Nature Notes: Minya Wish List

A long weekend in Minya could yield precious sightings of endangered duck species.

By Richard Hoath

Apathy is rife here in Garden City and I have to escape. I cannot vote, but were I able to I would be torn between a pencil, a helicopter, a motorcycle and a palm tree. Being a redblooded male I should probably go for something macho like a helicopter (like the opening scenes of Apocalypse Now) or a motorcycle (like all the shabab in Cairo with a fake baseball cap and rip-off teeshirt). The palm tree is cliché. Being me I would go for the pencil. As a drawing medium it has no equal — simple, expressive and, used deftly, artful.

I also have a holiday. As an Englishman I have no particular reason to celebrate Thanksgiving, though any Native American probably shares that sentiment. But working as I do for an American paymaster I get a day off on the last Thursday in November and for that I am very, very grateful — even thankful, I give thanks. And I am going to travel.

I am heading for Minya. I have not been to Minya for years, but can remember the corniche and how it really is a corniche, perhaps not the “coastal road with wide views” of the strict dictionary definition but the riparian road with wonderful views of the Nile. It is after all the world’s longest river and in Minya I can appreciate it as significantly cleaner than in Cairo.

And I’ll be looking for birds and in Egypt, in winter and on water, that means ducks. One I will be keeping an especial eye out for is the Marbled Duck. It is not one of the most spectacular ducks. For a start the sexes are similar. In most ducks the male, the drake, is much the more resplendent. Witness the Pintail with his chocolate brown head and elegant white neck curl. Or the Teal with his glossy green and rufous head finery and blue-green wing flash that gives the fashionistas their very name for that color teal. Or the Tufted Duck which does have a tuft in the male but is at once stunning and puritanical in stark black and white.

No, the Marbled Duck is subdued. Both sexes are pale gray throughout, darker above and spotted and speckled paler and with a darker eye patch. In flight there is no colorful wing patch, as in the iridescent blue of the Mallard or the teal of the Teal. That patch is bland and beige and pale. The Marbled Duck is, however, for all its blandness, listed by the IUCN as Globally Threatened and thus of very special interest. I want to see it.

History is not really on my side. Richard Meinertzagen claimed that it was often recorded from the Nile Delta, but that was recorded in his book Nicoll’s Birds of Egypt from 1930 and many of his records have been discredited. John Gurney in his wonderfully titled Rambles of a Naturalist in Egypt and Other Countries recorded it as common on Lake Qaroun in the Fayoum and suspected it to be breeding, but it has not been recorded there since 1965. However a paper published in Sandgrouse, the journal of the Ornithological Society of the Middle East in 1981, states that it “was observed every winter between 1976 and 1979” on the Nile in Middle Egypt.

But a long time ago can be good. If I fail to catch up with the Marbled Duck on the water and alive, I know I will catch up with other birds if not alive then as alive as thousands of years can be.

South of Minya is the necropolis of Beni Hassan, a Middle Kingdom site dating back to around 2000 to 1800 BC. And amongst the 30 or so tombs, some of which are open to the public, is a gem, the tomb of Khnumhotep III. A number of birds are portrayed in an acacia tree and portrayed so accurately that a naturalist from the 21st century can identify them not just to species but to sex and time. There is a Hoopoe, hudhud perched on a branch with leaves and fruit as accurately portrayed as the bird.

But it is difficult to get a Hoopoe wrong what with the cinnamon and black and white and that crest. So there is the Redbacked Shrike, an adult male with black mask, gray cap and chestnut upperparts. It could have been painted for a field guide. Above it is a Masked Shrike, a female. I know it is a female because the crown and nape are not clear black as in the male and the orange wash below is subdued. Below the Red-backed Shrike is a Redstart, a relative of the thrushes, and resplendent in rufous below with a gray nape and back and black face and throat. Again, straight from a field guide.

I could go, I will go, further south to Tel al-Amarna on the east bank of the Nile and the site of maverick Pharaoh Akhenaten’s brief and very, very maverick capital. From there comes a stunning representation of a Pied Kingfisher. The Pied Kingfisher is a large (26cm) black and white bird that is distinctive for its fishing technique. It hovers. Other birds hover, notably the New World hummingbirds, but the Pied Kingfisher is far larger. Bigger birds hover, notably the Common Kestrel still common in central Cairo but it does not really hover — it flies into the wind at just the same speed as that wind and suspends itself in the air. The Pied Kingfisher really does hover and it is the biggest bird to do so. And it is beautifully portrayed in a painting from the North Palace of Akhenaten from Tel al-Armarna.

I will also be going to Hermopolis, an ancient city of which little remains, just to the north of Tel al-Amarna and on the west bank of the Nile. At Hermopolis are the remains of a city dedicated to the cult of Thoth, the god of wisdom and of writing and the “Master of Scribes.” Little remains today bar a Roman agora with freestanding pillars, perhaps the best preserved of that era in Egypt today. And, if memory serves me right, there are two vast stone statues of Thoth as a baboon.

The baboon is no longer found in modern Egypt, though quite when it disappeared is uncertain. The species that did occur, Papio hamadryas, is known to this day as the Sacred Baboon precisely because it was worshipped as the god Thoth (just as the Sacred Ibis). Today it is still found in northeast Africa and also in southwestern Saudi Arabia and Yemen. I have never seen the Sacred Baboon despite my travels within its range, but I have seen its relatives. In the highlands of Ethiopia I found the Gelada, a baboon lookalike that grazes the Abyssinian plateau. In East Africa I have interacted with, played with and argued with Yellow Baboons and Olive Baboons. And in South Africa I have encountered Chacma Baboons, their southern counterpart.

Actually in South Africa I was told very specifically not to encounter baboons. In the Cape of Good Hope Nature Reserve, south of Cape Town, there are big signs everywhere telling everyone not to interact, entertain or feed the baboons. I always do as I am told in National Parks ,and on my visit to the reserve I did not interact, entertain or feed the resident baboons. One particularly and spectacularly belligerent male took exception to this lack of interaction and with a fearsome display of macho baboon canines yelled his fury at me. His very vocal vitriol disturbed an antelope quietly grazing nearby which leapt from otherwise deep cover. It was a Bontebok, a South African endemic and one of the rarest herbivores on the planet and way, way up on my South Africa wish list. Thank goodness for baboon pique!