Shoebill Searching

November 16^th, 2023

Another trekking option at the Ziwa Rhino Sanctuary is to try and see the Shoebill, a very prehistoric looking bird that is a large, long-legged wading bird and is considered to be one of the five most desirable birds in Africa by birdwatchers.  I have to admit, I’m not sure if I’d ever heard of this bird before but seeing pictures of it, I thought “Why not?”.  The bird gets its name due to its enormous shoe-shaped bill.  It is genetically closely related to pelicans and herons and is only found in swampy areas in a narrow band from South Sudan to Zambia.

 

I was told to be ready to go at 6:30 am.  It made me wonder that if I had been signed up for this trek the day before, I would have had 7 rhinos outside my front door to contend with!  It turned out that Jackson, my guide for the rhino trek yesterday was the guide for this morning.  Awesome, I really liked this guy.  The others on the tour were English Jane and her daughter Martha who was a doctor on a temporary exchange to Gulu, a city about 2½ hours to the north and also Rachel, a friend of Jane’s.  I had met these ladies the night before and had asked if I could join them as they had a vehicle with a driver.  This had been a suggestion by Jillian, the friendly woman who worked at reception. 

Continuing on my good rhino luck, here is the youngest member in the sanctuary, a three month old rhino and his mom, grazing near the restaurant early in the morning.

The shoebills tend to be found outside of the sanctuary and sometimes you can take a shortcut road through the sanctuary to get there, but we had a big storm the night before and the unpaved roads were not in a good condition.  Instead, we drove out of the sanctuary to the main highway, travelled about 7-10 kilometers south and then head back west along some unpaved roads.  Strangely, after a five to six kilometers of rough roads, we hopped onto a nicely paved highway.  I asked Jackson about it and it seems like the money ran out to connect this road to the main Kampala highway.  Seemed a bit bass ackwards to me…you would have thought that they would have started from the main highway, but hey, this is Africa.

 

We approached a swampy area and a guy on the side of the road flagged us down.  Jackson told us that he was our canoe guide and that he’d been looking for the elusive Shoebill before we arrived.  In this area there are only 10-15 of these illusive birds, so finding one may prove to be difficult.  Amazingly, the canoe guide and Jackson spotted one from the road.  The bird was probably about 500 meters away but with the aid of binoculars, we had a decent view of this prehistoric-looking bird.

He's out there somewhere...

You might have to zoom in on this pic, but he's the little black mark around the middle of the photo vertically, and a bit to the right from the center.

I tried to capture it better with Jackson's binoculars.

Once we were satisfied with that, we hopped into a wooden canoe, of questionable construction, as it needed to be bailed once in a while, although we had a better boat than some other tourists that we saw.  There was probably 2-3 inches of freeboard (the distance from the water to the top of the hull).  So any sudden movement to one side could guess a rapid intake of water onboard.  Luckily it was calm water with no wind.

Martha the doctor is in the front, her mom Jane on the right and her friend Rachel on the left.

Looking back towards the highway.

The canoe guide poled the boat through a narrow gap in the swampy vegetation, but as we neared the shoebill, he purposefully aimed us into the lilypads in order to keep our distance from the bird so that we wouldn’t spook it.  After 10 minutes or so, we headed back to shore.

That's a close as we could get.

Here's a really good picture of a shoebill, taken by Naomi (she said I could borrow it for my blog post):

Me, Jackson and the boat dude.

We were quite lucky to have seen a shoebill.  Jackson mentioned that he is more nervous going on shoebill treks than rhino ones as the probability of a successful encounter with a shoebill is much lower than with the rhinos.  He stated that there were probably only 10-12 shoebills in this area.

Back at the sanctuary, there were warthogs feeding on the grass.

Tough to see it, but we have a warthog, a monkey in the shade in the middle, and a kob on the little mound behind the monkey.

The main dining area, looking back at the restaurant and kitchen building.

One of many monkeys running around.

It was a super cool bird to see, so prehistoric looking, but I also couldn’t help but think that the shoebill was the least exciting bird in the swampy lake that morning…he hardly moved at all!  Oh well, check off another unique experience in my books.