Thursday 11th Oct. Final day’s filming and training

The tracking and film crews leave early this morning, the latter hoping to get one last shot at a Burkina sunrise out in the bush.  The rest turn up a little later, and Aly and Oumar lead the training whereby the Mauritanian guys themselves undertake the bird count and habitat recording.  This goes extremely well, and the four trainees seem well prepared to take these new skills back home to apply to point-count transects at their local sites.

Roger and Japheth continue a cracking job of plotting the tagged wood warbler locations, taking the odd leaf sample from any unidentified trees.  If properly pressed these should be identifiable later, but with the help of an expert botanist methinks!  With one net up this morning, we manage to catch a further 2 wood warblers, and tag these with the transmitters that have been previously used on other birds, and dropped with the tail moult. One of these should last at least another 7 days, whilst the other was only active for a day before being picked up, so with any luck it should continue transmitting until around the 23^rd or 24^th Oct.  At the ringing station, though, there’s more attention from the local youth (Thursday again!)

For the afternoon, it’s one final foray in to the bush for Toby and Roger Jr, in search for Fulani herdsmen and their communities, and one final sunset too!

Once Carlo has finished arranging for his feather samples to be shipped back to the US, we head out for the final group meal, at a favourite of ours from previous visits, Dany Ice.  Despite a tiny quibble over the bill (my mistake - apologies to the staff!) the evening was enjoyed by all.

Wednesday 10th Oct. Tag found, habitat training, and Japheth arrives

Roger continues with tracking with Oppong, and having gained access to that walled enclosure, they manage to collect the tag dropped earlier in the week.  In both instances the tags are stopped from emitting a signal with a tiny magnet taped to the outside, to turn off the internal micro switch. These tags can be used again, if we catch any more wood warblers that is.  Only one African paradise flycatcher caught this morning. Meanwhile, the Mauritanian team also head out to the monastery, to learn about habitat recording for the point counts.  Aly and Oumar help out (they’ve done more of this recently than anyone!) but then Aly is whisked off to town to search for his passport, hopefully now ready ahead of his trip on Saturday.  A great session, with lots of interesting points raised about the methods, and all seemed to be happy with the protocol, and confident about doing it themselves on the final day tomorrow.

Japheth finally arrives in Ouaga after a 24 hour bus trip!  We all take lunch at the office, but despite his gruelling journey, Japheth is keen to get out tracking some wood warblers this afternoon.  Whilst Danaë and Thandie chair some more presentations and training in the Naturama meeting room, Bara and I escort Toby and Roger II on some more filming excursions. This includes a spot by the roadside, when suddenly from nowhere distant sirens and flashing lights far down the road announce the arrival at speed of the entire government of Burkina Faso, en route to a military function down south in Pô.  A convoy of at least 100 vehicles, including a military helicopter escort!  Impressive, if a little OTT!

Much more peaceful scenes were to be had off road where a mother and baby collected some water from a communal borehole, and nearby some grand-looking baobabs cut an impressive silhouette in the early evening light.

Tuesday 9th Oct Solar power and point-counts

Now that their ringing training has finished, Pierre and Soumilah manage to head back to Sourou and Higa IBAs this morning, whilst all of the Oursi team remain until we manage to get all the equipment that they need.  Aly is staying in Ouagadougou anyway, as he will be going to the Pan-African Ornithological Congress in Tanzania on Saturday.  Danaë will be giving a presentation based on much of the data that they have been gathering from Oursi these past 3 seasons.

Following their arrival yesterday, the Mauritanian team begin their training at the Naturama office, with an introduction to the programme from Thandie and Danaë.  Over the next few days they will learn the field techniques for undertaking point counts of the birds in the various, often degraded, savannah habitats around the wetlands back at their homes in Mauritania.

Some great news from Ghana!  We hear from Japheth that he has set off by bus from Accra, due to arrive tomorrow mid-day in Ouagadougou.

Following another trip into town this afternoon, we collect all the solar power kit, and a few other sundry items for the storage of the samples that will be taken from the doves caught in north Burkina.  Following an internet search, we find what looks like a great option for a battery-powered deep freezer, for sale in the UK and elsewhere.  Back at the Lodge in Sandy, Jo looks into options for getting one such fridge shipped from the UK.

In the late afternoon a large group including the Mauritanian team head out to do some point count exercises in the grounds of the monastery.  Not quite typical of the habitat back home in Mauritania, but if anything trickier as the vegetation is a bit more complex here.  They soon get the hang of it!

Monday 8th Oct Transition day

Today the Burkina guys are due to go back home (but in fact are needed for meetings at the office), and the Mauritanian team arrive.  Bara, Aly and I join Toby and Roger Jr for some more filming of rural scenes, including some tree planting.  We find a spot next to main road that looks appropriate, and we get some assistance from a chap who appears on his bicycle.  [We subsequently discover that he is now guardian of said tree, watering it and protecting it from livestock. We’ll check on it later to see if it’s surviving!]

Meanwhile, Roger S discovers that of the four tagged wood warblers, one has dropped its tail with the tag attached, and it’s the one that we tagged only yesterday!  Surely they’re not starting their winter moult already?  Those birds seen in Ghana last year didn’t start moulting until early December.  Could these earlier arrivals a bit further north be getting a head start?  Roger also has his doubts about another tag.  It appears to have remained in the same spot for a few consecutive fixes now, about 15m away within an inaccessible walled enclosure.  We need permission to get into said enclosure to see if it can be found.

Birds of note on site include pearl-spotted owlet, 4 long-tailed nightjars, Senegal eremomelas, chestnut bellied starling and gabar goshawk

A group of us head to town this pm, to price up the kit needed for solar power supply for the Oursi incubator etc, and look too for a gas freezer.  The latter turns out to be prohibitively expensive, so we will have to have a rethink!

Danaë and the film crew are trying to find suitable action to film around town, and the Mauritanian team arrive in Ouagadougou.

Sunday 7th Oct. Last morning of ringing training

A  4^th wood warbler tagged!  This is proving a little too easy.  With Roger’s continued tracking we’re building up a great picture of the species of trees selected by the birds.  In time we’ll get a good idea of the “home range” of each bird, ie the area within which a bird roams around during the course of the 2 weeks or so that the tag lasts. Also caught today were 1 pied flycatcher and 1 common redstart.  Danaë and Carlo consider methods for sampling the invertebrates that are in the various trees being used by the wood warblers.

Aly does a great job with his interview for the film crew, painting a vivid picture of life in Oursi and his hopes for the future of nature conservation back home and across the whole of Burkina.

The p.m. is split between preparing all the gear to be taken by the Oursi team, and a trip into town for some filming of the market. Sadly, there’s not much going on as it’s a Sunday, so the crew resolve to try again when things will inevitably be a lot busier during the week!

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!