10 
Bulletin of the EANHS 28(2) 
Hospitality 
The Hungarians are very friendly people. They treated 
us with a lot of respect. They gave us the best of service 
and always the first preference. They always wanted to 
learn a lot from. Kenya. 1 taught a number of them basic 
Swahili and Kenyan Swahili songs. What I saw was good, 
The people I met were good. If the whole of Hungary 
is like that then 1 will always want to visit it. 
Seeing the rest of Hungary 
There were a lot of interesting features to be happy 
about in Hungary, for example, going to Osca village 
museum, driving in the Osca forest reserve and the 
project activities. On my departure I felt that it was 
very necessary for me to have a chance to see at least 
Budapest. But here was no time and I had to come back 
to Kenya. It is like being air-lifted from Nairobi to Osca 
and Osca to Nairobi. I strongly recommend that future 
fellows be given at least an afternoon in Budapest This 
would make the fellowship more complete. 
Paul Matiku 
Nature Kenya, (The BirdLife partner for Kenya) PO 
Box 44486, Nairobi 
SHORT COMMUNICATIONS 
NEW RECORDS OF SIDE-STRIPED JACKAL 
AND AFRICAN STRIPED CUCKOO AT 
BUYANGU, KAKAMEGA FOREST 
The more I continue going back to work in the Kakamega 
Forest, the more exciting it becomes, especially with 
records of new fauna. I have collected a semi-fossilised 
elephant tooth {Gathua, 1993, in EANHS Bulletin 22: 4), 
and 3 years later, I recorded the first serval cat in 
Kakamega (Gathua, 1996, in EANHS Bulletin 26: 3/4). 
This time round, I stayed at Buyangu, KWS Station for 
15 months, and with the help of Nixon Sagita, I studied 
differential habitat use and feeding by red-tailed guenons 
(Cercopiihecus a scam us). 
A field biologist is bound to record new occurrences 
in an area by the mere fact of being present much of the 
lime. In my 15 month stay, I sighted and photographed 
a side striped jackal Cams adustus On 19th March 98. 
I was following monkeys along the grassland by road to 
Udo’s campsite. To my surprise, 1 saw a carnivore which 
turned out to be a side-striped jackal Fortunately, I 
was taking slides of monkeys during that week, and I 
was able to take a slide of the jackal on the move. It is 
interesting to record a jackal at Kakamega since it is a 
dry land mammal while Kakamega is lowland rainforest. 
It is possible that this animal was in transit because I 
never saw it again. About a week before the sighting, I 
had seen a very unfamiliar greyish and hairy scat in the 
grassland where the jackal was seen, implying that the 
individual might have been there for a few days. 
The second species recorded was the African Striped 
or Levail!ant’s Cuckoo Oxytophus levaillantii . The first 
sighting of an African Striped Cuckoo was in October 
1997 when Nixon Sagita and I were returning to Buyangu 
camp after long hours working on red-tailed guenons. 
The bird drew our attention because it was an uncommon 
sighting there. On closer look, the bird had a prominent 
black crest and black streaks on its white throat. The 
bird was in dense Acacia abyssinica scrub. The second 
sighting was 11 months later, in September 1998. This 
time I observed the bird about 300 metres away from 
the initial sighting, and in guava scrub. In September, I 
saw the bird feeding on caterpillars. This bird stayed in 
that general area for about 3 days. It was interesting to 
find that the bird was solitary. According to Birds of 
Kenya and Northern Tanzania (Zimmerman et al > 1996) 
the African Striped Cuckoo is an rntra-African migrant. 
In Kenya, it is common in the West of Rift Valley 
between May-September, The African Striped Cuckoo 
has not been collected at Kakamega Forest, but it has 
been collected at Bungoma, some distance to the north 
of Kakamega. Elsewhere in Kenya, the cuckoo has been 
collected sporadically all the way to the coast. 
Mwangi Gathua 
Mammalogy Dept., NMK, P.O. Box 40568, Nairobi 
or Department of Anthropology, Columbia University, 
New York, NY 10027 
Reference 
Zimmerman, D.A., D.A. Turner & D.J. Pearson 
(1996). Birds of Kenya and Northern Tanzania. 
Russel Friedman, Halfway House, SA. 
HUNTING FOR AFRAMOMUM, FAMILY 
ZINGIBERACEAE, IN MASAKA DISTRICT 
UGANDA 
During the course of the research for our proposed new 
book, “Wild Food Plants of Uganda”, we had driven to 
Bukukata ferry intending to cross over with our 
University Suzuki to the Ssese Island of Bugala, but 
there was a strike of the ferry workers as they had not 
been paid for four months!! Tony Katendc spotted a 
good clump of Aframomum in a forest patch nearby, 
Jubia Forest We explored and noted two species, 
Aframomum angustifotium over 2 m and clumped, and 
A. mildbraedii much lower and creeping along by 
rhizomes below the soil (figure I), its leaves “pleated” 
in contrast to the tall one, Back and forth to the vehicle 
for the flash as we were in a shady forest. How to take 
a successful photo? Then a pad and paper to do a hasty 
sketch of plants in situ , heat and humidity combining 
to add sweat to the pages. 
But we still wanted to sec flowers and fruit. 
Days later (the ferry workers still on strike) we were 
new resident at Lake Nabugabo, still near the lakeshore, 
