There has been so much news in the press, on the television and radio, even from everyday conversations on the street, about the proposed give away of Mabira Forest -the degraded bits! The whys and wherefores   have covered every topic and all to plant that most necessary of crops “Sugarcane”. Having lived in Uganda for over two years and visited Mabira at least ten times I feel able to give an insight into the state of the forest, especially the ‘degraded bits’! To my mind at the moment there are no degraded areas, just some trees are more mature than others.

My last three visits have centered on the Griffin Falls area, where I have stayed at the community campsite, this is the area proposed for give away. As the recently taken photographs show, the forest is not degraded with some extremely large trees surrounded by good secondary growth, although disturbingly some of the trees are being removed on small flat-bed trucks by opportunist speculators.

The Griffin Falls campsite is owned by the Mabira Forest community organization as a means of conserving the forest and at the same time generating revenue to support friendly community projects to alleviate poverty. They have carved a network of trails through the understory where you can see, or at least hear a good spectrum of forest birds. I have been fortunate to see the scarce and easily overlooked Nahan’s Francolin and White-spotted Flufftail and with patience have been rewarded with views of Forest Robin, Brown Illadopsis and Fire-crested Alethe as they congregate near columns of Safari Ants. Flashing through the trees you can see various species of Greenbul including the spectacular Red-tailed Bristlebill, while by scanning the higher sections of the forest one can observe the colourful Western Black-headed Oriole and Narina Trogon, the latter being particularly hard to observe despite its bright green and red plumage as it sits unobtrusively under the canopy for long periods.  During my most recent visit the community allowed me to erect some mist nets and I was fortunate to capture and ring a few birds, one of which Jameson’s Wattle-eye is described in the Birds of the Kampala AreaCarswell 1986 as overlooked as it occurs in the densest undergrowth and that she documents a singlebird seen as long ago as 1972.