Rwanda Revival

Akagera & Nyungwe national parks.

- John Maytham

I saw my first Shoebill in Rwanda on 14 June 2005. I was with a group of birders and we had traveled east from Kigali to the Akagera National Park with our primary birding goal being the Red-faced Barbet, the closest that Rwanda has to an endemic species. (It can also be seen in Uganda and Burundi, but Akagera is the safest bet for this particular tick.) We dipped on the barbet; despite being told that it was a near-certainty in the parking lot outside the entrance lodge, it was not to be.

But there was the unexpected bonus of very decent, if distant, scope views of the Shoebill, which John Gould in his 1851 paper ‘On a new and most remarkable form in ornithology’ assigned the scientific name Balaeniceps rex and described it as ‘the most extraordinary bird I have seen for many years’. It is one of those birds the full impact of which is impossible to anticipate through photographs and paintings. ‘Abu markub’ (‘father of the shoe’) as the Arabs call it, is so much more striking in the flesh than in two dimensions and for me, that impression has not been diminished after further sightings in Uganda, Zambia, and South Sudan.