It then shook its head as if dislodging ear wax, and then began to do what Mukisa had earlier told me about shoebills, was bill-clattering. The shoebill stared at me, it’s dark yellow eyes fixed on me with such unwavering focus that I felt embarrassed, as if I had been caught outdoors, naked. “Against law to interfere with natural habitat or wildlife,” he said.
A couple yards away from it, Mukisa, stuck the oar into the mud in the water, bringing the boat to a halt. As he guided us closer to where the bird stood, I thought it would fly away, or at the least walk further back from the bank, but it remained where it was, immovable, fearless, walking only a few feet, only to stand motionless again. He turned off the engine, and picked up an oar. “Stop the boat,” I called out to Mukisa, “I want to have a closer look at the shoebill.” It stared at the boat, at me, with unnerving intensity. On the tip of its bill was a reddish mark, like a birthmark, shaped like a hammer. Its bill looked like a shoe for an extremely large foot. There was a tuft of feathers sticking out of the back, top of its head. It stood there on long spindly legs, about 4 foot tall, its feathers a blend of powder blue and dusky gray. An endangered species, prehistoric in appearance and thought to have roots in the last days of the dinosaurs, it was estimated there were only a few thousand remaining in the wild.
It was the shoebill stork I wanted to see. All kinds of birds warblers, kingfishers, herons, storks, ducks, cuckoos, on and on, then there it was, standing in the reeds near the bank, a shoebill. My otherwise state of poverty be-damned.īirds were everywhere I looked. It was the death of – or more precisely, a small inheritance left for me by – my grandfather on my mother’s side that allowed me to take this trip back to his birthplace of Entebbe, Uganda. I knew there was nothing that could quell my enthusiasm, my excitement, as an observer of this world so far away from the streets, pollution and noise of my neighborhood in inner-city Chicago. I tried to see everything all at once, as if the watery landscape alive with birds, mammals and lizards was a photograph capable of being viewed with a single panoramic glance. I inhaled it until it filled my lungs until they ached. A steady hot and humid gentle breeze blew across the Mabama Bay Wetlands, carrying with it the scents of vegetation, alive and dead, and that indescribable smell of fresh water teeming with aquatic wildlife. Written by: Steve sat in the front of the motorboat manned by Mukisa, who held onto the tiller, guiding it slowly through the narrow alleyways between the islands and peninsulas of dense papyrus grass.
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