A Guide to the Birds of East Africa Read online

  ‘Oh, I’m sure Malik will remember them eventually. But speaking of writing down names…’

  Harry Khan thrust the sheets of hotel notepaper into Mr Patel’s hands.

  ‘How many, Harry?’ came a shout from the bar.

  Harry Khan turned to face the room.

  ‘Well, the Committee will have to check it, of course, but I made it… now, was it seventy-four or was it seventy-five?’

  The lovely island of Lamu had exceeded even George and David’s expectations. Only yards from the aircraft steps at the airport on Manda Island they had been dive-bombed by a spur-winged plover. Pearl-breasted swallows swooped low over the grass beside the runway, and as they made their way across the tarmac towards the airport building they almost tripped over a small flock of violet-backed starlings. Outside the building a colony of yellow-backed weavers were chirping and squabbling on a large weeping bougainvillea while two pairs of dusky turtle doves cooed their sad four-note disapproval from a nearby telephone wire. From the boat on the way over to Lamu Island they identified six species of gulls and terns, and watched an osprey speed low over the water, reach down with its talons and pluck a silver fish from just below the surface. A brown and white fish eagle flew slow circles overhead.

  It had been no trouble at all to find and hire a small motorized fishing boat for the morning. From beneath its canvas awning the three birdwatchers watched egrets wading and cormorants and darters perched on branches over the water drying their wings. They were lucky with the tide. It was going out, so they asked the friendly boatman to take them over to the south end of the island where more waders were feeding on the mud-banks – redshanks, greenshanks, whimbrels, turnstones, sandpipers, golden and Kentish plovers. In the first three hours they recorded fifty-seven species.

  ‘I think we’ve struck gold, Harry,’ said David.

  ‘I think I’m hungry,’ said George.

  ‘Lunch,’ said Harry, ‘is on me.’

  The afternoon, though less active, had been almost as productive. After a long lunch at Petley’s they stretched out on the grass by the old town wall. Swifts scythed the blue air above them with scimitar wings.

  ‘Eurasian swifts, the big ones,’ said George, shading his eyes with one hand and pointing skywards with the other, ‘and the smaller ones are little swifts – right, Davo?’

  ‘Yeah. And those two, a bit lower down, with much narrower wings, they must be palm swifts. And hallo. Look at that one, George.’

  Binoculars were trained on a bird that looked at first sight like one of the larger Eurasian swifts.

  ‘What do you reckon?’

  ‘I think you could be right, Davo. Yes, I saw the throat. Did you see it, Harry?’

  ‘The one with the white bit, you mean? What is it?’

  ‘Horus swift. The book says you don’t usually see one of those so far north but there’s no mistaking it.’

  And what with the Horus swift, and several kinds of swallows and martins, and the small flock of African spoonbills that flew straight overhead in tight V-shaped formation, their banjo-shaped beaks held out straight before them, George and David and Harry thought they might just as well stay lying on the grass for the rest of the afternoon. By the time they had to leave Lamu and catch the ferry back to the airport the day’s tally stood at seventy-four.

  ‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ said George, after they had checked into the flight and were waiting at the gate to board the plane. ‘But do you know what I’d really like to have seen? A carmine bee-eater.’

  A flash of red shot from a railing on the control tower, paused in mid-air to snatch some insect in flight, and glided back towards its perch.

  23

  Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is it just a plain silly one? As far as I understand it, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for – give or take a birthday candle – three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another and people in between gave it several more. But that didn’t matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn’t ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. Endearing, or silly? I really can’t decide.

  Later that night back at the Hilton, Harry – with seventy-five Lamu notches on his belt – sat down with George and David to plan their next trip.

  ‘I’m thinking west,’ said George, taking a meditative sip of Johnnie Walker while looking at the map already spread out on the table.

  ‘West, eh?’ said Harry. ‘How far west?’

  ‘As far as you can go. Lake Victoria. There should be a few birds round there.’

