Bale Mountains

A week’s work in Addis Ababa was an opportunity to fly Chanté out and seek some locally-rooted tourism experiences that took our cash and used it for good, both for human and wildlife communities. July is the main rain season in large areas of the country and we headed for the drier regions of the Rift Valley and Bale Mountains National Park (where it rains later in the afternoon, leaving much of the day for trekking).

NOTE: for reasons apparently related to ‘terrorism’, binoculars were being confiscated by airport customs staff at the time of writing in July 2022, as Chanté discovered when she was detained at Bole. It was a real pain to get them back, which was only possible shortly before boarding a departing international flight. In future, I’ll be concealing them using means best not advertised publicly. However, this still limits you to road transport in-country since a body and bag scan is inescapable when boarding a flight. Hopefully, as tourism recovers, the self-defeating element of this position in a country whose major product is nature will become clear to the authorities.

Topographic map of Ethiopia, showing the Rift Valley and its lakes south of Addis Ababa

Location of Bale Mountains National Park, southeast of Lake Langano

Bishangari Lodge, Langano

The lodge had only just reopened following a disastrous fire and COVID. Gemeda is a kind waiter and an expert local bird guide. He is a walking avian encyclopaedia and can identify the 180(!) locally recorded species by call. He took us out before breakfast and again around sunset to poke around the lake margins and community-managed forest area. The lodge actively supports villagers (and is staffed by them) and visitors pay a fee that is channeled directly into local projects, such as the upgraded bridge shown below.

This is what helps to keep the forest in a relatively untouched state. Villagers observe first-hand how much visitors value it and the life it supports. In fact, we were joined by groups of enthusiastic kids, helping to spot birds and point them out. One little boy found a pygmy kingfisher hidden in deep woodland, something that was challenging to pick up with binoculars even with his guidance. A future guide, hopefully. If anyone has equipment in good working order that they’ve since upgraded and would like to donate to a good cause, please get in touch — the guides use barely functional compact models and the kids have none at all.

Here’s a selection of the tiny minority of sightings I managed to record with a camera:

Adult (2&4) and juvenile (1&3) blue-breasted bee-eaters

African spoonbills (with Hottentot teal and African yellow-billed duck in foreground)

Community bridge, funded by tourism fees

As we approached Dinsho along the valley road, Abel, our driver, began to point out the first (very) distant mountain nyala through the afternoon downpours. You know how it is when you go to a particular place to see a particular thing – at the back of your mind you’re trying to manage expectations and not get your hopes up. It might be an elusive bird species listed on a nature reserve’s public signage or it may be that you’ve travelled to Abruzzo to go ‘bear-watching’, but you content yourself with a pleasant walk and the red deer that nearly stood on everyone while prostrate and waiting in the freezing cold in vain since the main target species are shy and rare and, well, the food and company were good.

So, we were slightly perturbed when Abel took off again quickly before I could even snap the sketchiest of long-range record shots, not really believing his, “oh, you’ll see loads of those” explanation. Which, in hindsight, was hilarious.

Dinsho and the juniper forest

Were we greeted by guide Muzeyen and the camp logistics team at the no-longer-functional Dinsho Park HQ lodge. They’d set up our tent and, after a quick shoe change, we were skipping through the juniper forest, trying not to trip over rare endemic mammals. Clearly, nobody bothers these animals, such is their apparently highly evolutionarily maladaptive level of tameness (see images below). Presumably they get eaten by the native hyenas, and Bale also hosts lions and leopards, but it seems they can discern potential predators from harmless lumbering bipeds.

I used to be known as Owl Man by the residents of Kielder Village, Northumberland, while I was studying them there, but The Old Guy (as he was described to us, with no further name details) almost certainly deserves the former epithet more. At any one time, he knows the location of local owls to the tree and will rapidly take you there, also pointing out the mammals (still approaching as if with a death wish) as they passed. Muzeyen (Muza) had arranged for The Old Guy to appear when I mentioned my owl fancying tendencies. And, just like one of his owls, suddenly, there he was. Again, I was a little skeptical — my tracking experience told me that even when the things are radio-tagged, they can easily detect your approach and depart long before you reach their roosting place. Not these ones, and not with The Old Guy.

