The Rift Valley, a Safe Haven for Birds
When it comes time for the great winter migration, the bird world divides itself into flappers and gliders. The passerines, for example, fall into the former group, small, numerous, and full of beans, literally, as they emerge from a spree of binge eating and take off into the airways in a mad dash to get to their winter grounds in Africa. They fly at night to avoid predators and use the cool night temperatures to conserve energy. Flying as direct as possible over deserts, water, and all sorts of terrain, they quickly put the mileage behind them as they scramble to reach their place in the sun.
The gliders, such as our White Stork, fly thin, hoping to eat along the way. Since they must travel during the day over land where thermals are generated, you can watch them start in the late morning as they glide back and forth, wings outstretched, searching for the updrafts that will carry them in a spiral of warm air until they reach heights where they are almost invisible to the naked eye.
When the warm air of the thermal disperses, they glide on until they find another one that lifts them again. In this way they conserve energy, but pay for it because they have to follow a longer, more restricted route—and they must get very hungry on the wing.
If we were following banded White Stork No. 981981, who overwintered in Mozambique in 1969,1 we’d be flying for about nine hours each day once the sun is high enough in the sky, soaring on thermals above the great canyon of the Rift Valley, an enormous corridor flanked by escarpments that runs the length of Africa from the Red Sea almost to the South African coast.
Our stork—let’s call her Lisa—is bound for Mozambique, so she has to fly south beyond the East African Great Lakes, then across Tanzania, Zambia, and Malawi, where she veers east following the Zambezi River. Here she passes over the long series of lakes, ponds, and wetlands interconnected on the valley floor by rivers with papyrus swamps large and small sprinkled along the way. One of her first stops in Africa might have been at the edge of a papyrus swamp in one of the Rift Valley lakes in Ethiopia, and one of her last stops, 2,400 miles later, might have been in a papyrus swamp on the eastern edge of the Zambezi Delta, just short of the Indian Ocean.
South of Lake Victoria, soaring over Tanzania she will find perennial watercourses and floodplains in which swamps are common enough (Map 8, p. 213), with vast papyrus swamps in the Malagarasi Basin to the west, and the Kilombero Valley to the east. Even in the famous Ngorongoro Crater inside the Serengeti Park she will find two swamps dominated by papyrus, the Gorigor and Mandusi. Papyrus is also common along many of the Tanzanian rivers in and out of the game parks, including the Mara, Pangani, Wami, Ruvu, Rufiki, Kafufu, and Ruaha.
Perhaps Lisa will decide to spend the night there; if so, she will settle in a tree or shallow water for at least 14–16 hours of rest. She is safer roosting in plantlife in Africa than on pylons or electric poles elsewhere. Electrocution is a major cause of death of the White Stork. A team from the German Agency of Nature Conservation found birds with broken wings, broken legs, broken beaks, swollen legs, or in otherwise bad condition stuck in mud after landing with both feet on a live wire, or colliding with high-tension wires.
After arriving in the Zambezi Delta in Mozambique and staying through the winter, she will turn around, leave southern Africa and, if she can avoid being electrocuted, pierced by an African arrow, or shot at in Syria or Lebanon where the hunting pressure is the greatest, she will return to Europe in the early spring.
Safely back on her nest after a long hazardous journey, Lisa may recall that she had flown over millions of acres in order to search out the verdant plant cover near water where dinner waited. The river edges and lakeside reed swamps teem with treats that would appeal to her, but her favorite of all would be a fishpond, if she could find one. In Europe, where White Storks are coveted and cosseted, she might be allowed to eat her fill from a fish farm, but in Africa the local fish farmers are not as forgiving. More often than not she will have to make do with a buffet from nature: a varied selection of frogs, small fish, large insects, worms, and snakes that are abundant among the aquatic grasses, bulrushes, reeds, and papyrus of the African swamps.
