Uganda’s Only True Endemic

Julien Mauzenauer is one of Ross’s good friends. They talk often via internet messaging regarding future birding plans, recent bird photos taken, new species splits, and in general, all things birds. Julien may live in Switzerland but the distance and time zone change does little to deter conversations about a shared passion.
We first met Julien (and his lovely girlfriend Hélène) in Indonesia when he brought me a new pair of binoculars after mine were misplaced and stolen. A few years later Julien (and his flatmate, Killian) joined us in Western India on our quest for Great Indian Bustard. Now Julien was meeting us for a three week whirlwind trip all around Uganda. While he currently guides for BirdQuest, he also does a lot of independent travel on the side and he is one of the few people I know hardcore enough to put up with Ross on an all-out birding quest.

Julien was going to be joining us for most of Uganda, but needed to be home after 22 days so he could receive his second COVID jab. Originally it was supposed to be 26 days but he needed to delay his flight after concerns Uganda was going into a strict lockdown and as a result he would be missing out on some key birds in Southern Uganda as Ross and I continued on.
We picked Julien up at the airport at midnight on June 3rd and hit the road. While a strict curfew of 2100 was in place set by the president in an effort to curb the spread of COVID-19, those picking someone up from the airport are exempt and we hoped that if any police stopped us, we could show Julien’s airline ticket and explain we were on our way to a hotel. The hotel just so happened to be 5 hours away…
By morning we had arrived outside of the town of Soroti, with two targets on our mind, Fox’s Weaver and Karamoja Apalis. Fox’s Weaver has a a special distinction as Uganda’s only true endemic.
We weren’t sure on the road conditions to get to the exact site and agreed to pick up Robert, a local who has since learned of Fox’s Weaver and the location it can be found. When we arrived he wanted 30USD per person, aka 90USD to accompany us for less than 3 hours! (Considering the average wage in Uganda is $1.90 per day, these prices were astronomical.) We considered not even taking him, but eventually we agreed on 50USD in total which was still way more than we wanted, but we figured he would be useful. In hindsight, we did not need to bring him along as the location he took us to was the same one we already had a GPS point for and he didn’t know any of his birds.

It was a short but enjoyable morning of birding as we quickly found a colony of Fox’s Weavers and not long after we successfully tracked down a cooperative pair of Karamoja Apalises.