Ghana: 1-4 October. In Burkina Faso

Danaë Sheehan writes: The best thing about arriving somewhere in the dark is that your surrounding are kept as a surprise for the dawn. We made the most of the cooler (although it's all relative...) air of the morning and spent sometime looking for migrants along the shore of the Mare d'Oursi and in the surrounding acacia thickets. Before too much time was up we had managed quite a list, including Nightingale (singing from the thickest areas of bush), Melodious, Olivaceous, Subalpine, Bonelli's and Willow Warblers, Redstart, Spotted and Pied Flycatcher, Northern Wheatear, European Turtle Dove, Eurasian Marsh Harrier and Great Spotted Cuckoo. Needless to say there were also plenty of quite wonderfully coloured resident species, including Beautiful Sunbird, Abyssinian Roller and Woodland Kingfisher. The muddy, shallow lake shore held a good selection of waders, including migrant Ringed and Little Ringed Plovers, Common, Green, Wood and Marsh Sandpipers and both Little and Temminck's Stints. By the time Phil, Chris Orsman (the RSPB lead of the fieldwork team in Burkina Faso) and Judit arrived from Ouagadougou on 2nd October, all we could talk about was the potential of the area and what we had seen. Sadly we had to leave them the next day and headed once again southwards back into Ghana and to our first field site at Damongo.