  ‘Flamingoes,’ said David, scanning through his guidebook.

  ‘Greater and lesser.’

  ‘Pelicans, perhaps?’

  ‘White definitely, pink-backed probably.’

  ‘And…?’

  And storks and herons and cranes and rails and ducks and geese and swamp hens and…’

  ‘Victoria,’ said Harry, ‘I think you could be our girl.’

  It came to pass that on the third evening Harry Khan returned from the great lake in the middle of Africa, the source of the Nile and a wonder to all men, with a list of birds that included (according to Mr Patel’s careful reckoning) no fewer than thirty new species. And there was great rejoicing in the bar, but some consternation. For it was now forty-five minutes past seven and there was still no sign of Mr Malik. Even though he had lost his car the previous day it was unlike him to be late. Where was he?

  Mr Malik had not got up at six o’clock that morning to catch the early plane to the town of Kisumu beside Lake Victoria. He had not engaged a driver and car to take him to where the Nzioa River disgorged its water into the lake, and there seen flamingoes (greater and lesser), pelicans (white and spotted) and storks (black, white, woolly-necked, saddle-billed, boat-billed, open-billed and yellow-billed). Neither had he seen a yellow-billed duck, a black duck, a ferruginous duck, a tufted duck, a white-backed duck nor tree ducks – fulvous or white-faced – nor a dozen other species of birds not yet on his list. Indeed, as far as ticking off species on the official checklist of the birds of Kenya goes, Mr Malik’s day had been a dud.

  I don’t know what you would have done if you’d had your car stolen in these circumstances, but with the possibility of holding in my arms the woman of my dreams I would have gone out and hired another. Car hire is expensive in Nairobi but it can be done – Harry Khan is driving round in a hired red Mercedes convertible, is he not? But Mr Malik had lost not only his car and notebook but his wallet, and in his wallet was his driving licence.

  I have already alluded to the time it takes to report a crime in Nairobi. This is as the blink of an eye compared to the time it takes to obtain a replacement driving licence. Without a licence Mr Malik could not hire a car. Of course, he could always have called upon the assistance of God.

  I was brought up in the Church of England, but it wasn’t until I went to Kenya that I first met God. It was my friend Kennedy who introduced us. Needing a telephone line connected to my house in Nairobi I was dismayed to find that some friends who were also recent arrivals had been waiting ten months for such a service and still no telephone.

  ‘Why don’t you have a word with God?’ said Kennedy. ‘I’ll give you his number.’

  I dialled the number from his house and on the seventh attempt connected (I remember thinking at the time that the seven must have some divine connotation, only to discover later that this is the average number of times one has to dial to be connected in Nairobi). />
  ‘Hello,’ said God, and it was a revelation. Because God sounded exactly like God should sound. I’d never thought about it before. Growing up with the European imagery of God I’d been happy thinking of him as white, male, venerable and bearded, but I’d never thought about how he might sound if I spoke to him. Like a rabbi, like the Pope, like Orson Welles? I was delighted to find that he in fact sounded like a deep-voiced, Oxbridge-educated Englishman. He sounded just like the God of the Church of England should sound, and I must say I found this very reassuring. When I later met God at his spacious flat just off South Parade (lovely furniture, and he had a much bigger place in the country, he assured me) I discovered that God is in fact in his thirties, charming, black and gay. And for a fee (donation? offering?) he was able to get my phone connected within a week.

  ‘Ah yes,’ nodded Kennedy on hearing the news. ‘God works in mysterious ways, his wonders to perform.’

  This little detour into telephones and personal revelation is all by way of illustrating that in Kenya there are always alternative ways of doing things. Mr Malik could, if he so chose, have called upon the assistance of my God or any one of a number of other gods to speed his driving licence replacement along. He could, if he so chose, have gone to a hire car company, explained his predicament and discovered that for a small extra fee the legal requirement for producing a driving licence could be waived. But Mr Malik would not do this, because – as we have discovered – Mr Malik is an honest man.

