"Birds of Eastern Africa," by Ber van Perlo, is an staple you'll find alongside any Lonely Planet book. The shelves are sparsely lined with guidebooks for individual East African countries, but Amazon lists Uganda's Popular Birds Handbook, Where to Watch Birds in Uganda, Check-List of Birds in Uganda, and others. Few books of Ugandan history, politics, or literature export beyond the borders of COMESA, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa.
As a Ugandan would say, "Eeehh, the books, they aren't there."
But the bird books are quite an accomplishment. Ugandans take their birds very seriously. The flag's red, black and yellow stripes abruptly break for a crane in the middle.The football team (which is actually soccer, right) goes by the same token. After all, cranes are said to be as peaceful as doves but have a loud and fearful war cry - qualities any county or sports team should espouse.
And the cranes are lovely. And outside Kampala, the birds are lovely. But Kampala, eeehhh, Kampala. This far-from-metropolis, a sprawling city that goes from center to suburb to village without much demarcation, is the first stop for any visitor to Uganda.
Within this stop, any aviary enthusiasts' first encounter with the birds of the Pearl of Africa (Churchill called it that), is the Kalooli, the Marabou Stork.
They sit in sets of threes to sixes top trees in Kampala.
Kalooli.
All those vowels.
It's so rhythmic.
In the American collective psyche, the name of the stork might evoke a baby-carrying bird painted with Disney's pastel palette.
But Kalooli, eeehh, Kalooli eat garbage.
They are five-foot scavengers with ugly, hairless exposed heads, the color of dried up intestinal lining. Their legs are scary automated-like tree trunks, and their beaks make me think of several witchy teachers I had in grade school.
And they eat garbage.
Kampala is filled with garbage, which means it's filled with Kalooli. Mounds of detritus the size and volume of swimming pools the size you might find in an Florida backyard mid-sized swimming pool mounds of detritus fill empty plots in Kampala. And everywhere there's an empty plot, there's a Kalooli.
They also crouch in trees, waiting to dive bomb you. Which means you're a target when all you sought was relief from the equatorial sun under the shade of a tree.
Which means Disney never came to Africa.