Pelicans preen and glide. Jacana birds, precise as ballerinas, point their improbably elongated toes. Pied kingfishers flit in and out of their lakeside nest holes, saddlebilled storks patrol the grassy banks and skimmers speed across the silver-blue water, scooping up beakfuls mid-flight.
Everywhere I look, there are birds in abundance. The safari boat is the perfect platform from which to watch: open-sided, smooth and near-silent.
Southwest Uganda’s Kazinga Channel is south of the Equator, but only just. On the journey here, I passed from one hemisphere to the other, pausing at zero degrees to take photos and hear the cheerful patter of a roadside opportunist with a pair of painted funnels, one on either side of the line. With practised sleight of hand, he poured water into each. Down it swirled, clockwise in the north, anticlockwise in the south. “It’s the Coriolis effect!” he declared.
Now, as I putter along the channel, it’s my mind that’s spinning. Like a theme park stocked with flocks of animatronics, it’s all too perfect to be true. But on this squiggle of fresh water, roughly 22 miles long and 2,500ft wide, there’s no trickery: it’s a naturally magical spot. “Often, we’ll spot 60 or 70 species of bird on a single excursion,” says Yasin Mubiru, my softly spoken skipper for the afternoon, who lives locally and knows the channel’s natural history inside out
Many of the birds are so unfazed by our approach that there’s barely any need to reach
