Day 16, August 9: Seldomseen Lodge

We birded York Lodge at 7 a.m. and saw pied crows, miombo and variable sunbirds, turacos, African green dove and red-eyed dove, palm swift. Others saw white barbet, but I didn't.

We left for the Highlands about 9 a.m. The Highlands really aren't highlands at all; they're where the Zimbabwe plateau descends towards the Mozambique lowlands, in a series of valleys and small mountain ranges.

 It was a long, boring slow drive along the R5. At about 100 km, we stopped at something called the Halfway House, and saw house sparrows, Southern black tits, and weavers. There were also some very old and interesting steam tractors, built some time after 1914, and shipped laboriously via ship to Cape Town, and then on land up to what was then Southern Rhodesia. 

spectacled weaver

southern black tit

Also, eastern miombo sunbird

We lunched about 2 p.m. just north of the town of Mutare. By this time I was thoroughly sick of York Lodge's sandwiches -- they had made about four times too many. However, wandering around the tiny park,  I saw a Southern hyliota, which made up for the sandwiches and the stray dogs roaming the picnic location.

Mutare itself was a busy little town. We were delayed about 30 minutes because FunGuy, our navigator, had to stop and pick up Pepsi and food, something he could have done earlier. Then he directed the driver to take a wrong turn, and so we didn't get into Seldomseen Lodge until 3:30 pm. Our lodging, in a little detached cottage called Twinsprings, had a bit of a climb up to the main lodge, but in compensation we had a lot of privacy. The cottage itself was spartan, cold, with no dried coffee. But I cured the cold by lighting a fire.

An evening bird walk near the lodge, and through Ken (our host's) shrub nursery. We heard Roberts' warbler and the orange ground thrush, a highland specialty.

Also, variable sunbird

flat-tailed drongo