  Lying can get you in an awful mess but it isn’t easy being honest. Someone shows you a photograph of their new grandchild and says, ‘Isn’t he just adorable?’ Your frank opinion is that if a freshly skinned monkey is adorable then so is this child – but do you say so? If someone near and dear to me were to parade before me in a new dress and ask, ‘Does this make my bottom look big?’ would I say, ‘Yes!’? No. Though Mr Malik had never been put in the latter quandary (the late Mrs Malik, like many women in Africa, did not have so strange and modern an attitude to female proportions), he had been shown more than a few baby photographs in his time to which even he accepted that an honest response would be ill-judged. But despite such occasional lapses Mr Malik’s general policy was honesty in all things. In business his word was his bond. If he said he was going to buy at a price, he bought at that price. If he said he was going to sell at a price, he sold at that price. If he said he was going to supply at a certain specification, that specification would be met or exceeded, and if he said he was going to deliver, he delivered.

  Mr Malik was well aware of the way the world worked. Every year the Jolly Man Manufacturing Company needed, like all companies, to be registered and licensed. He was legally required to obtain export permits from the Ministry of Trade and bond clearances from the Ministry of Finance. Every employer in Kenya knows that the Immigration Department has the power to close down a business while it makes spot checks for illegal workers, and the Home Security Department now has similar powers. The Ministry of Health could have shut down his factory if there was a suspicion of any of a number of gazetted communicable diseases among his staff. His factory could by law only operate with an annual safety inspection from the Health and Safety department of Nairobi City Council. The Pest Control Department had similar powers, while the Police Department had a hundred ways of making life difficult if they so chose. Mr Malik was diligent in abiding by all the rules, but knew that rules were so often a matter of interpretation. Though he might fill in all the forms, forms can get lost. Just like the telephone company, any regulatory body with any power in Kenya runs two services – a formal one to process the paperwork, and an informal one to ensure the paperwork is processed. If you expect your forms not to get lost and rules to be correctly interpreted, you are expected to pay for both. Mr Malik did not like doing it – was not part of the reason he wrote his ‘Birds of a Feather’ column to break the cycle of endemic corruption that still stifled freedom and justice in so many aspects of life in Kenya? But at the moment that was the way things worked. That was business. Daily life was another thing. Mr Malik refused to pay a bribe to replace a driving licence, or pay extra to hire a car illegally without one. Highly principled? Unrealistically virtuous? Incorrigibly stubborn? Take your pick.

  But it still left him on Monday morning with no car.

  24

  On learning of the car theft Mr Malik’s daughter Petula had shown more anger than sympathy.

  ‘What were you thinking of, Daddy, walking around in that place? Alone, and with binoculars round your neck for goodness’ sake? Why not just have a big sign – Rob Me? Oh, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.’

  She shook her head as her mother used to shake her head at the children when they had done something silly and Mr Malik thought, ‘So, it has come to this. Now I am the child and she is the mother. It is strange how things work out.’ He asked her to take him to town to buy a new pair of binoculars.

  ‘Look, I’ll drop you on my way to work. But please, please promise me you’ll take a taxi home.’

  Mr Malik agreed and she dropped him in Freedom Street. In the window of Amin and Sons General Emporium he saw a pair of Bausch & Lomb 7 x 50s, and as Godfrey Amin himself was in the shop at the time, as well as getting a good price on the binoculars he stayed for a cup of tea and a chat.

  Mr Malik recounted the story of how his car was stolen.

  ‘Oh, and by the way, Godfrey do you have any notebooks?’

  There is very little that you cannot find at Amin and Sons. Mr Malik was shown a number of notebooks of various sizes, lined and unlined, cover stiff or cover floppy. He chose one with a blue cover just like the one that had been stolen, and bought it.

