In 20 minutes the rangers are scheduled to pick us up, so I have time only for a quick summary of the past week. Basically, we spent two days searching like crazy, first south down the "Albert Nile" (north of Lake Albert toward Murchison Falls) and then north of the Lodge. We found no shoebills, apparently because it's the rainy season and the swamps are more extensive: also, it's breeding season, so half of the shoebill population is incubating or staying close to the nest.
Late the second day, we visited a marsh near the Pakwach Bridge and found a single adult male and spent a day and more studying his hunting behavior. He struck five times in our sample and caught only one small fish. Paltry data so far!
The most interesting thing (to me, at least) is that the water turbidity is totally amazing. A secchi disk is a standardized devisee for quantifying water turbidity/clarity. It's a metal disk, about 25 cm diameter that is sharply contrasted black-and-white. You lower it on a marked string into water and determine the depth (mark on the string) at which the black-and-white object vanishes. In the middle of the Nile, this is about 70-80 cm (the Nile carries lots of particulate soil), but in the marshes where shoebills hunt -- specifically OUR shoebill -- the disk barely got wet before it was invisible...literally 2-3 cm! The implication is that a hunting shoebill may not be able to SEE its target at all, certainly not clearly, when it jams that monstrous bill down on its victim! And the target may be a small fish (the one captured was perhaps 15 cm long) or a baby crocodile or a huge fish (the lungfish that constitute most of the shoebill diet can be 1.3 METERS long)!
Enough for now. I'm happy to report that we've seen one hunt. And heading out now for more.
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