Looking for Dibatags in Ethiopia’s Somali Region, 2024
Somali Region rest stop
The Horn of Africa is a mammalwatching bucket list destination. Home to top-shelf endemics – including Dibatag, Beira and African Wild Ass – it remains a little known region that can be challenging, in places unsafe, to visit. So when Tomas Carlberg posted his 2017 report on a trip to Ethiopia’s Somali Region that included photos of Dibatag both Charles Foley and I were chomping at the bit to know more. In December 2024 we got there along with Ian Thompson and Alex Meyer on a trip organized – and organized superbly well – by Swedish guide Håkan Pohlstrand who had set up Tomas’s trip.
Håkan scanning for Dibatags
Traveling to Ethiopia: Binoculars, Cameras and more
No Gun … and definitely no binoculars
The most difficult part of the trip was getting binoculars into Ethiopia. You might remember Ian Thompson’s 2021 trip during which his binoculars were confiscated on arrival. When he went to pick them up on departure the airport staff tried to charge him import duty and storage fees! As of December 2024 this ridiculous obsession with binoculars as a ‘weapon of war’ continues. You are allowed to bring binoculars into the country, but only after you have successfully applied for two separate permits. One from the tourism ministry and one from the security services. Håkan and his team reassured us that we would get the permits and – after a lot of back and forth by them – they were issued at the last minute. Mine arrived a few hours before I boarded the plane Addis.
You have to have your bags X-rayed on arrival and sure enough my binoculars were spotted immediately. The X-ray guy was disappointed to see I had permits. He tempered his disappointment by insisting on seeing the originals – which of course I didn’t have – and making me wait for an hour until Brook from Magic Land Tours (who ran the trip with Håkan) came into the airport with the originals.
Gerenuk (Litocranius walleri)
Despite the grave danger the country faces from binocular smugglers, the airport only x-ray your luggage. If my binoculars had been in my jacket pocket no one would have seen them. Trouble is they will find your binoculars when you exit the country and go through a real security check, at which point you will be asked for your permits. The rules change frequently but at the moment you can apply for permits for regular 8x binoculars but apparently have little chance of getting a permit for something with more magnification let alone a spotting scope. The airport no longer seem to care about zoom lenses for cameras.
We were told by Håkan to leave our thermal scopes at home for obvious reasons.
Silver Dik-dik (Madoqua piacentinii)
Permits aside, travel into and around Ethiopia went without a hitch. It took a few minutes for me to get a tourist visa on arrival and our internal flights with Ethiopian Airlines were easy to book and punctual. Not always so easy to board though: getting on and off a domestic flight is good practice for the mosh pit at a Metallica concert.
African Golden Wolf (Canis lupaster)
Before we left for the Somali Region Håkan and I spent a weekend in the Bale Mountains: that report will come very soon.
Travelling to the Somali Region
Speke’s Gundi (Pectinator spekei)
The security situation in Ethiopia is fluid and quite a lot of the country is dangerous to visit at the moment. But right now the Somali Region (once called the Ogaden) seems one of the safest bits of the country to travel through.
We flew to Jijiga – east of Addis – where three Toyota Landcruisers, loaded with supplies and camping gear were waiting for us. The vehicles had left Addis two days earlier on a long – and potentially dangerous – drive. Jijiga sees few tourists. An American doctor ran into us in the airport car park and exclaimed we were the first group of tourists he had seen in 8 years. But if Jijiga is off the beaten track, it is positively well-trodden compared to our destination, the village of Gerdame, about 50 kilometers from the border of Somaliland and a full day’s drive from Jijiga.
The road to Gerdame
Travelling to our destination felt totally safe. But it is not straightforward. Our trip required permits from the local government: permits that were checked often as we drove through settlements. Håkan and his team know the local officials and permits are not a problem. I suspect without his contacts the permits would be very difficult to get.
Organising a Trip
Gerdame campsite
Håkan Pohlstrand organized the trip with his friends from Magic Land Tours. I can’t imagine there is any better way to look for DIbatags. Håkan is a Swede who grew up in Ethiopia and has spent much of his 70+ years exploring every inch of the country. A former big game hunter, he speaks Amharic and has written books on Ethiopian wildlife. I hope I have half his energy and sense of adventure in my 70s.
Magic Land Tours is run by Brook Kassa and Efrem Hagos and are probably best contacted through Håkan. Both Brook and Efrem were fabulous and they and their team couldn’t do enough for us. We were joined by a local Dibatag expert, Hasan Yusuf, who has likely seen more Dibatags than anyone alive after spending many years accompanying researchers in the region. His leadership with local trackers in Gerdame was instrumental in our success.
Guenther’s Dik-dik (Madoqua guentheri)
December and January seem to be the best months to visit the Somali Region. The rains should have finished and the temperatures are cool. Indeed, the trip was much more comfortable than I had expected. We slept in mosquito dome tents under spectacular stars and on top of camp cots. The temperatures at night were cool enough to need a sleeping bag and I slept wonderfully well when I wasn’t stressing that I would never see a Dibatag. Day time temperatures may have gotten up to the low 30s once or twice. The camp food was excellent and we had shower and toilets tents. Far more importantly, Håkan made sure there was enough beer and gin to keep us happy. I didn’t see a single mosquito. Not a tough trip by any stretch of the imagination.
Salt’s (Harar) Dik-dik (Madoqua saltiana hararensis)
We arrived after dark at Gerdame on our first day and spent six nights camping there with a last night camping two hours outside Jijiga (here) in order to make our flight back to Addis the following morning. So we had five full days dedicated to Dibatags.
