I have enjoyed looking at birds for many years now. My interest was stimulated by the wide variety of pretty birds that inhabit the yard of the apartment I rent here in Cameroon. The bright yellow village weaver, the aptly-named blue fairy flycatcher, the green-and-red iridescent olive-bellied sunbird, and the three-tone gray Mackinnon’s shrike are my neighbors at various times of the year. These are lovely birds that would encourage almost anyone to get to know them. I got myself a Collin’s Birds of Western Africa book and got to know them better.
Later, I hooked up with a missionary from the Navigators who is a serious birder. Randy has been in this country longer than I, and he has traveled far and wide to check out different birds that can be found here in Cameroon. So, when he asked if I would be interested in going with him to hike up a local mountain and see what we could see, of course I said “yes”.
Friday, September 10, was a “surprise” holiday to celebrate the end of Ramadan (and give the working class a day off), so he pulled up in his car at precisely 6:00 a.m., and we drove about 30 minutes southwest of Yaoundé to Mount Kala, a rain-forested hill that Randy had last visited three years ago. Randy was appropriately decked out in a long-sleeved shirt, long pants, and baseball cap, and he carried a rain slicker in his backpack along with his binoculars, bird book, and some food. I was, as always, not quite as prepared. I sported jeans, a sport shirt, and $9 Walmart sneakers. I did have an umbrella in my backpack and a small container of peanuts, and I managed to remember to bring a bottle of water, but I really wasn’t dressed for a hike in the rain forest. Worst of all, I wasn’t able to find bug repellant in the apartment before Randy showed up and I had to leave.
We left the city and drove down a long dirt road, dead straight as it went up and down ridges towards our destination. At one point, Randy pulled onto a side road and then parked opposite a wattle-and-daub dwelling with a well near the road where a young child was pumping water into a bucket. Randy engaged in conversation with the child who responded cautiously, and some people in the dwelling peeked out at us from behind the front door. Then, a woman in her early 30’s showed up who welcomed us and gave us permission to park where we did. She was a pastor who was in the process of building a new house on the side of the road where the car was parked, but all that was standing was a frame and a sheet metal roof. Lack of money had stopped the project. She was very sweet and interested in Randy’s ministry, and we felt that the car was in a safe place. (Actually, people in African villages rarely molest other people’s property. It’s in the cities where crime and theft are prevalent.)
We began our hike by backtracking down the road where we came in and then veering off to a trail on the right. As we walked through some lowlands, something bit me repeatedly on the left arm and a few times on the right. Since I never saw the insect, and since it left a telltale red dot slightly smaller than a dime, I assume it was a moot moot. Also called “no-see-ums”, they itch ferociously at first but are otherwise harmless. It was also very overcast and quite cool, probably in the upper 60’s. I was deeply regretting the light-weight jacket I left hanging in my closet.
Shortly after passing the last vestiges of civilization, a heavy mist began to fall. Randy whipped out his rain jacket, and I whipped out a very loud, cheap umbrella that Bonnie and I had picked up at a store the other day. Randy looked like a true birder; I just looked like an idiot. We plodded along on a narrow path, brushing up against leaves that added to the water content in my jeans. On occasion, there was a clear area where we would stop and look around, hoping to see a bird flit between the trees. The heavy mist eventually stopped, but the trees perpetually dripped water the duration of our hike.
Rain forest birding is more a thing for the ears than for the eyes. You can hear them everywhere, but the chances of seeing them are next to nil. Randy knows hundreds of bird calls and was able to identify warblers and marmots, doves and turacos, flycatchers and tinker birds. All I could do was smile and nod. On the hike up the mountain, we hardly saw any birds at all.
However, the forest itself was amazing. One of my desires when I first came to Cameroon 17 years ago was to walk about in a real rain forest, not just the stuff that passes for forest on the edges of the capital. This was not my first experience in the real deal, but it was enchanting nonetheless. It certainly helped that, beyond the initial moot moots, there were no nasty insects, no wild animals, no snakes, nothing even remotely dangerous. The jungle wasn’t impenetrable, but it was dense enough that there was a defined canopy overhead. And the trees! The big hardwoods often had flared bases that shot out some distance from the tree like flying buttresses. Other trees were tall and straight from about five feet up but below that looked like an above-ground root system propping the whole thing up as if on stilts. And the thick, trunk-hugging vines just made the whole environment like something out of a Tarzan flick.
After a fairly good ascent for the better part of an hour, a sheer rock race loomed through the trees to our right, and then we entered a large clearing at the base of a nearly vertical granite wall that actually arched overhead before turning back up and disappearing into a rim of grass at the top, well over a hundred feet over our heads. We passed through a wall of dripping rain from the cliff edge and then were dry and able to rest a bit and observe a couple of swallows darting about the cliff face. Randy reached into his bag and pulled out a bagel and banana meal for each of us. He pointed out some cleats in the rock face where technical rock climbers had left evidence of their route. Amazingly, the route took them around a place where the cliff face was horizontal to the ground. Who in their right minds would climb such a wall? Birding was certainly an easier pursuit.
We made the decision to climb around the cliff and achieve the summit of the “mountain”, so we followed the thin trail up a steep and slick slope to the left of the bare rock and eventually leveled off and reached a clearing that was still deep in the forest but clearly the highest ground around. People had camped there and left discarded water bottles half buried around the edge. We went down a short path to check something out in the treetops – Randy was suspecting monkeys, but we didn’t see anything – and I stood next to an unusual tree to have my portrait taken. On our way back through the clearing, we had a long view in one direction that afforded us our first real bird sighting: a gray-headed negro finch sitting on the bare branches of a dead tree. This was a bird I’d seen earlier in Yaoundé, but I was just happy to finally see something, and the bird is pleasant to look at. Darting in and out of the same tree were a couple of flycatchers that caught our attention as well.
We finally decided that we needed to get back down if I was to make it home in time for lunch, and we promptly realized that we hadn’t been paying close attention when we arrived at the clearing, for we discovered several trails leading away from it and no clear indication of which one we had popped out of earlier. We retraced our route as far as a butterfly net lying beside a wide part of the trail (which neither of us remembered seeing on the way up), and we struck out into the woods at least four times, got lost, and returned to the net before we finally found the right trail back. I was nervous about the hike back down the trail to the base of the cliff because it had been so steep, and steep trails are much easier to climb up than to climb down. However, with the help of a ready supply of vines and saplings, we made it back to “base camp” with no trouble. From there we continued on back to the lowlands, stopped in the vicinity of somebody’s farm to enjoy a gathering of marmots, a couple of chestnut wattle-eyes, and a few other interesting birds. One bird silhouetted against a very bright sky caught my attention, and Randy tried to sidle into the grass to get a better vantage point. He made a guess and whipped out his iPod with recordings of hundreds of bird calls, chose one, and watched to see the bird’s reaction. At first all it did was turn its head towards us, but then it abruptly took off and flew directly over our heads, perching up in the trees where we could no longer see it. Randy got a quick look through his binoculars and identified it as a chocolate-backed kingfisher. I looked it up in my bird book and realized that I missed a beautiful bird. (My binoculars were back in my backpack at the time.) Oh well. I’ve already seen five species of kingfisher in Cameroon – I could miss this one.
As we finished our walk back to the car, I realized that I hadn’t seen too many birds, but I had seen a glorious part of God’s creation, and I had great fellowship with a man of God whom I admire. If those were the only reasons to get wet and tired in the jungle, those were reasons enough.
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