Photos

This is a Bee-eater I catched over a large river called Kimbi in a place called Kimbi Fauna reserve, nort-west of Cameroon.

Getting there absolutely requires a four-wheel-drive car even if the place is quite well-known being part of the Ring-road, north-west of Cameroon. The north part of that road is really hard and you don't meet much people : some Bororos people walking along with catles, few locals walking to the market and that's it.

Thanks to cuckooroller from TN, I identified it as a White-throated Bee-eater (Merops albicollis).

Climate in that area is very different from Douala : cool, slighlty windy due to the altitude (between 600m and 2200m high) and much drier than the littoral.

About 20km west of that area, a small path is leading to Nyos lake. It is sadly famous for having caused death of more than 1,600 people around in 1986. The crater lake, perched inside a dormant volcano, had become laden with CO2 gas. This gas had suddenly bubbled out of the lake and asphyxiated nearly every living being in the surrounding valley community.

An international team of scientist did set up a pipe system about 5 years ago to degas the lake and avoid a new disaster.

In a nearby village called Buabua where we spent the night, people from the village told us that most of them lost some parents at that time.