Sun, Apr 14 - Birding the Antikwa section of the Park

Today being Sunday, we got pancakes with jam for breakfast!  We set off at 5:30 AM and saw a lovely sun streaked with clouds rising over the jungle.   We drove around the park and through several tiny villages of thatched houses made of adobe brick and finally stopped at a little clearing where we took off on foot.  It was slightly cooler today which was very nice.

 We could hear chain saws in the distance and then women walked by carrying huge piles of small logs on their heads!  They pleasantly greeted us as if they were carrying only a small bundles of laundry. We walked about one mile (which took three hours - standard birding speed!), ducking into a small clearing with a pool of water where we stood for 15 minutes while Phil and James called in a rare Fluff Tail, a little reddish rail, that walked briefly by.

We came upon a palm wine production area - a small clearing in the woods that contained a still, buckets of palm wine and  pools of wine brandy.  Andrew, our other guide and butterfly expert, poured some wine from a rather grubby pail into a plastic mug and passed it around!  Bob didn’t take any, and so can act as our control if we all get sick!  It was rather pleasant and sweetish.  Nearby was a palm oil palm tree that had been felled and several outer layers of the trunk peeled back to reveal a little trough that someone had cut into it.  The sap collects in the trough and that is made into the wine.  It looked like a primitive illegal still of Prohibition, but Andrew says it is a legal, and taxed, distillery.

Palm wine production

 We proceeded on to a river crossing and walked by a very smoky small palm oil
business.  Mounds of palm fruits were on the ground and workers were grinding some up and extracting oil and burning the remaining vegetation.  As Glenda pointed out, that material could be used as heating or cooking fuel and save a few trees, but oh, well.   We saw lovely, azure White-throated Blue Swallows flying over the sand-colored water and watched men paddling small dugout canoes.

Palm Oil production

We started driving back to the hotel for lunch and passed many church parishioners going home after services.  Many of the women and quite a few men were wearing clothes made of brilliantly colored, wildly patterned material!
I hope to find where they obtain it and how it is made.  The women wear elaborately designed dresses and the men’s’ is generally fashioned into pajama-like garment.  The kids often wear matching outfits. You can see this everyday, but on Sunday it is quite a show!

We got back at 12:30 (seven hours of birding!) and had a restorative lunch of hard boiled eggs in a veggie stew and a beef stew with boiled manioc slices.
We had a break until 3:30 and then were to go out again, walking along a park road and into the evening to see some owls.

 At 3:30 I decided that after going up and down the stone staircase yesterday which left my knees not happy, and not sleeping well last night that I needed an afternoon off!   And as this is probably the nicest hotel we will stay in, it only made sense to stay home, which I did, happily.  It’s now past 7 PM and they are all still out, hot and sweaty, exhausted, and bouncing around in the bus!   I took a shower, washed my hair and spend a couple of hours getting a blog post out with two measly photos and organized our gear for leaving early tomorrow.  Then I went over to the bar and now am happily drinking a large “Stone Strong Lager” which actually is rather weak, but does the trick awaiting the brave birders.
The group arrived at 7:30 and we had a good dinner of spaghetti with spicy tomato sauce.