Natuurfoto Van Der Hart

In October I made a trip with some naturephotographers of the VNF-Apeldoorn: Hennie van Heerden, Ton van Wouwe, Jelle de Jong and Ardjan van der Blonk. We flew to Banjul, in The Gambia and stayed the night at Sukuta Camp. It was during the last part of the rainy season and the humidity was very high. On the other hand: Everything was lush and green and a number of birds were in their breeding plumage, like this Red Bishop:

The next day I drove to the harbour in Banjul and we were lucky to get on the ferry quite quick. From Barra, on the other side of the Gambia River, we drove to Jimbana, a tiny place along a mangrovecreek, with some cabins and places to pitch tents. Directly in this lovely area there is a lot to photograph, specially birds. One of the most significant birds at Jimbana is the Pied Kingfisher. Sometimes we saw 4 to 6 birds at the same time.


During high tide we regularly took a dip in the creek to cool off and during low tide the mudflats were scattered with hundreds of crabs (In Dutch they are called "Wenkkrab") . In the picture beneath you can see 2 males acting like gladiators, each one of them is trying to push the other out of its territory:



After spending some days here, taking many birdpictures and some landscapes, we took the ferry southbound again and drove to the south of Gambia, to Marakissa River Camp. The road between Brikama and the camp was very bad and we were glad to have this Mitshubishi Pajero 4 x 4. The area around Marakissa River Camp really is a birdparadise! One of the highlights were the canoetrips we took each morning. This gave us the opportunity to get very close to birds, like various types of Kingfisher, Thicknees, Herons, Waders to name a few...


Greenshank, taken out of a canoe......

Also during the hot hours at the lodge there still were some good chances to picture birds. Next to the restaurant there is a tiny pool and every once in a while a Malachite showed up:


sometimes too close to be able to focus.....

Everybody was very satisfied about the possibillities to make pictures in this little West-African country. One of the extras you get are the warm and friendly people we met everywhere. The last picture is a man with a throwingnet trying to catch fish. I took this picture in backlight: