In a country wracked with poverty, affordable transportation is a necessity for moving people and goods. There are very few private automobiles; most transport is “public” – buses, matatus, tuktuks, and bodabodas. Buses are just that….buses. But there can be a great deal of discrepancy in the quality of the experience with some bus lines maintaining their vehicles in a clean, uncluttered state and selling no more tickets than they have seats and others just keeping their vehicles on the road, dirty and overloaded….with passengers inside and almost anything else tied down on the roof. I once passed a bus with an easy chair tied on the roof and a passenger sitting in it, absorbing the insects and dust as well as the view.

Matatus I’ve described before – old 12-seater vans converted to bench seats in the front (for 2-3 passengers and a driver); a bench seat directly behind (I’ve experienced 8 people on this bench); and then two more rows consisting of 2 seats, a space and then a single seat across with a removable slab of wood that can be used as a seat across the space. These last two rows usually take no more than a maximum of 5. The highest total I’ve driven with is 24, including the driver and conductor (the guy that takes the money). The advantage? They’re cheap: the one and a half hour ride from Kisumu to Bondo is only 200 Ksh (about $3.00).

Tuktuks are 3-wheeled motorbikes with a cover over the back to protect passengers and/or goods. I’ve only taken one and it puttered along at a reasonable clip. They are often used to transport freight believe it or not, sometimes piled over twice the height of the vehicle itself.

Bodabodas (motorbikes) are the vehicle of choice for short-range travel for one or two (or up to 4) passengers. Their name is derived from the words: “border border”. They were often used to skoot people from the Uganda border across Kenya to the Tanzanian border….border to border. As well as people, they also handle a variety of freight: 3-4 five-gallon jerrycans full of water; a stack of 12 seat cushions (rising 8 feet above the ground); baskets of chickens; just about anything when I come to think of it.

One of my two assistants, Dan, is a bodaboda driver in his spare time. Here’s the deal for these guys: they rent the motorbike for 600 Ksh a day. Anything they make over and above that is profit (after gas). Sometimes Dan makes a profit….sometimes he doesn’t.

As well as spreading the birding gospel in the Mattangwe area I wanted to do more counts in the south Nyanza area as a whole in order to publicize (through Ebird and the Kenya Bird Map Project – KBMP) the ornithological richness of the area. In doing so I wanted to train Dan and my other assistant Brian in the discipline of doing bird counts. So I used the KBMP as the structure. The country is divided up, for mapping purposes, into 5-minute by 5-minute squares (latitude/longitude) – “pentades”. This works out to about 9 kilometers by 9 kilometers. For KBMP purposes you just have to keep track of the species seen, hour by hour (for a minimum of two hours). But for ebird purposes we needed to count how many of each species we were seeing. Keeping track of what you see and how many are novel concepts over here for the most part and it took awhile for the guys to catch on (especially keeping track of the hours). But what made it fun…and interesting….and really useful was to move out from our pentade directly around Mattangwe to the pentades surrounding us.

To do this I needed a form of transportation that was relatively fast, safe (I stress the word “relatively”), and CHEAP. Dan’s bodaboda was the perfect answer. As well as covering the Mattangwe area intensively we have visited and done counts in 12 other pentades, in a couple more than once.

