Lake Chamo

The Nechisar National Park is border on Lake Chamo and Lake Abaya. The lakes are very different because of the ferrous oxide, what makes Lake Abaya’s water brown, whereas Lake Chamo is very blue. The lakes are connected by River Kulfo.

 The land which dived the lakes is called ‘Bridge of God’.

We visited the Lake Chamo several times. It’s famous for the large crocodiles and hippos that live here. We could observe them at close quarters and of course we could always find new birds to add to our list.

On the shore we found an African Fish Eagle nest where we could follow up how the chick was growing and we saw adults bird everywhere around the national park.

We found hippopotamus footprints one kilometre from the lake in the mountains. Supposedly they spent the nights there.

Before we started the hard work on the south of the plains we always had a HotPack for dinner.

More Yabelo

Where we saw the vultures and the eagles:

The camels are important lifestock in Ethiopia (Camelus dromedarius). Like cattle, they provide a variety of resources (including milk, meat and hides) and they play an important role in pastoralist culture.

Birds around Yabelo

Stresemann’s bushcrow (Zavattariornis stresemanni) is endemic to central-southern Ethiopia. It lives in a small area circumscribed by the towns of Yabelo, Mega, and Arero in Sidamo Province.

We spent a night at the school of Madacho.

Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary

On the 18th of January the expedition group split into 2 small groups. Doortje and Frederik went to Bale Mountains, Zsófi, Ruben and Eddy to Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary. Pim, our friend from Belgium joined to the Yabelo group.

    

Yabelo Wildlife Sanctuary is a protected area in southern Ethiopia. It is located in the Borena Zone of the Oromia Region.
The park affords protection to the endemic and vulnerable Streseman’s Bush Crow and and the White-tailed Swallow, these are also restricted-range species.

This area is famous for the big amount of nightjar what they have, that was the reason why we went there. A very nice scout (Jarso) joined us on these days. With his help we could easily observe the endemic species, and e.g. Ostrich, Rosy-patched Bush-shrike, Gabar Goshawk, Vulturine Guinea Fowl and at one stop-point we saw 15 vultures and 5 Tawny eagles together!

We saw same nice mammal species, like the Unstriped Ground Squirell, Generuk and Black-backed Jackal.

We were searching for the nightjars two nights long but we couldn’t find any so we decided to go back earlier to Nechisar to continue the work there.

During the trip we gave the children pens which were was donated by the Hasselt University and a Hungarian sponsor.

    

   

Finally we stopped at the border of the National National Park to do some bird watching at the marshland of Lake Chamo. The diversity of the birds was amazing. We saw 37 species in one hour! Our favorite bird was the hunting Black Heron.                 

Lions in Nechisar????

Lions, are they still present in Nechisar or not? An important question we wanted to solve. About 10 years ago a research team did an effort to find this out and after a very intensive search they found 1 female and a cub. Rumours were a male lion was also present but they couldn’t find him. An estimation of 4 lions was made. Since then, 10 years later, nobody has ever made pictures or movies of lions and because the park has changed a lot since then nobody even knows if lions are still present there.

On one of our first days a little piece of the puzzle was solved. When we were lying in our tents we could suddenly hear a male lion roaring in the distance! What a fantastic and impressive sound and what a discovery. So we already knew at east one male was still living in the park. Not enough to talk about a “lion population” but it was already a good start for our mammal research.

A few days later, while searching for snakes, Michiel suddenly stopped and pointed out some very big cat-like prints in the dry sand. No hesitatation this was a lion-print! We put some trailcams in the direction of the tracks hoping the lion would use the same path again. We also found some big porcupine burrows and one burrow was extremely big, much larger then the others. Michiel tried to enter the burrow but it was impossible to go deeper then 1m. So we also set up a trailcam in the direction of the big burrow to find out who the digger was.

The next day we returned to see what was on the trailcams. No lions on the trailcams we set up at the trails. No dissapointment because the baboons, zebras and warthogs were also cool to have on film. Our last camera was the camera pointed on the big burrow. When we arrived we could see in the sand there had been some movement in and out of the burrow but the most exciting thing was a big lion-footprint on top of our footprints from the day before!!! A lion had been there! We immedeatly headed back to the camp to see the clips. Everybody, the park rangers and the Ethiopian Wildlife Conservation were all very excited and with good reason! On the first movie we saw a large warthog-family of 20 animals entering the apparently enormous burrow to go to sleep. Seeing the next movie however will be one of the most exciting moments of the expedition. A female lion curiously sniffed inside the burrow, waited some seconds and left! Wow, the first images of a Nechisar lion in many years. Everybody was thrilled! We now know at least one female and one male lion are still present in Nechisar. We hope to find out more details about the lion population during the next few weeks. If so, we’ll keep you up to date via this blog!

