Dip The Kip – Tanzania’s Hardest Endemic

How many times can we search for Kipenjere’s Seedeater and miss it? The honest answer: more times than I can count. What a boring bird to spend so much time searching for!
Kipenjere’s Seedeater actually holds a special distinction as the very first bird we ever searched for in Tanzania. We were in Kidulu National Park and Ross said “we should try for Kipenjere’s Seedeater here because it will save us a lot of time in the future.” That was in February 2020, before “corona” was anything more than a Mexican beer. As it turns out, truer words had never been spoken. Unfortunately we missed the seedeater in Kidulu and as a result we have had to dedicate multiple days into finding it, even a year and a half later. In total we spent an entire week on just this one bird!! (Spoiler alert: we still missed it.)
We checked along a dirt road in Njombe and came up empty. We missed it while in the Udzungwas, arguably the most reliable spot to see it. We dedicated a day in Mafinga at local resident Tim Cozen’s farm to search again because Tim had taken photos of it in the area before, but we missed it there too. Then we tried a few patches of forest outside of the Udzungwa Scarp Forest and again turned up short. Ross asked anyone and everyone he could where on earth we could find this bird. He posted on forums and asked around on Facebook and no one really seemed to have a decent spot. This is low-key Tanzania’s HARDEST endemic. Since we were going after all the endemic species and subspecies we didn’t want to miss this one. Eventually we talked with local bird guides Elias Mungulu and Leon Mlawila and they recommended a forest patch south of Njombe but we missed it there too.
So much time spent in fields, forests, and forest edges above 1700m elevation that we should have seen the bird by now. The density of this species is very low and the exact distribution and habitat is not fully understood, but surely with enough effort we could track one down, right??? No.

Sometimes lumped with Thick-billed Seedeater, Kipenjere’s is plainer, browner, lacks a white forehead, and allegedly sounds very different. Except that no one really knows what it sounds like… The song often used as playback from the “Birds of East Africa” app is actually of Eastern Double-collared Sunbird, a mistake Ross realized on the very first day of our search. Thankfully last year Louis Hansen posted recordings of the birds’ call but to this date there are no confirmed records of its song.
Maybe, had we been equipped with an actual sound recording we might not have missed this bird in the early stages of our search. And it was for this very reason that we went back to try again. It was de-ja vu visiting a place that we hadn’t been to in over a year and a half. It was deja-vu once again as the only Seedeater we could find was Yellow-browed. The very last place we went to search also happened to be the very first place we searched, Kidulu National Park. We really had come full circle.
But after two months and 755 species (per Clements) later, we simply had to say goodbye to Tanzania. We couldn’t spend any longer searching for this bird. We accepted defeat and headed onward to Zambia.

Our time in Tanzania will always have a special place in my heart. I have a love/hate relationship with the country if I’m being honest. Excellent birds but hard birding. Lovely people but frustrating and annoying police. Beautiful scenery but often with a very hard hike taking place before hand.
We visited nearly every corner of the country and went to places that very few birders have ever gone before. I’ve always wanted to be a trail-blazer and I got to do that in Tanzania. It’s fun and exciting but it’s also a lot of work and effort that doesn’t always pan out. When it doesn’t it’s very frustrating.
In the end we managed over 750 species of birds, a list that could easily be well over 780 had we not spent so much time searching for Kipenjere’s. We still managed to see and photograph birds that no one else has ever seen or photographed before! We’ve put out the first public photos of Rubeho Forest-partridge and the best photos ever of Ring-necked Francolin. Ross discovered a new species. When I reflect back on all of the time that we spent in this beautiful country and all that we accomplished, I feel an odd sense of Tanzania truly was a resounding success, even with a dip of the kip.