Saturday 6th Oct. Path-lab training!

Whilst the rest of the crew stay at the monastery this morning, Bara and I go with Toby and Roger Jr to get footage of various rural scenes, including the activities at the shore of a nearby lake.

A couple of Levaillant’s cuckoos and a grey-headed bush-shrike caught this morning, but no further migrants.

This afternoon we spent a good few hours going carefully through the protocol of the treatment of the swabs that the Oursi team will be collecting.  After 7 days of rest in an incubator, each swab sample then goes through various treatments, before a final sample of the Trichomonas parasite can be labelled and then frozen until dispatch to the UK.  This was all fairly straightforward, but we’d rather overlooked the difficulty of power supply in Oursi, for both the small incubator and a centrifuge, and furthermore the low chances of finding any local freezer space!  A mission to check the viability of solar power was discussed, and deemed possible by those in the know.

Whilst the team headed out to a pizzeria in town, Thandie from BirdLife was on a flight in from Accra, arriving to coordinate the training of a team of four from Mauretania, themselves arriving on Monday.

Friday 5th Oct. Alphonse's farm

Take nets down and put in Alphonse’s patch near the farm.  Doesn’t look great for migrants but we do manage another laughing dove for Aly and Oumar to learn again how to take an oral swab.  A great catch too is a menacing-looking bearded barbet.

With things generally more peaceful here than yesterday (although with a few more birds) the trainee ringers get some good practice at handling and processing one or two birds themselves, under the brilliant tutorship of Aly and Oumar.

En route back to the hotel, Toby and Roger Jr film some of the views of the sprawling suburbs of Ouagadougou, highlighting the degradation of the landscape as the wooded savannahs are replaced by breeze-block and mud-brick buildings with a very few trees allowed to remain for shade, fruit or timber.

The afternoon is spent at the hotel sorting out ring stocks for both the Burkina and Ghana teams, with the Oursi lot having their first read through of the protocol for the various pathological samples that they will need to take.  A full training session for this will take place tomorrow.

Oppong treats us to a meal of “red-red” this evening – a Ghanaian favourite but a first for us in Burkina!

Thursday 4th Oct. A change of ringing site

The 5^th and 6^th wood warblers caught this morning, and this time both tagged.  This turns out to be the only real highlight of the morning.  The nets otherwise yield very little, and this must be in some large part down to the scores of children that are hanging around the ringing site.  It transpires that as it’s market day, they have no school, and many of them are left to seemingly run amok around the monastery!  We decide to take the nets down with a view to placing them in a new spot later ready for tomorrow’s ringing.  Danaë suggests a great looking patch of forest straddling a stream near to the monastery dairy farm.  A quick call to Alphonse and we get permission to put some nets here in the afternoon.

Arriving at 1530 we set about choosing good net rides, and with minimal clearing of vegetation we manage to put up 5 before we get the sudden command to stop.  It would appear that tomorrow morning a training group from the farm will be here to learn about farming practices, and the group leader, who wasn’t informed of our mission, has taken great umbrage at our large and efficient team busily setting up nets.  No amount of persuasion from Alphonse can change his mind, so the nets must come down.  Instead, Alphonse shows us a nearby fallow arable enclosure of his own, that he kindly allows us to use for the next day’s netting.  Now in the dark, the furled nets will have to stay where they are until the morning.

The Burkina team in some new field kit

Wednesday, 3rd Oct. First morning's ringing

A great start to the training with a few Estrilda finches caught first thing. These are small birds, and a tricky start for the new recruits, so Aly and Oumar ably demonstrate the main techniques used during the ringing programme before the others are later allowed to try handling their first birds.

The ringing team

Meanwhile, Carlo, who’s PhD is centred around identifying birds by using only feathers, begins his fieldwork by carefully removing a single feather from the tail of some of the birds that we catch.  Carlo hopes to use the DNA found in the cells at the base of the feather to formulate techniques and create a database that will enable him to identify otherwise “unseen” birds just from a single feather.  By asking hunters in the Sahel to donate a feather from each bird they catch, he hopes to gain a picture of the impact of this subsistence hunting on the various species that depend on the Sahel, both residents and migrants.

