This is going to be a real-time accounting of an adventure/research project I am pursuing with Kenneth Tumusiime in Uganda throughout the whole month of October, 2022. At the time of this first posting on the (brand new!) blog site, I have never met Kenneth in person (only via zoom) and never seen a live shoebill. Before I go any farther, let me introduce the star of the show: Balaeniceps rex, the shoebill (aka shoe-billed stork, whale-headed stork, etc.) along with its less-happy co-star, the African spotted lungfish..
Shoebills are a threatened species of very large (4'-5' tall) wading bird that live in the papyrus marshes of the Nile Rift Valley in East Africa. Thought to be a really aberrant stork (Order Ciconiiformes, Family Ciconiidae), mainly because it's tall and gawky, its DNA has now revealed that it is a really aberrant pelican (O. Pelecaniformes, F. Pelecanidae) instead. (N.B. I'm tall and gawky, too, but I'm not a stork, either.)
Oddly enough, the story of this improbable collaboration with Kenneth dates back to 1976, when I was a Smithsonian post-doctoral fellow helping organize a conference sponsored by the National Audubon Society to focus on wading birds. Early the next year, that conference was held in Charleston, S.C., and one of the featured speakers was Prof. W. Roy Siegfried from the University of Cape Town. One night at dinner, Roy offered me a three-month research trip to southern Africa, giving me the choice of either studying Goliath herons or shoebills. I'd been working on herons, so I took the Goliath heron option as the safer bet. A month later, the University of Oklahoma hired me as a tenure-track assistant professor, but was happy to let me skip the first semester (without pay) and go to Africa. One reason I avoided the shoebill was that I didn't know squat about shoebills at the time. And neither did anybody else.
Fast-forward to last autumn (2021). I'm now well retired from the University and playing music once again. With the COVID-19 pandemic, I had been doing Facebook livestream programs for friends around the world and having a few people I didn't know listening in. Kenneth was one of those listeners and we exchanged notes: when he said he was director of the Save the Shoebill Project, I remarked on the coincidence of having passed up the chance to study shoebills >40 years earlier. He pleasantly said, "Well, you should come to Uganda and study them now!"
That comment was literally the germ of this project. I pondered just how crazy such a venture would be and then just let the notion grow on me. One thing led to another and here we are.
Over the past few months, I have read the "scientific literature" on shoebills (about ten papers), found no real explanations for why it has that remarkable bill, and began to think hard about the possibilities. In the early '70s, I spent two summers in San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico, studying a weird night-heron called the boat-billed heron, which has a similarly widened bill, so there was some old conjectures to tap into. But, basically, Kenneth and I are going to spend four weeks watching shoebills hunt to see if we can propose a coherent backstory for a remarkable physical feature of a famous, but essentially-unstudied bird.
This is 'vacation research' as far as I'm concerned. We'll be staying in a tourist accommodation (Pakuba Safari Lodge, Murchison Falls National Park) and boating out each day to the Nile delta of Lake Albert to observe and film foraging shoebills. We don't know what we'll learn, but it seems extremely likely (given the nonexistent published literature on this problem) that we'll advance the topic and get something publishable. Beyond basic scientific curiosity, we hope that this attention to shoebills will provide useful information in attracting tourist interest to the birds with possible benefits to the local economy. And efforts to keep the dwindling populations going may well benefit from increased knowledge of the birds' habits.
Collaborator Kenneth Tumusiime grew up near Murchison Falls and knows the area (and Ugandan birds!) very well. None of this would be possible without him.
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