It’s Albatrossity Monday!
We’ll go on a river trip with frosty and then head back to the Yucatan with Uncle Eb.
You may have seen me mention that we are coming up on 1,000 On the Road posts since I started shepherding the series. That happens this week!
To commemorate the occasion, I am going to re-run the two Farewell to Paris posts where Albatrossity and I each chose our favorites from the 5-weeks of Paris posts. Such a lovely series of posts, it’s nice to see the favorites again, so Albatrossity and I thought that would be a fitting way to commemorate 1,000 posts.
The comments were lovely, too, and in those threads we also talked about ideas for OTR, and it was good to see those again, too! I hope you’ll read the posts and read the comments and think about some things we might do going forward.
Albatrossity
Day 2 in the Serengeti started out in the savannah in the morning, and some of those pictures were highlighted in the last installment. We then had lunch and a stroll around our tent camp at Naabi Hill, followed by a trip to Lake Ndutu, which is a destination worth visiting!
These tent camps have quite a few employees, including cooks, waiters, and lots of staff to set up/maintain the tents etc. All of these folks are quite knowledgeable about the plants and animals of the Serengeti, and many of them are aspiring to be guides in the future, and thus eager to practice their English. I was talking to two of the young guys who were washing up the dishes after lunch, and they noticed my omnipresent binoculars and asked if I would be interested in a bird walk in the area after they finished up. Saying “Yes, absolutely!” was my immediate response. And as it turns out, they were hoping to become guides in the future, and eager to show off their knowledge and practice their English. And they were thrilled to be able to borrow the camera and practice their bird photography skills as well! I’m still in contact with one of these guys, and he’s still in training to be a guide.
One of the first birds we saw on that excursion was this guy. Actually, we heard it first, and I asked if they knew that birdsong. Of course they did, and it turns out that vocalizations are the best way to ID most the species in this family CIsticolidae, since they all look pretty much alike. This is a Rattling Cisticola (Cisticola chiniana), and for those of you who think that North American sparrows are uncolorful and hard to visually identify, you should thank the FSM that we don’t have cisticolas on this continent! And interestingly, their diagnostic vocalizations don’t sound much like a rattle, at least to me. Click for larger image.
On The Road – Albatrossity – Serengeti Day 2, Round 2Post + Comments (12)