Arabuko-Sokoke, Mida Creek and the Sabaki river mouth

Arabuko-Sokoke is the single most important birding site in Kenya. Roughly 420 km² of coastal dry forest holding six globally threatened bird species, and one — Clarke’s Weaver — that occurs nowhere else in the world. Its breeding grounds were not located until 2013, in seasonal wetlands in the Dakatcha woodland to the north.

The forest is worked as three distinct habitats. The Brachystegia woodland holds Amani Sunbird and roving Clarke’s Weaver flocks. The Cynometra thicket holds Sokoke Scops Owl — a tiny owl found only here and in Tanzania’s Usambaras — and Sokoke Pipit. The mixed forest holds East Coast Akalat and, in the northern winter, Spotted Ground Thrush.

Add Fischer’s Turaco, Mombasa Woodpecker, Retz’s Helmetshrike and Four-coloured Bushshrike, and it becomes clear why serious world listers plan whole trips around this one forest.

The Sabaki changes shape every season, and the sandbars it throws up hold tern and gull roosts of a size you see nowhere else in the country. Sooty Gull, Lesser Crested, Greater Crested, Saunders’s and White-winged Terns can all be on the same bar.

The grassland behind holds Malindi Pipit — a near-endemic with a range measured in a few hundred kilometres of coast — and Madagascar Pratincole arrives on the dunes on its non-breeding migration. Broad-billed Sandpiper and Basra Reed Warbler are both regular in the northern winter.