The Great Rift Valley that she traversed is one of the earth’s most remarkable geological features. It is also one of the longest rift valleys on earth and spans two continents. It stretches over 4,400 miles from the Taurus Mountains in Turkey to the Zambezi River Delta in Mozambique and includes almost two dozen countries: Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Egypt, Sudan, Republic of South Sudan, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Uganda, Rwanda, Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, the United Republic of Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Botswana, and Mozambique.
The valley is globally important as a flyway for billions of migratory birds. Twice a year, five hundred million birds of 280 species follow this route of passage, some traveling more than 5,000 miles annually from their northern breeding grounds in Europe and Asia.2 Once in the valley, they find there the steep cliffs and high daily temperatures that produce ideal conditions for the generation of thermals, the hot air currents that raptors and large soaring birds need for their long journeys.
About 80,000 Eurasian Cranes (almost the entire world population) winter within the valley. The entire world population of Lesser Spotted Eagles, the entire Palearctic populations of Levant Sparrowhawks and White Pelicans, and significant world populations of White Storks, Cranes, and Honey Buzzards pass through a portion of the Great Rift Valley.
It is also home to enormous biodiversity as well as an extraordinary array of cultures, so much so that Kenya has proposed it as a World Heritage site. This effort is a natural outgrowth of the fact that the valley is topographically distinct, something well shown in the 2010 BBC movie The Great Rift: Africa’s Wild Heart, a film narrated by Hugh Quarshie in three episodes built around the themes of fire, water, and grass. The film describes the highest mountains and deepest lakes of Africa, all found in the valley, along with the ash layers from active volcanoes that encourage the grasslands and provide the forage needed by the massive herds of game.
The Rift Valley is also thought to be the “cradle of humanity,” the place where our human ancestors stepped out of the forest, and the place of origin of three of Africa’s main rivers, with water flowing north from Lake Tana in Ethiopia and from Lakes Victoria, Albert, George, and Edward in East Africa into the Nile, or southeast along the Zambezi and southwest into the Congo. In all cases the headwaters are filtered and protected at their origins by papyrus swamps.
With so many illustrious geophysical credentials and unique biological phenomena, it is easy to overlook another feature of the valley, one that has enormous impact on birdlife and the survival of animal and plant species—the interface between saline and fresh water. In no other place on earth do we find so many closed lakes. These are shallow waterbodies with one or more influent rivers but no exits; consequently, they have high mineral contents that result from the evaporation of water that leaves salt behind.
Water flows into Lakes Turkana, Natron, Nakuru, Manyara, Eyasi, Elmentaita, Magadi, Bogoria, Chad, Naivasha, and the Okavango Delta as well as many small lakes in Ethiopia and elsewhere, and it stays there.
In the case of Lakes Chad and Naivasha and the Okavango Delta, salinity is kept low because salts are taken out by seepage; but in most other cases the water becomes saline or alkaline or soda. As a result, there is a division between species, something that is hinted at on the cover of the BBC Rift Valley DVD. Here we see two male hippos, mouths wide open as they clash against a background typical of the Rift Valley, the lush green hills of an active volcano, Ol Donyo Lengai, the mountain that looms over Lake Manyara, a closed alkaline lake in Tanzania. What is not shown is the fact that the hippos are most likely not in the lake proper, but in the Hippo Pool, a spot on the Simba River just before it passes into the alkaline waters of the lake. Much of the fresh water of the river originates from the small papyrus-fringed Lake Miwaleni a few miles north of Lake Manyara, fed by water coming from a spring via a waterfall.
Since papyrus swamps are confined to those parts of lakes or rivers that are fresh, the plant is an indicator of freshness, which is a vital concern to most birds. Flamingoes, for instance, live on a diet of microscopic algae dredged and filtered from saline and brackish water and are perfectly equipped to survive in the closed lakes of the valley, but only if they have access to fresh water for drinking. Likewise, hippos, which normally prefer fresh water, can live in brackish water provided that they have baths in the muddy pools found at the places where rivers enter saline lakes.
