Places Note
Lekki Conservation Centre: birding a fenced reserve in Lagos
A 78-hectare swamp and savannah reserve on the Lekki Peninsula, the species a visit recorded there, and what the access problem actually is.
Lekki Conservation Centre is a fenced reserve of about 78 hectares on the Lekki Peninsula in Lagos, Nigeria, on the Lekki-Epe Expressway opposite what was then the ChevronTexaco building. It holds mixed swamp and savannah, and the walk through it runs along a boardwalk looping into the wet forest behind the visitor buildings. Entry was free at the time of the visit recorded here, and the gates opened early enough to catch the first movement of the morning.
The awkward part of the site has never been the reserve. It is that anyone not already staying on the peninsula has to cross Lagos to reach it, which takes about an hour and is the part of the trip that needs planning rather than the birding.
What the visit recorded
The list below is what one morning produced, and it is a record, not a current species list for the site — the visit dates from 2005, the boardwalk was already weathered then, and neither the reserve nor the city has stood still since.
The sunbirds were the draw. Carmelite Sunbird and Green-headed Sunbird both showed, along with Collared Sunbird. In the swamp forest itself the notable birds were Swamp Palm Bulbul and Grey Swamp Bulbul, with Little Greenbul and Common Bulbul alongside them, and Piping Hornbill and Buff-spotted Woodpecker in the canopy.
Smaller birds in the scrub and edges included Green Crombec, Grey-backed Camaroptera, Tawny-flanked Prinia, Bronze Mannikin and Blue-spotted Wood Dove, with Red-eyed Dove throughout. White-browed Forest Flycatcher and Forest Flycatcher were in the darker sections, and a White-tailed Rufous Thrush was the sort of bird that makes a boardwalk worth walking slowly.
Overhead there were Little Swift and Mottled Swift, Red-breasted Swallow, Yellow-billed Kite and Little Bee-eater, with Yellow-throated Longclaw on the open ground.
The reserve is not only birds. A Mona Guenon Cercopithecus mona in the swamp forest was the mammal of the morning, seen in poor light under the canopy.
Getting a usable view here
Two things about the site shape what can be seen from it. The boardwalk fixes the route, so the birding is a slow walk with fixed sightlines, not a search — the birds come past the path or they are not seen at all. And the swamp forest is dark, so a bird in the canopy is a silhouette more often than a plumage. Both argue for arriving at opening, not later, which is the one piece of planning that changes the morning.
In the city itself, away from the reserve, Cattle Egret and Western Grey Plantain-eater are the birds most likely to be seen from a hotel window.