Peak VIEWING

Birding Amboseli, Kenya

- GRANT ATKINSON

Amboseli National Park is located in the south of Kenya, close to the border with Tanzania. The park is perhaps best known for its sizeable elephant population, with more than 1500 of the animals utilising the area. Co-existing with the elephants is a wide variety of birds, with in excess of 450 species being recorded in Amboseli and its surrounds. The park itself is not very large, covering just 392 square kilometres, but it forms part of a much larger conservation area. The local Maasai people, who own the land on which the national park is situated, live around the park, but their traditional cattle-farming activities are not as damaging to the environment as more modern agriculture methods might be and as a result birds and wildlife still flourish beyond the park’s boundaries.

Amboseli lies only a few degrees south of the equator and is blessed with plenty of sunny days. It also receives less rainfall than might be expected (about 300 to 400 millimetres a year), mostly as a result of lying in the rain-shadow of Mount Kilimanjaro. However, the park benefits from the meltwater that flows underground offthe ice-capped mountain and wells up in the form of permanent swamps or marshes. In addition to the bird-rich marshes, there is a variety of habitats, including stands of umbrella thorns and mixed Commiphora and