Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary

Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary tickets and tours: which one to book

Djoudj is a wetland in the delta of the Senegal river, in the far north of Senegal on the Mauritanian border, about sixty kilometres, an hour and a half on a partly rough road, north-east of the old colonial city of Saint-Louis, which is itself four to five hours by road from Dakar. It is one of the great bird sanctuaries of the world, and visiting it is simple and much the same for everyone. Visitors come by hired taxi or, more usually, on a half-day excursion organised by the hotels and agencies of Saint-Louis, leaving at six or seven in the morning; the two-day tours from Dakar spend the first day on the road and in Saint-Louis, a World Heritage town on an island in the river, and go to the park at dawn on the second.

At the park entrance, the fee is paid, per person and per vehicle, and the drive continues several kilometres along dykes, past warthogs, jackals and wading birds, to the embarcadère, the landing stage, where wooden pirogues with outboard motors and an awning, holding twenty or so, take visitors on a trip of about an hour and a half to two hours along the Djoudj channel. The boat passes crocodiles, monitor lizards, cormorants, herons, egrets, African fish eagles and kingfishers on the banks, and ends by approaching, slowly and at a fixed distance, the nesting island of the white pelicans, which is the purpose of the whole journey. Guides from the village association accompany the boats. Those with more time and binoculars can hire a guide and vehicle to reach the observation hides at the Grand Lac, Lac du Khar and the Tantale pond for flamingos, ducks and waders. There is a small lodge and a campement at the entrance.

Visiting Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary: what you will see

The Parc national des oiseaux du Djoudj was created in 1971, enlarged in 1975 to about 16,000 hectares, listed as a Ramsar wetland in 1977 and inscribed as a World Heritage Site in 1981; with the Diawling park on the Mauritanian bank it forms a transboundary biosphere reserve. It lies in a bend of the Senegal river, a low basin of lakes, ponds, channels, backwaters, reedbeds, tamarisk thickets and bare flats, which was flooded each year by the rising river and dried out by evaporation. Its significance is one of geography. Djoudj is the first permanent fresh water that birds meet after crossing two thousand kilometres of the Sahara on their southward migration from Europe and western Asia each autumn, and one of only three such sanctuaries in West Africa, so that from October to April some three million birds, of nearly four hundred species, rest, feed and winter here: garganey, pintail and shoveler in hundreds of thousands, ruffs, black-tailed godwits, avocets and other waders, spoonbills, purple herons, night herons, white and black storks, together with a large share of the European population of the aquatic warbler, the rarest songbird of the continent, discovered wintering here in 2007.

The residents are as spectacular. The great white pelican nests on an island in the channel in a colony of between five and fifteen thousand pairs, one of the largest in the world, the adults fishing in synchronised squadrons and the grey-brown young packed into crèches; greater and lesser flamingos feed on the lakes, and African spoonbills, sacred ibis, darters, reed cormorants, whistling ducks, spur-winged geese, crowned cranes, which have been reintroduced, and Arabian bustards are present. Warthogs, golden jackals, patas monkeys, African rock pythons, Nile crocodiles, the manatee, in the river, and reintroduced dorcas gazelles complete the list. The Diama dam, completed downstream in 1986 to keep salt water out of the river, ended the natural cycle, and the water is now managed by sluices; invasive plants, water lettuce, the fern Salvinia and the reed Typha, have repeatedly choked the channels, which put the park on the list of World Heritage in Danger for some years.

Djoudj National Bird Sanctuary: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open to visitors from 1 November to 30 April, and closed in the rainy season, when it floods and the birds disperse. The best months are from December to February or early March, when the migrants are present in the greatest numbers and the pelicans are nesting; by April the water is low, the heat severe and many birds have left. Boats go out in the early morning, when it is cool and the birds are most active;

the harmattan, the dusty wind from the desert, can haze the light from January onwards. Bring binoculars, a hat and a jacket for the boat at dawn. Allow a half-day from Saint-Louis. Saint-Louis, with its Faidherbe bridge and colonial quarter, is an hour and a half away, the Langue de Barbarie park at the river's mouth half an hour south of it, and the Lompoul desert dunes two hours towards Dakar.