Entebbe Botanical Gardens

After a relatively peaceful and comfortable night camping on the front lawn of the hostel, I caught a boda-boda (motorcycle w/driver that is used for getting around town…and Uganda’s most common form of public transportation) to the Entebbe Botanical Garden for a morning of birding. I paid the driver and as I approached the entrance, I read the garden’s sign that said the opening time was 9:00. This seemed bizarre, as I know the gardens are a popular birding site and 9 o’clock seemed very late to begin birding. The gate was open, so I decided to walk in, even though it was only 8am. I immediately saw a guy who told me to just go in and that I could pay the entrance later.

I ended up spending about 4 hours in the park. Birding was great with stuff popping up all around me. The best birding was down on the shores of Lake Victoria where, by the end of the morning, I had tallied a total of 66 species, including 8 “lifers” (species I had never seen or had overlooked and not recorded). Among the 8 lifers were Red-Headed Lovebird, Angola Swallow and Northern Brown-Throated Weaver (two birds I had undoubtedly overlooked in previous outings throughout Africa), Slender-Billed Weaver, Golden-Backed Weaver, Weyns’s Weaver, Black-Crowned Waxbill, and Western Citril. Most, if not all of the other 50+ species were all familiar to me, and while they were not new birds, it was great to see them after a nearly 7 year absence from the continent!