Kakamega: Kenya's Last Rainforest
The first thing that hits you in Kakamega is the sound. After months of the wide, wind-scoured silences of Kenya's savannas and deserts, walking into Kakamega Forest is like walking into a wall of noise - a dense, layered, ceaseless chorus of birdsong, insects, and frogs so thick you can almost lean against it. This is not the Kenya of the game drives. This is something else entirely.
Kakamega Forest is the easternmost remnant of the great Guineo-Congolian rainforest that once stretched across the middle of Africa. It is, quite simply, out of place - a fragment of Central African jungle stranded in western Kenya, cut off from its parent forest for thousands of years, and home to species found nowhere else in the country. BirdLife International recognises it as an Important Bird Area, and for good reason.
I came here specifically for the birds, and Kakamega did not disappoint. Over three days I saw great blue turacos - enormous, absurd, prehistoric-looking birds that crash through the canopy in family groups - along with hornbills, barbets, and a dizzying array of sunbirds. My guide, a soft-spoken local birder named Patrick who could identify a species from a single note, told me that over 350 bird species have been recorded here, many of them Central African species at the absolute eastern edge of their range.
But it is not only birds. Kakamega is a place of butterflies and primates and snakes and an almost overwhelming density of green life. Troops of black-and-white colobus and blue monkeys move through the canopy overhead. The forest holds hundreds of butterfly species, and on a warm afternoon the light-filled clearings fill with them. It has the biodiversity intensity of a proper tropical rainforest because that is exactly what it is.
The forest is also a working relationship between people and place. Local communities have harvested medicinal plants, firewood, and the famous Kakamega wild honey here for generations. Kenya Forest Service now co-manages the reserve with community groups, and much of the guiding is done by local people who grew up on the forest edge and know it with an intimacy no outsider could match.
I walked at dawn, at midday, and - most memorably - at night. A night walk in Kakamega is a different forest entirely: the daytime chorus replaced by the calls of tree hyrax, the eyeshine of bushbabies caught in the torch beam, the sudden startle of a pottos moving slowly through the branches. Conservation groups have worked hard to protect what remains, because Kakamega has shrunk dramatically over the last century and every fragment now matters.
If your image of Kenya is lions on golden grass, Kakamega will rearrange it. Come for the birds, stay for the sheer improbable greenness of a rainforest that has no business existing this far east. Walk it slowly. Hire a local guide. And do the night walk, even when the forest at night makes you slightly uneasy. Especially then.
