Kijongo News - Page 2

When visiting Kijongo Bay Beach Resort, one of the things our guests often comment on, is our incredible dawn chorus.

Having well established gardens, with most of our bushes and trees being indigenous, we attract a lot of birds to Kijongo. This dawn chorus can range between subtle to loud, starting just before sunrise, to around a half hour after the sun rises.

Bird song is a thing of beauty from the natural world.

A cacophony of natural singing talent.

With the different seasons bringing different flowers and fruit, the birds in Kijongo's gardens are forever changing. Not only do we have our seasonal visitors, we also have our resident population of birds.

The morning wake up call is special at Kijongo, with a cacophony of bird song, not a lot can beat that morning coffee accompanied by natures alarm clock.

At the moment we will only post birds we are able to get a photograph of. There are, however, quite a few birds that we still need to photograph to bring our list up to date. We are working at getting photos of the mannikins, the puffbacks, different sparrows and a couple of smaller raptors that have been spotted visiting the gardens.
As the beach makes up part of our extended garden, a really big challenge is to photograph the shore birds found in front of Kijongo.

Bee-eaters are a vibrant species of bird that are found in a wide variety of terrains in Africa, Asia, Australia, New Guinea, and Southern Europe.

They are a very colourful bird with slender bodies, long wings and often have long central tail feathers.

The different types of bee-eaters found at Kijongo Bay Resort, are beautiful to observe, as they swoop across the pool, hawk from the bushes or are seen performing their skillful acrobatics as they hunt on the wing.

Whilst visiting Kijongo Bay Resort, why not take a trip to Saadani National Park?

With Kijongo Bay Beach Resort being next to two bodies of water, namely the Indian Ocean and the Msangazi River and mangrove forest, we are in a very favourable position for seeing kingfishers. Not to forget Saadani National Park, which is close by and also being a great area to spot kingfishers.

As a species, kingfishers are very extensive, however with around ½ of all kingfishers not fishing or even eating fish, perhaps the name kingfisher is a misnomer.

Half of the kingfishers are insectivores and live almost entirely on insects and are not dependent on water. This half is found in bush, woodlands and forest areas and are commonly called tree kingfishers.