Carlo labelling feather samples

A great start too for the new programme that will trace the fortunes of European turtle doves in the Sahel.  As part of this new project, Aly and Oumar are going to target these birds for ringing, the main reason being to test them for a highly contagious (to doves!) disease which may be affecting their condition and therefore their survival year on year.  To do this, they need to learn some new techniques for taking the samples, and they need to see this demonstrated on doves.  Luckily, a laughing dove obliges this morning (no turtle doves this far south in Burkina) and Danaë carefully shows the team what to do.  The sample is safely stored and will later be placed in an incubator for 7 days – just the start of the protocol that the Oursi boys will have to learn before heading back up north!

And what about the wood warblers?  By 0800hrs we’ve heard the faint “pew” of a bird or two in nearby trees, so we pop a recording on.  Over the next hour we catch four, and we attach a radio-tag to the last one.  Radio-tracking of Burkinabe wood warblers has begun!  With a tag lasting maybe 13 days or more, the GB/Ghana wood warbler team are now committed to staying near Koubri for at least another two weeks.  No hardship that!

In the evening we go back out to Koubri to catch 2 black-capped and 2 brown babbler.  The wood warbler is tracked and is found foraging low in a short mimosa very close to the ringing station.

As a change from the hotel restaurant, and as it's Carlo's birthday, this evening Oppong cooks us a great meal of fried yam, chicken and tomato salsa.   

Tuesday, 2nd Oct. First day of training

After a gentle start with a team breakfast at the lean-to cafe next to the office – omelette in baguette as usual – we have a meeting at Naturama ahead of the start of the programme.  Whilst Danaë rescues our luggage in the afternoon, and meets film crew Toby and Roger (henceforth Roger Jr!) from their flight, others set off to the Monastery at Koubri, scene of last year’s triumphs of wood warbler catching.  We’re given the go-ahead by senior monk Alphonse to set our nets as we did before, and Aly and Oumar take the lead with the net site selection and installation. With nets furled, we’re ready to start early tomorrow.

Monday, 1st Oct, London – Ouagadougou

Just like last year, I am once again woken at 3am for my trip to Heathrow at 4, and, hard to believe, even more luggage than before.  This time we have so many more bits and pieces of essential equipment, to hand over to the team in Burkina for a new phase of our work in the Sahel.  Danaë is at the airport ahead of me having lodged at the Terminal 4 hotel overnight.  A fairly smooth check-in and a relaxed saunter to the departure gate, and it transpires that we’re actually booked in on different flights!  Only a half our apart, we were to meet in Paris and get the same onward flight from there.  With both flights slightly delayed, it was a close call for my later flight to make the connection, but with the latter also delayed we both made it in good time.  6 hours later we get to Ouagadougou via a short stop in Niger’s capital city Niamey, only to find that 5 out of our 7 pieces of luggage are missing!  A little further delay to fill out lost luggage forms, and we spot Aly and Bara waiting to greet us the other side of the glass doors at arrivals.  Before long we’re heading off to the Foyer guest house where some of the team are staying, and there we meet up with Oumar, Idrissa and Hussein, the rest of the Oursi crew.  We also meet Pierre and Soumilah, from Sourou and Higa IBAs, here to learn for the first time about the ringing that takes place at Oursi.  This is truly the start of a Burkina Faso ringing programme, with Aly and Oumar the trainers, Idrissa and Hussein the trainees, and new recruits Pierre and Soumilah. It is great to see the team, especially one so keen to get on with some more training at the start of the new season.  Danaë and I then head on to the Naturama office where we find Oppong and Roger after their marathon road trip north from Accra.  For Roger, a well seasoned traveller and volunteer all over Africa, this is his first visit to Burkina Faso.  Oppong’s first visit too, and with neither of them speaking French they did very well to make it!  After catching up with all in the Naturama office, we head to the hotel to settle in, grab some dinner and a short rest before heading back to the airport to meet PhD scientist Carlo, due in at midnight. We eventually turn in at 01:30.  Quite a long first day!

Thursday 27th Sept - Burkina fieldwork begins

Whilst Danaë and I amass equipment ahead of the start of our season, the crew in Burkina Faso are already well under way.  They had their first ringing session on the 17^th of this month, and first bird caught was a garden warbler, closely followed by a common nightingale.  On Oumar’s birthday on the 22^nd they managed just the one common whitethroat. Then, ringing on 25^th and 26^th at the lakeside “garden” produced 2 common chiffchaffs, 7 common nightingales, 1 common redstart, 4 common whitethroats, 6 western olivaceous warblers, 8 garden warblers and 19 melodious warblers.