Let me give you an example of a typical “away” count day. Lake Victoria opens to the east into Kavirondo Gulf. A peninsula extends down from the north forming the mouth of the gulf. At the end of the peninsula is the town of Luanda Kotieno where you can catch the ferry to Homa Bay across the way. We decided to count this southern peninsula. Dan and Brian arrived at 6:15 (the sun rises at 7:00) and we headed out on the dirt road, scattering herds of goats, cattle and school children on the way. For an hour we followed a mix of dirt and tarmac roads. It’s a mystery how Dan knew where to go as there are virtually NO signs on any of the routes. At first it was pretty (some…Canadians…would say refreshingly) cool but as soon as the sun cleared the horizon the heat began. As third man on the bike I felt most of the bumps (although Dan is a very good driver). [The tarmac roads in this area are very good….because they have been constructed by the Chinese. All the Kenyans I talked to about these matters concurred: Kenyans, when left to their own devices, can NOT build a serviceable road….or building, for that matter. (It’s interesting to me that the Chinese are pouring millions of dollars into African infrastructure. Without it Africa would be even further behind. Of course there will be a payoff for the Chinese….I’m just not sure yet what it will be. Probably access to Africa’s rich natural resources – which African leaders seem quite enthusiastic about selling off. Of course the human cost to the majority of poor Africans doesn’t seem to enter into the equation…..he says cynically.]

By 7:10 we reached Gudwa Beach – a tiny scattering of huts sheltering fishermen and farmers and their families. Dan simply picks out a house, drives up and parks, and asks the owner/occupant if it’s ok to park there – we’ve never been turned down. We then walked for 4 hours, covering as many habitats as we could, and counting everything we saw (keeping track of the hours). We then jumped back on the bike and traveled slowly to the ferry terminal in Luanda Kotieno where we once again stashed the bike and walked for another hour and a half….counting all the way. (We were rewarded on this second leg by stumbling over a couple of Water Thick-knees, a bird I’d seen only once before. When we followed these we put up 3 Swamp Nightjars and, as they would fly only about 5 meters before landing, we got really good looks at them to help confirm the tricky identification.) We finished the count with 75 species.

Now protocol demands that the mizungu provides sustenance for the troops, so when the counts were done we motored into town, scattered a cow or two from the front of the hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and sat down to a typical African repast: half a tilapia (the head half) in a nice sauce and a scoop of skooma wiki (like spinach); this is eaten using your hands (your right hand if you’re any good) by taking balls of ugali (imagine dried out cream of wheat), forming them into a sort of spoon, and scooping up the food with them. It’s an art….not mastered by me. Fish bones are discarded on the table. Any crumbs dropped to the floor are quickly recycled by the circulating chickens. The whole meal for the 3 of us, including bottled water, was 490 Ksh….about $7.00.

Sated and content we jumped back on the bike and headed for Mattangwe, an hour away. But by this time the sun was high overhead and the heat was blasting off the ground. So not a comfortable ride. It was a little disconcerting when driver Dan dozed off and began to meander off the road toward a prickly acacia but Brian alerted him and we all had a good laugh.

So another count under our belt. I had the guys enter the data for KBMP on the forms (the internet here is too slow to allow us to do it directly so we’ll do a paper copy and send it to Gladys at the Nature Kenya office at the National Museum in Nairobi). Later in the evening I entered the data into Ebird. This is actually quite a pain. The system is VERY slow. But the biggest pain is that the list of birds provided by ebird does not necessarily correspond to the names in the standard field guide: Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania, by Zimmerman, Turner, and Pearson. Also, many species are not included even though we see them commonly, so I have to arduously go to “Add a species” and try to find the right one. When the “common name” can’t be found I enter the Latin one. The other day it took me over three quarters of an hour to enter a 45-bird list. My African colleagues do not have the money it would take to pay to enter the data, especially as they buy “air time” in 20 shilling allotments – an amount they can afford most of the time. So I will have them send me their data and enter it for them until a better system is found. Ebird is great…..but it’s for societies (or individuals) with the money to have a good internet connection. So….not for most Africans.

My time here is drawing down but I’ve enjoyed this year more than the others because I’ve been mobile and able to take in so much more – birds, people, landscapes. If you don’t already have it on your bucket list I would highly recommend you add “Bodaboda birding”.

Tomorrow is the start of the Great Backyard Bird Count and we’re out to make Kenya competitive on the world stage. Our first (of four) leg will be Ndere National Park – combining a bird count with a school outing/trip. How cool is that!?

Photo Gallery:

Rick