How travel ruined my Life: Birds of Samburu

Samburu can easily win a bird watcher heart in just a flap of a wing. I call it the bird watchers paradise. The birds just find you!! Every place you turn there is a bird doing something!! First I must confess in Uni I opted to take Mammology classes instead of Ornithology, not to mean I don't like birds but the thing is during preparation for the classes one of the things on the list for the class was a ''Birds of East Africa'' or ''A birds of Africa'' book. While I enjoyed reading the books and looking at the beautiful illustrations differentiating the weavers, the kites, the starlings, the sparrows or the Ducks was no easy task(especially if a classification exam was in store)!!! For me a lion will always be a lion no hundreds of variations!! Now I know better.

Birds are important and have a vital role in our Ecosystem. Birds occupy many levels of trophic webs, from mid-level consumers to top predators. As with other native organisms, birds help maintain sustainable population levels of their prey and predator species and, after death, provide food for scavengers and decomposers.

Many birds are important in plant reproduction through their services as pollinators or seed dispersers. Birds also provide critical resources for their many host-specific parasites, including lice that eat only feathers, flies adapted for living on birds, and mites that hitchhike on birds from plant to plant and even between countries.

Some birds are considered keystone species as their presence in (or disappearance from) an ecosystem affects other species indirectly. In Samburu a good example of interdependence with other species with birds is the Oxpecker and several species of Ungulates. The Oxpecter is in the starling family and is quite wide spread in Northern parts of Kenya and has symbiotic relationship with several common ungulates. A symbiotic relationship in this case Is said to be mutual where the Oxpeckers benefit by receiving nutrients and the ungulates benefit by having ticks removed and diseases prevented. Black Rhino, Giraffe, Buffalos, cattle are among the most common ungulates in this mutual relationship.

Below are some birds I have encountered in Samburu. Most of them if not all I took while inside the Samburu National Reserve.