Hi, Hi, Eregou

Hi, Hi, Eregou

“Hi!”

He gives a sudden, loud, ascending whistle that rings through the clearing.  He tilts his head to one side, listening.

“Hi!  Hi!  Eregou!”

We have walked for an hour and a half through the thorny bush country that surrounds the Maasai village of Ewangan.  It’s the middle of the afternoon; baking hot, and not getting any cooler.  We have pushed beyond the area where the village goats browse on their hindlegs, far out into the scrub where the only paths are those made by wild animals.  We have found medicinal plants, chewed the refreshing, moist bark of the Senegal acacia and found the tracks of leopards and dik-diks.  Eagles swing overhead and the bush echoes with the calls of cordon-bleus, crombecs and other exotic species.  But there’s one thing I want to see above all others.

Dennis, our guide, has a hunch.  He’s also almost as desperate as I am to find what we came for.  He speaks quietly - so quietly that sometimes I can’t tell whether it’s in English, Maa or Swahili.  He starts to walk uphill towards the foothills above us.  He whistles again; we wait for minutes on end.  One clearing is starting to look much like another, a green-grey blur at the periphery of my vision.  It’s only when we step close to the trees that I notice the thorns as long as fingers.

Last night the hyenas came raiding; the dogs barked frantically all night.  I have not had much sleep. 

“There he is.  Can you hear him?”  I can hear a variety of bird calls – the chuffing of francolins and the crackle of sunbirds.  A glaringly prominent white-headed buffalo-weaver punctuates the khaki tones of the brush like a snowball.  I’m finding it hard to focus on anything else.  Many of the bird calls are still unfamiliar to me, after only two days’ stay with the Maasai.  I can’t pick out the one Dennis is referring to.

I shake my head.  This isn’t going well.  I feel anticipation laced with a growing sense of futility.

Dennis asks to borrow the binoculars.  My Leicas go well with his crimson and purple checked shuka, his bow and spear.  We’re well and truly tooled-up: I have had lessons in Maasai archery and spear-throwing.  I’ve had a demonstration of how the locals dispatch aardvarks emerging from their burrows.  I have been obliged to borrow a hearty thumbstick belonging to James, the village chief.  If a lion were to come charging out of the undergrowth, we would be well prepared.

Since I was a child poring over natural history books I have been fascinated by the Maasai’s relationship with an unassuming grey-brown bird called a honeyguide.  At some distant point in their history, various communities in sub-Saharan Africa noticed that pugnacious critters called honey badgers were often accompanied in their raids on bees’ nests by a pink-billed bird with a distinctive call. 

Working out that the animal was following the calls of the bird to guide it to a shared source of food, the Maasai, Hadza and other tribes decided to cut out the middle mammal, developing a unique understanding with the honeyguide that persists to this day.  The Maasai get the honey, the bird gets the bees’ larvae; even wax, which they are one of the few birds to be able to digest.

In theory - but not this afternoon.  That is as close as we get.  Neither Maasai communication nor German optics conjure the honeyguide into view.  The bird we’re after goes quiet, its fairytale-like attempt to lead us deeper into the woods for mutual gain thwarted by who knows what.  Was the bird there at all?  I have to take Dennis’ word for it.  Everything that this tall, regal young man has said and done so far has inspired respect and trust. 

Cravenly, I add greater honeyguide to my list of birds recorded in Kenya.  It’s okay: Dennis assures me that we heard one.  The fact that I was unable to pick it out is academic, surely?  I have a qualm of guilt and add square brackets and a note: ‘heard by Dennis.’

Still a large part of me wants to return to the Maasai Mara and watch the age-old teamwork of human and bird that I so narrowly missed.  Perhaps remember to ask what ‘hi, hi, eregou’ means.  Perhaps one day I will.