Sunday 16th to Wednesday 19th November 2025. After an overnight stop at Naro Moru in the foothills of Mt Kenya, we continued our journey north to Buffalo Springs National Reserve in Samburu. If the first hour after our arrival was anything to go by we were in for a treat. In fact you don’t have to travel further than the entrance checkpoint to witness Little Swifts busy building their nests under the welcoming arch, mixing mud with saliva to form nests akin to our own House Martins. The birds pass just above your head in screeching groups, moving at breakneck speed through the entrance gate as they perform their courtship dance.
As we made our way through the park to our lodge at Ashnil Samburu Camp for lunch we came upon a wealth of impressive birds and mammals. Too much to take in as the sightings came thick and fast.
One of the main reasons for coming to Buffalo Springs and to the wider Samburu region was to try and find a Somali Bee-eater which can only be found in this part of arid Kenya. More of that in a later post. Suffice to say that after lunch we hunted meticulously for any signs of, what is for a Bee-eater, a rather plain looking thing, but there were no obvious indications of anything approaching the target bird. But it’s always good to have a goal and it certainly gets you looking hard at anything that moves. Our peregrinations discovered many things of splendour, I think it true to say that every bush we stopped besides eventually revealed some bird or other. The proliferation of avian life is hard to describe, birds were literally everywhere you looked. On one side an Isabelline Shrike, atop an acacia a pair of hornbills, shuffling through the grass a Golden-winged Pipit, above a soaring Tawny Eagle. Flocks of starlings, noisy groups of nesting weavers, strutting Kori’s Bustards, gaggles of Vulturine Guineafowl which initially we thought quite ugly but over time came to adore what with their antics and simply radiant electric blue plumage. Paradise.
The Samburu area has a number of mammal species not present in the other more familiar parks. We saw several small groups of Grevy’s Zebra and often came upon a party of Reticulated Giraffes. We encountered the long-necked Gerenuk and watched majestic Beisa Oryx browsing in the golden light of late afternoon. Elephants were well represented and you can read more about that here.
One day we crossed the Ewaso Nyiro River to explore the Samburu National Reserve. Here we drove around large hills where Verreaux’s Eagles hunted Rock Hyrax and lunched by the riverbank watching herons, terns and kingfishers hunting for prey. The landscape here was most imposing, more mountainous that Buffalo Springs, and best of all almost devoid of tourists. We virtually had the place to ourselves.
And then back to camp for a refreshing shower and excellent dinner before a cocktail or two and bed. It’s a hard life!