March 4 2025. Amboseli National Park, Kenya. Amboseli National Park is a flat sometimes featureless plain, dry as dust in most directions (at this time of year) but becoming a soggy grassland and eventually a complex of shallow lakes as you travel west. It is watched over by Mount Kilimanjaro and is very rich in wildlife, vertebrate and invertebrate. We were there to sample it for barely 48 hours and were led around its most interesting corners by a well-qualified and skilled tour guide. When we left, our heads were full of memories: sightings of dryland and wetland birds and startling mammals in sometimes surprising numbers.
This is a birding site, and I’ll come to My Bird of the Day in a moment but I can’t leave the richness and abundance of what we experienced without sharing some of our encounters with mammals.
Mammals: Masai giraffe, Grant’s Zebra, Wildebeest, Grant’s and Thomson’s Gazelles were all around but Elephants stole the day. For 50 years Amboseli Trust for Elephants (ATE) has conducted an extensive research program covering many areas of elephant biology including: social organization, behaviour, demography, ecological dynamics, communication, and human-elephant interactions. ATE’s presence has helped ensure the survival of them as well as the Amboseli ecosystem. And yes, we saw many, 250 elephants in one sweep of the binoculars for example. 
A Hippopotamus draped with a mat of vegetation emerged from the waters behind a Tawny Eagle we had been watching.
It is hard to identify My Bird of the Day but I think this Secretarybird was it. Secretarybird is a raptor, just look at its head and significantly its bill. What a startling creature, named for that corona of plumes, which supposedly resemble a secretary’s writing quills. Secretarybirds stride through the savanna, hunting for prey items, including insects, small vertebrates, and perhaps most satisfyingly, snakes. We watched this one stalking and then stamping on its prey. I gasped in amazement while my companion found it hilarious, I see her point but I can’t let go of my appreciative amazement, it was My Bird of the Day, as it was some six years ago when I got better photos – follow this link to take a look.