Another good example of this kind of interface is the northern end of Lake Turkana where the Omo River empties into the lake. Here again, papyrus swamps on the river indicate to highflying birds the location of fresh water in an otherwise alkaline basin that would be hostile to them. So the papyrus swamps in the Omo Delta are a great place to see a variety of bird species, a place where salt-lovers and freshwater fauna meet to feed and drink. It is also a place enjoyed by predators who gather there as well, perhaps even lusting after the same space occupied by a birdwatcher who occasionally has to concede a seat to a python, jackal, croc, vulture, or a lion or two.
The Omo River, like the Okavango, originates in another country and feeds a lake across an international border; thus negotiations have been in place to prevent Ethiopia from turning off the freshwater spigot to a precious Kenyan natural reource. Meanwhile, the tribal lifestyle of the Turkana region, as well as the enormous tourist and agricultural potential, are all in the balance. Likewise, throughout the Rift Valley papyrus filter swamps and the freshwater sources of many closed basins are at risk where humans want the fresh water for other purposes. A balanced, sustainable approach to avoid disaster seems the only way to deal with such problems. The need here is for an integrated approach where the valley is treated as a system, not in piecemeal fashion.
In this regard, Kenya’s interest in designating the whole valley as a Heritage Site is a good start, originating from the fact that the valley bisects a large swath of the nation. They already have the lakes of Kenya listed as Heritage Sites, but the goal now is to broaden the effort to bring together the other countries to form a network in order to protect the many important wetlands critical to birds migrating along the corridor. Bird Life International has identified over one hundred important bird areas within the valley. Many are water bodies that include closed basins and the interface of fresh water crucial to the survival of migrating waterbirds.
Because of the wider, larger goals behind the Greater Rift Valley Program, there are multiple objectives, but one thing to keep in mind is the maxim used in development—that the easiest and most sustainable path to progress is to provide local people with the tools, training, and incentive to take ownership and achieve results.
In the process, wild areas can be locally conserved.
It is also possible to protect wetlands by example. If tourism becomes a money-spinner and if tourists flock to centers of bird migrations the way they do, say, to the wildebeest migration, the Rift Valley countries will take notice. Market forces work in tourism as well as they do in other industries, and they go a long way in protecting the wetlands and water bodies that attract birds, all to the favor of papyrus conservation.
The project attracts a wide range of support because of its globally important nature, including Flyways, a project of Music for the Earth that serves as a musical metaphor for the valley. With a range of partners that includes environmental organizations, ornithologists, conservationists, ethno-musicologists, and musicians, it provides music performed by an international ensemble, the Great Rift Valley Orchestra, comprised of musicians from cultures throughout the region and brought together by saxophonist and composer Paul Winter.
The US Forest Service also participates in the Rift Valley program by developing flyway level education activities focused on migratory bird conservation. Introducing environmental activities into schools and youth groups makes conservation a tangible reality for children and inspires future generations of conservationists. The USFS works with Lebanon’s Hunting Higher Council and other stakeholders to explore challenges to the sustainable management of hunting activities in Lebanon, and to examine lessons learned in the US on addressing the threats of unsustainable hunting and poaching. It partners with Nature Conservation of Egypt, the Ethiopian Wildlife and Natural History Society, the Society for the Protection of Nature in Lebanon, the Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature in Jordan, the Palestine Wildlife Society, and Bird Life International in supporting the participation of biologists from across the Rift Valley in training programs in California that focus on bird monitoring.
The ongoing effort to make the Greater Rift Valley a World Heritage site is a way to conserve wetlands in this part of the world on a long-term basis. Many objectives of this effort would benefit papyrus swamps. One of the wider, larger goals driving the program is to globally protect swamps using models that work, such as the rehabilitated swamps in the Jordan Valley, which have demonstrated their value as tourist magnets, thus providing a boon to the nation’s economy and the people’s financial well-being, too. The hundreds of species of migrating birds frequenting the Rift Valley corridor from Europe, Asia, and the Mideast, in numbers greater than five billion, may well entice people from the countries within the valley to work in a cooperative way to promote this trans-boundary region as a place of extraordinary cultural and biological diversity.