  ‘May I ask what it is for?’ said his host.

  ‘Oh, just for jotting down things, you know.’

  And it wasn’t until he said this that the full horror struck him. The notebook.

  If you have ever had the sensation of a heavy weight – a large green coconut, say – falling from a considerable height straight into the pit of your stomach you will know how Mr Malik felt at that moment. The notebook. The one that was stolen. It didn’t just have his bird lists. It contained the notes of every conversation he had had with Mr Nyambe over the last five months. If that notebook got into the wrong hands…

  Mr Malik had heard rumours of bodies being buried in concrete on construction sites administered by the Minister of Housing. People passing the Treasury building after dark had reported muffled screams and remained unconvinced that these were cries of joy from members of staff working late to correct accounting errors. It did not pay to get on the wrong side of those in power. Fumbling for his stiff new wallet and thrusting a handful of notes towards a startled Godfrey Amin, Mr Malik grabbed the bag containing new notebook and binoculars and headed for the door. What was he to do? He needed time to think.

  A taxi was waiting outside. He wrenched open the door.

  ‘Where to, sir?’

  Where to? What to do? So many questions.

  ‘Just drive on,’ he said. A quiet place, somewhere where he could think. The cemetery? No, not the cemetery.

  ‘The arboretum,’ he said, slamming shut the door. ‘Take me to the arboretum.’

  The Nairobi Arboretum, on the other side of town from City Park, is indeed a quiet place. Set up in the 1920s by the colonial government to test which foreign trees might acclimatize to the area, it features specimens from all corners of the world. It also features Christians. I don’t know why this few acres behind the university attracts Christians but it does and it doesn’t have to be a Sunday – any old day will do. The Christians of Nairobi Arboretum don’t seem to be gregarious sorts of Christians. Though you may come across a lot of them you come across them singly, and you might find one almost anywhere – be it in the shadow of a Canary Island palm or an English oak or an Australian gum tree. But you most often see one standing alone in plain view in the middle of the lawn. With Bible or prayer book in hand he or she will be keeping up a steady c
onversation with God, which from the outside always seems to be pretty much one-way but who knows? And they seem to keep the robbers away.

  I should qualify that statement. An uncle of mine who lived near Godalming used to work in the City, taking the train up to town each morning and usually completing the Times crossword around about Long Ditton (Clapham Junction on a bad day). At one time, he told me, he occasionally shared his first-class compartment with a chap who used to read The Daily Telegraph – a much easier crossword, of course, but otherwise fairly unobjectionable. What was objectionable, or at the very least disconcerting, was this fellow’s habit, every time he had finished reading a page of the newspaper, of tearing off the top corner, rolling it into a little ball, and throwing it out of the window. At last my uncle could stand it no longer.

  ‘Look here, old chap,’ said he. ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking, but why do you do that? Why do you tear off the corner of every page of your Daily Telegraph, roll it into a little ball, and throw it out of the window?’

  ‘Oh, didn’t you know?’ said this chap. ‘It keeps the elephants away.’

  The reply set my uncle somewhat aback.

  ‘But my dear fellow, there aren’t any elephants in Surrey.’

  ‘No,’ said the chap, tearing off another corner. ‘Effective, isn’t it?’

  Which is really just by way of saying that the absence of robbers from the arboretum may not be an effect of the presence of the Christians at all. The two conditions may be causally unrelated or indeed the reverse may even be true. But whether Christians deter robbers or the absence of robbers attracts Christians or there is something else entirely that accounts for both conditions, the fact remains that compared with City Park, Nairobi Arboretum is a haven of peace and rectitude.

  Mr Malik asked his taxi driver to wait in the car park. He wasn’t planning to go far – just find a bench, sit down and think. He pushed open the green gate, turned left at the big sequoia and headed towards a grove of lemon-scented gums. And blow me down if he didn’t see, on the path right in front of him, a hoopoe.