Ethiopia 5 More Surprises

Well it's been quite another interesting week which included three days in Gera, the trading village 100 kilometres away.

The site I like most is called Gauke 11. It's not because we catch a lot of birds there, because we don't. It's because we are ringing next to a house with three fantastic children. There is a boy of about 9, a girl of about 5 & a baby. The boy carries the baby around all the time. The gig the nets wrl is absolutely hyper & thinks everything is funny. There favourite pastime is looking through my binoculars both ways round. I always give them 1 Bir, about 4p, & they run off to the local shop.

Well this time as we were closing the nets we caught an Abyssinian Oriel. 

The next day, at another site, I saw some Trogon feathers in a net. I was a bit cheesed off that it had got away. But there it was in the next net! And what a bird. So colourful & yet so hard to see in the forest.

So off to Gera. One site is a plantation & is protected by a guard with a rather old, but I am sure deadly, AK47 Russian assault rifle. He was friendly enough though. And we caught another new bird. A wonderful little Brown Wood Warbler. 

We visited Zabiba's cafe after watching Manchester United's victory on satellite TV. First of all a chicken came scratching around. That was followed by sheep that had to be dragged out. And then, & this is absolutely true, a COW walked in to the Cafe & went straight through to the back yard!

The other photo is of a local farmer whose garden I'm going to be ringing in next month. He sold the Swedish researchers I was with a bunch of bananas. The WHOLE BUNCH!