Day 3: Road to Nechisar

After a nice breakfast in the Arba Minch Tourist Hotel we got in the car and headed up for Nechisar. It was a short drive of only 15 minutes before we reached the park headquarters. We stopped for a few minutes to meet some of the guards and with already a lot of different bird-species flying around we could taste a litte bit of what Nechisar has to offer. After an hour driving through te park we had a nice viewpoint over the lake. We could even see some Nile crocodiles bathing in the sun in the distance! Because we were standing on a hill, we had a view on the canopy beneath us and in one of the trees a magnificent African fishing eagle was sitting on her nest. When we had to cross a river we took a short stop and our driver Masai noticed a big Verreaux owl hidden between the leaves of a high tree!

Slowly, the vegetation gradually changed from a relatively dense groundwaterforest untill it became a more open savanne with the Nechisars famous white grass. Unfortunatley, the grass was very short, shorter then the 1m tall grass you see on the old pictures of Nechisar. Nechisar has a big cattle-problem and thousands of cows and goats have to struggle to find the last fresh grass to eat. Of course, this causes problems for wild herbivores living on the plains.

But never the less, the scenery is beautiful and we could see a lot of zebras and Grant’s gazelles grazing. After a short stop in the western base camp of the park, we continued our route in an attempt to reach the eastern part. Because the famous wing of the Nechisar nightjar was found in the east, we wanted to start or quest there. While crossing the plains, the road became to bumpy for the car, and we had to head back to the western camp were we set up our tents. The next morning we took a better route, and two hours later we arrived at the eastern camp what will be our base camp for the next coming weeks.

Day 2: Road to Arba Minch

After our landing in Adis Abeba, we were all very excited to go South, to get closer to our final destination, Nechisar National Park. To reach this destination we had to cross a 450 km long hot road. It took us 9 hours but the trip was worth the time. After some hours driving we saw our first Whettled ibis, an Ethiopian endemic. We could approuch them very close so we were able to take some nice pictures and videos of the fouraging animals. While Ruben and Frederik were walking back to the car Michiel, Eddy, Zsofia and Doortje were excited about two other fantastic birds on the other side of the road. Two magnifiant tawny eagles were eating from what was probably a freshly killed prey. While eating they were continuously mobbed by a couple of black kites. Fantastic!

A toilet-stop took us to a small, next-to-the-road, coffee shop. The owners were very excited to let us taste their coffee (and it wàs good, Ethiopia is a real coffee-country).

The final stop was without doubt the best! We parked the car on the bridge of a very nice river and followed the river upstream untill we reached a waterfall with a small sandy beach in front of it. Very beautiful, could be the scene of a movie!

We enjoyed it but we didn’t want to wait too long. Nechisar National Park was waiting on us and we were waiting on Nechisar National Park. We arrived in Arba Minch in the early evening and stayed in the nice Arba Minch Tourist Hotel where a very tame duiker (deer-species) was welcoming us in the hotel garden. We had a very good sleep probably the last in a real bed for a long time!

Day 1: Preparing for Arba Minch

We landed in Addis Ababa at 6 (local time) and were picked up by Yilma (Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society) who will be our giude for the entire trip. Today will be a quite technical day, here (in Addis Ababa) we need to finalize the last paperwork.

We spotted already lifers at the airport (Superb Starling and Yellow-billed Kite)! After our guides took us to a hotel where we spend the night.

After breakfast we went to the office of BirdLife Ethiopia and met their entire team, including Director Mengistu. We spend the afternoon in their fabulous 10m² garden and added 11 new species to our list.

Montane trush

Red-billed Firefinch (male)

Red-billed Firefinch (Female)

Around 16h local time, we went to the garden of Ghion hotel to fill our remaining spare-time of the day. And again, we were blessed with some superb species!

White-browed Robin-Chat

Abyssinian Slaty Fycatcher            African Dusky Flycatcher                  Speckled Mousebird

Brown-rumped Seedeater (JUV)

Tomorrow, we’ll head for Arba Minch (10h drive), the gateway to Nechisar National Park. We’ll leave Addis Abeba around 7am.