Mount Kenya, the Aberdares and the last of the Kinangop

Castle Forest sits on the southern slopes at around 2,000 m, where montane forest gives way to bamboo. The lodge track is the birding: walk it from first light and Jackson’s Francolin — a Kenyan near-endemic — comes out onto the road, unbothered, in a way it does nowhere else.

The forest interior holds Abyssinian Ground Thrush working the leaf litter, Bar-tailed Trogon calling from the mid-storey, and Rüppell’s Robin-Chat in the tangles. Hunter’s Cisticola is common along the edge, and Mountain Buzzard circles the ridge as the thermals build.

Higher up, the Sirimon and Chogoria tracks reach Afro-alpine moorland where Scarlet-tufted Sunbird feeds on giant lobelia and Moorland Chat follows you along the path.

The Kinangop plateau was once continuous tussock grassland at 2,400 m. Most of it is now potato and pyrethrum, and Sharpe’s Longclaw — endemic to Kenya and dependent on unploughed tussock — has contracted into a handful of remnant parcels. Finding it means knowing which parcels are still intact this season, which changes year to year.

The same fields hold Wing-snapping and Levaillant’s Cisticolas, displaying Long-tailed and Jackson’s Widowbirds, and Red-throated Wryneck on the fence posts.

This is conservation birding as much as listing: the community conservancies that protect the remaining tussock are funded partly by birders visiting them.