18-19 Dec 2019: São João dos Angolares

Gallery, Roça São João dos Angolares

The flight from Principe to São Tomé was uneventful, although it was delayed for about five hours due to bad weather over São Tomé island. I booked into the Sweet Guest House in São Tomé Town and then travelled by motorcycle taxi to Papa Figo restaurant for a few beers and a delicious fish dinner. The following morning, after searching various taxi ranks, I found a collective taxi to take me to the south of the island. The scenery along the coastal road was spectacular. Small fishing villages dotted the coastline while cocoa plantations and secondary forest stretched into the hilly interior. After about an hour’s drive I birded the plantation paths and river estuaries near Roça São João dos Angolares, an old colonial plantation house now converted into a quaint boutique hotel. My target birds were the São Tomé Kingfisher and Giant Weaver, indicated in my guidebook as two common endemics. I soon realised that they might be common elsewhere, but I failed to find the location of “Elsewhere” on my São Tomé map. The small art gallery at the hotel was well-worth a visit and a stunning wooded sculpture of a prone figure with a catapult might indicate the reason for my inability to find the Giant Weaver. Lunch was a delicious fish paella in São João dos Angolares village while being amused by the frolics of a group of children on the beach. After an hour’s wait at the village square the collective taxi filled with customers and I was able to head back to São Tomé. My flight to Libreville in Gabon was delayed so I had enough time to consolidate my sightings at the airport. São Tomé and Principe delivered 26 new species of which 21 birds were endemic to the islands. This meant that within the next ten days I still needed to find 12 new birds on the Clements list. The pressure was building and I was rapidly running out of time and targets.

Roça São João dos Angolares