One hundred and fifty species
Narina trogons, crowned eagles and the woolly-necked storks that treat the dams as their own.
More than 150 bird species have been recorded at Dunkirk. That number takes a moment to land. It is not a list of things that might pass overhead, it is a count of what has actually been seen inside the estate, and it is the clearest measure of what forty-two acres of indigenous forest is worth.
Some of it is spectacular. Narina trogons, which are far easier to hear than to see. Crowned eagles overhead. African fish eagles working the water, and woolly-necked storks that treat the dams as their own.
The dams do the heavy lifting
Water is what turns a wooded estate into a habitat. The two dams hold ducks and other waterbirds year-round, and the kingfishers that work their edges are the birds most residents notice first, because they are impossible to miss.
Nothing here is managed as a bird sanctuary. The birds arrived because the forest was left standing and the water was left alone, which is the whole point. Give a coastal forest twenty years and it fills itself in.
