The VERY last birds...and an African wolf

I couldn't let that cricket warbler get away, so I took one final trip back up to the dry and dusty Sahel region in the north of the country, armed with its call downloaded onto my iPod from the excellent website xeno-canto, to track it down.  The bush yielded some nice birds - fulvous babblers and speckle-fronted weavers - but the cricket warblers were still proving elusive.  So I got out my new toy - the downloaded call - and pressed Play.  Within only two seconds, there was a cricket warbler!!  It popped up onto the top of a bush, having been hiding in the shady interior I assume.  A fleeting view but enough for a positive identification.

Some other nice sightings of the weekend included some beautiful African pygmy geese, the rare Arabian bustard and a big party of vultures feeding on a freshly dead roadside donkey - see photo above.

There are not all that many mammals in Senegal, but I saw a number of jackals, and heard the interesting bit of information that recent DNA testing has shown these to be more closely related to the European wolf than to the jackals from southern Africa.  This photo I took there really does show a wolf-like animal.