There is a special song that arises just before the sun. The dawn chorus, when the birds begin to sing all at once, happens each and every day just before the sun comes up. The first few hours of the morning are notoriously the birdiest as birds sing to celebrate the new day. It can be overwhelming trying to identify each of the melodies so sometimes I like to just listen and soak it in. Minziro Forest had an especially nice morning sound.
After Uganda Ross and I (but mostly Ross) decided to enter back into Tanzania and travel down the Western edge where very few birders have ever been before and where much exploring remains to be done. We started in far northern TZ at Minziro Forest Reserve. The fact that we had recently birded Kakamega Forest in Kenya and Mabira Forest in Uganda was definitely to our benefit as many of the birds we were finding or had the potential to find were birds we had just previously seen. I’ve never been one to identify birds by sound but Ross was pointing out new birds for Tanzania left and right.
Sadly the sounds of a Brown-chested Alethe calling were drowned out by the unfortunate sounds of someone chopping down a tree. Like many places in Africa, a reserve does little to preserve the intact forest. We saw multiple big trees chopped down and several current charcoal furnaces billowing with smoke as the newly chopped wood is slowly roasted into charcoal.
Standing in a tree graveyard 
Beautiful forest vines 
chopped to be turned to charcoal 
Mosquito breeding grounds 
A few “poachers” 
Swamp Nightjar 
Great Blue Turaco
Despite my frustrations with illegal logging, birding this relatively unexplored patch of beautiful forest was extremely enjoyable. At one point we looked up into a big tree where several birds were seen moving around. For whatever reason the entire flock decided to pick up and fly out and it suddenly sounded as if we were in a wind tunnel as 100 Weyn’s Weavers flew over our heads. The only word I could muster at the time was “wow.” By the end of the day we had seen over 300 Weyn’s Weavers along with countless other good TZ birds.
We stopped at a small clearing that Ross thought looked good for apalis and within five minutes we had three species, Masked, Buff-throated, and Black-throated Apalises. And as we were looking at the apalises, we got distracted by a Brown-Eared Woodpecker perching in the open followed immediately by the beautiful song of Gray Longbill who also decided to perch right above our heads. Only recently has the latter been found to occur in Tanzania.
The trails we were walking were small and mostly used by fisherman or loggers but seemed to get us deep enough into the forest to find several species of robin-chat, alethe, and illadopsis. (Sample eBird checklist here.) Overall it was enjoyable save for the fact that the mosquitos were extraordinarily abundant and ferocious, attacking at any given opportunity. The fact that we both managed a bite on our eyelids hopefully illustrates how sneaky and vicious these mozzies can be! Honestly, I’m not sure I’ve ever been surrounded by more mosquitos. These mosquitoes rival the swarms in the Alaskan Tundra, or so I’m told.
After leaving Minziro Forest we opted to drive further south and just bird along swamp/papyrus habitat. We stopped at a rice paddy on the side of the road and quickly had several new birds. The area looked good for Greater Painted-snipe so we scanned but in the process noticed a Hadada Ibis caught in some string. I ran down to rescue him because I couldn’t bear to hear him cry and see him struggle. After cutting him loose just like that a Greater Painted-snipe flushed from right at my feet. Talk about good karma!
Freedom to the Hadada Ibis! 
White-winged Swamp Warbler
This whole area of Tanzania was exciting as we hoped to add new birds to our country list. Pointing out birds we had seen multiple times before (i.e. Wattled Lapwing, Long-toed Lapwing, Papyrus Gonolek, White-winged Swamp-warbler, & Swamp Flycatcher) but had never seen in Tanzania was surprisingly fun. I wouldn’t necessarily say we are “country listers” but these are birds only found in this small region just across the Uganda border and we just happened to have the time to bird here. So suddenly we were Tanzania “country listers.” Had Rwanda’s borders been open we never would have come to explore this region of Tanzania but I’m so glad we did. In just our first two days we added over 80 new birds for our Tanzania country list (which is quite impressive considering we had already seen over 600 species in Tanzania at that point!)
This birding occurred on 28-29 June 2021 and just so you know, “karibu” is the Swahili word for “welcome”