African wood owl (*Strix woodfordii,* from the same genus as the European tawny owl)

Abyssinian owl, or African long-eared owl

Although attentive, mountain nyala can be closely approached with care…

Nose flies give a female a spotted appearance

Hyena caves with warthog bones, like something out of The Hobbit

Red hot pokers, flowering and lush following the rains

Lone male nyala just behind the Dinsho park HQ buildings

Warthogs were the most ludicrously tame of all

After a night punctuated regularly by the sounds of nearby hyenas and warthogs, I played toilet roulette and lost (the four cisterns in the compound shared a puzzling and unpredictable water supply and I was forced to obtain a pan and water from the kitchen to flush). We downed a vast breakfast and made only semi-successful attempts to carry our own luggage to the vehicle – I’ve never been comfortable with being waited on in that way.

The Web Valley and Sodota Camp

The Web Valley is central to multiple Ethiopian wolf territories. Bale has the largest of the remaining sub-populations, with the national (and, therefore, world) total estimated at around 400-520 individuals. Again, “we really hope we’ll see one”, became a naïve observation in hindsight. Muza is to wolves what The Old Guy is to owls — he has worked on the wolf conservation programme long-term and is responsible for the sightings behind most of the images and films in international media, although he rarely gets the credit he deserves for his work, with many authors and presenters preferring to keep his contributions hidden.

The wolf research and monitoring team is constantly looking for good quality outdoor equipment, which isn’t available locally. If any readers have kit in good condition that they’d like to donate, please get in touch with me.

There are far too many livestock in the world. Here, they compact soil and eat natural vegetation. They also place carnivores in direct human conflict — one paper found that Ethiopian wolves and golden jackals take around 1.2 heads per year (10% of the average herd size). However, other social studies from Bale have revealed that pastoralists are much more likely to have a favourable view of wolves if they see direct economic benefits from wolf tourism

Malachite sunbird enjoying pokers, like so many bird and mammal species do

A fledgling moorland chat harries a parent before replacing it at the top of an old poker

Local herders attempting to keep dry during a heavier shower

Cattle foot movements can disturb borrowing mammals, causing wolves to hang around in case of feeding opportunities

The wolves are sustained by an incredibly dense small mammal community. Their staple, and the producer of the thousands of large holes that pepper the plains, is the giant mole rat

The ear tag signifies that the animal has been vaccinated against the rabies carried and transmitted by domestic dogs

One of two wolves that were patrolling the Web Valley together as heavy rain came and went before finally trotting off, pausing periodically to consume the giant mole rat they were carrying. Although they live in groups of two to 18 animals, and defend an exclusive territory, they generally forage alone by daylight

Giant lobelia (only found between around 3,100-4,400m above sea level) plants and shrubs above Sodota Camp

Water begins to flow toward the seasonal Fincha Habera waterfall as the rain continues to fall long after the customary short afternoon showers would usually have ended. The valley also hosts endemic spot-breasted lapwings (plovers), blue-winged geese and Starck’s hares

The Sanetti Plateau

Rising to 4,377m at its highest point of Mount Tullu Dimtu, the plateau is an incredible moorland system and the largest Afroalpine region in the Ethiopian Highlands.

Ethiopian wolf amid fields of the endemic dwarf shrub *Helichrysum citrispinum*, whose colouration gives the impression of a deep frost

Ruddy shelduck, with its only Ethiopian breeding population on the plateau

Lappet-faced vultures, standing separately with their backs to a melée around several ox corpses and seemingly viewing the other birds’ behaviour with embarrassment

A thick-billed raven grabs a morsel from the edge of the scrum

An adult Rüppell’s vulture gets a little too close for a juvenile’s liking…

…causing a foot full of talons to be thrust in its direction

Rira and the Harenna Forest

Rira is a delight. The local bars serve delicious ambesha and gomen, a flatbread and steamed kale served with spices and local unprocessed honey (with the bees thronging the container apparently determined to take it back again), and the usual treacle-like coffee, or in macchiato form. Down the hill from the campsite is the the Harenna forest, with its Bale monkeys and giant hogs. We didn’t see either of these as the light rain barely let up (it’s called cloud forest for a reason) but the fern-covered trees were stunning in their own right. It blows the mind that black-maned lions roam around here, albeit rarely seen.