Déjà Vu

Dateline: Gabon 27 September 2011

What a surprise, this morning, to find a little bit of my past right here before the house where I am staying in Iguela. One of the constant joys of coming to Loango National Park is that several species of bee-eaters are found here. I studied one of this spectacular family of birds for eight years in Kenya back in the 1980’s and always it is a pleasure to see others on my travels.

While boating through the delta of the Ogooue River on the way to Iguela, and again along the Ngowe River a few days ago, rosy bee-eaters were swooping around in the air and dipping into the water for a drink or a bath-on-the-wing. This is certainly one of the most elegant of the bee-eater species (in a family of beauties), with a mourning gray back and wings contrasting the gorgeous rosy throat, breast and belly. The other common species is one of the little ones, the blue-breasted bee-eater, which likes the open areas of savannah edges. This is the one that so pleased me this morning.

Bee-eaters are so named because they are specialists at eating venomous insects like bees and wasps, although they also eat just about any flying insect of a suitable size. Most of the species, including the blue-throated, sally forth from a perch to snap up flying insects, returning to their perch to whack them against the perch before eating or feeding them to nestlings (or their mate). All bee-eaters nest in holes that they dig themselves – the one that I studied in Kenya nested colonially in vertical earthen banks, sometimes hundreds all together. Others, like the rosy bee-eater, are also colonial but nest in the ground, digging a burrow more than a meter long with an expanded nesting chamber at the end. The smallest bee-eaters, like the blue-breasted, tend to be solitary nesters and dig their holes in small ridges of earth, or the tops of aardvark holes, or even just in the ground. A pair of blue-breasted bee-eaters forages in the edges of a savannah area behind the house here in Iguela. I have seen them on other trips and have always enjoyed taking a coffee or tea out on the back steps to sit and watch their foraging antics.

So this morning I was having coffee and enjoying the cool of early morning without anyone else up in the compound when I noticed that the pair were catching prey and processing them on the perch, but then flying off again without eating them. For sure this indicated they were feeding nestlings. Much to my surprise, I followed one around the side of the house and saw it go into a hole dug into the ground not 15 feet in front on the house! I have been here for two days and never noticed this happening. Where were by observer’s eyes?

So it has been great fun to get a little bit of video of this pair coming to their nest hole, and remembering the fantastic experiences I had living in Nakuru National Park, Kenya, following the complex social lives of white-fronted bee-eaters.