Ghana 2019 - Day 2

Breakfast

Day Two 

Breakfast at 6 am, Omelette, toast, Liptons tea and excitement!

After breakfast Peter and I did a bit of birding around the hotel with Isaac.   It was good to see some African birds straight away; grey-headed sparrow, copper sunbird, laughing dove, mosque swallow, little and common swift, purple glossy starling and our first common bulbul.   Quite a good list for five minutes in a garden with hardly any plants!

Yellow-throated Longclaw

Whilst African birds are obviously going to be the main avian interest, I never cease to be thrilled to see “our birds” in their wintering grounds, and hope they make the journey north safely - in another couple of months the skies over the U.K. will (hopefully) look very different!

Callithrix (Vervet) Monkey

All loaded up and off we went to Shai Hills - a morning here would enable us to get some relaxed birding under our belts.    As we are also interested in butterflies, our list quickly filled with species from both taxa - making interpretation later an interesting prospect!

Shai Hills was declared a reserve in 1962 and now covers around 51 square kilometres.   The area is close enough to Accra for a day visit and with introductions of Ostrich and Zebra the authorities are trying to bring people and nature together.   With around 170 bird species there was a lot to do.

Olive Baboon

Time to go for lunch, where we enjoyed local dishes including grilled tilapia and banku with Shito pimento sauce.   Agama rock lizard entertained us feeding on insects in the car park.   Woodland kingfisher and African pied wagtail were spotted along the journey with large numbers of cattle egret.

Lunch

We continued towards Bobiri butterfly and wildlife reserve.   I spent half a day here in 2010, so to get the chance of two nights in the reserve was something I was looking forward to.  

The purpose of this trip is to investigate some potential birding and butterfly sites in Ghana, and Bobiri was the ideal place for us to re-acquaint ourselves with the birds and learn more about Ghanian butterflies before we move to un-chartered territory.

At Bobiri we were greeted by many butterflies feeding on fruit scraps from the kitchen - here we could test the butterfly trap!

We walked along the east track, a great introduction to the reserve and all it had to offer.  We wandered along adding some excellent species  we didn’t make it quite it to the end of the track, but we did see six grey parrots coming into roost which caused some delay and gave a great end to our first walk here.

Tonight we would put out the safari moth trap, and with only three hours of electricity we had to make the most of it - within minutes a lovely silk moth had arrived, we quickly took 

Silk moth sp.

photographs and released it.

A great first day in the reserve - remembering that there is only electricity from 18:00-21:00 hrs, it was time for bed, remembering to plan for the morning’s torchlight ablutions!