Gerenuk (Litocranius walleri)
Charles and I originally planned to combine the Somali Region with a few days in Somaliland with Håkan where we should have been able to see Beira and Speke’s Gazelle. That was until I realized that a visit to Somaliland would – in the eyes of the USA immigration services – count as a visit to Somalia. And a visit to Somalia would prevent me from getting an ESTA travel authorisation to visit the USA. Friends who have been to Somalia told me that I would likely be able to get a US tourist visa but that would require a trip to a US embassy and a potential wait for an appointment. So we decided instead to go to Djibouti to look for Beira. This turned out to be a very happy decision. That trip report is also in the pipeline.
Dibatags
Dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei). Photo Charles Foley
Dibatags are a medium-sized antelope found only in Somalia and Ethiopia’s Somali Region. At first glance they look like a Gerenuk – and several times I was fooled – but they have a more slender build, a grayer sheen and a long, horse-like tail which they hold erect when they run. Indeed their name comes from the Somali for ‘dabu’ (tail) and ‘tag’ (erect). Watching one trot through a clearing for a second or two – tail held high and hooves raised jauntily like a dressage pony – is forever etched on my memory.
Håkan explained that Dibatags are very patchily distributed along a fairly narrow 250 km so oval of habitat in Ethiopia. The locals do not – we were told – hunt the animals and we saw no snares or guns. But the population is growing quickly in the region and each day we saw people herding camels and sheep through the Dibatag areas. So competition with domestic livestock and habitat loss would appear to be the biggest threats to the species here. In Somalia it is likely a different story. Håkan said there had been no reports of Dibatag from there for 20 years (though of course few people have been looking).
The Mammalwatching
Guenther’s Dik-dik (Madoqua guentheri)
Finding Dibatags
Dibatag habitat
Håkan was worryingly confident we would see Dibatags. He has a more than 90% success rate on his trips. But the animals are shy and though he was confident we would see one, he was far less confident we would get prolonged looks. Finding one requires wandering through the bush, looking for tracks and hoping for luck. The landscape is flat and there is a lot of vegetation for the animals to hide behind so periodically Håkan and our guides would climb trees, termite mounds or anything else to get a better panorama.
A little elevation goes a long way when scanning for Dibatags
Our days were largely arranged around looking for Dibatags, going out early each morning for several hours, and again for the last two or three hours of light in the afternoon.
We began by searching three areas within 30 minutes of our base camp that historically were reliable for Dibataga, switching focus to just one of these areas for the rest of the trip as it seemed most promising. We went out every second night for short night drives.
Once we had seen a Dibatag we spent time looking for other things: one afternoon staking out a rock pile for Rufous Sengi, and one morning looking for Desert Warthog around waterholes. But Ian and I spent nine of our eleven Gerdame mornings or afternoons looking for Dibatag. We saw animals during three of these and our guide saw one we missed during a fourth session. Once we began focussing on the ‘right’ area for the Dibatags – on our second day – we averaged about a 50% success rate per session. But we only had excellent, unobstructed views during the last session. And even those were too brief for me to get a decent photo.
Dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei) – my best photo. You should see the others.
We split into two groups. In part this meant we could cover different areas but it would also – we thought – cut down on noise and increase our chances. I teamed up with Ian. Charles was with Alex. This is never an easy move for the overall psychological wellbeing of the group and when Ian and I returned to camp – Dibatag-less – after our second searching session to see Charles’s excellent photos of a Dibatag the world became a dark and empty place.
It became darker. Ian and I didn’t see a Dibatag the next day either – although Hassan, 100 meters away from us did, so … well you can imagine. Thankfully the next morning Ian and I saw one. Though the view – see below – was lengthy it was hardly stunning!
Dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei) butt shot
True, splitting up increased the amount of ground we could cover which was useful in the beginning to get a better sense of where the Dibatag were most active. But I am not sure a group of two was much quieter than a group of four. That largely depended on which guides from the village were helping us track. Several people were involved and two would usually accompany us depending on on who was available. Our favorite was Moussa, one of the older local guides and a fabulous tracker. He walked silently, using gestures to communicate. The other local guides …. not so much. Cell phones would start ringing at critical moments and they would yell to each other when they spotted fresh tracks. Hassan did his best to coach them in the finer arts of mammalwatching but it seemed an uphill battle.
Ironically we had our best sightings on our last morning when Ian, Charles, Alex and I went out together for the first time. We saw two or three different animals several times over the course of two and a half hours, including seeing one trot through a clearing.
Gerdame Campsite
Håkan’s routine had us waking up at just before 6am, breakfast at 6.30 and then leaving for Dibatag searching at 7. It took about half an hour’s drive to reach the right areas. Although Håkan felt the animals didn’t start moving around until 7.30am we often found fresh tracks not long after we arrived suggesting the animals had been moving around since dawn and twice we met herders who had seen an animals at first light. So going out an hour earlier would not do any harm, even if it might mean missing the pancakes – the very good pancakes – for breakfast. Again on our last morning we left camp at 6am – an hour earlier than usual (because camp was being taken down) – and had our best morning. Perhaps just a coincidence but we saw our first Dibatag before 7am.
Other Mammalwatching
Desert Warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus)
Although Dibatags were the main event there were plenty of other species to look for and Håkan knew reliable sites for many of them. He knew which rock piles we should stake out for Speke’s Pectinator and Rufous Elephant Shrew, knew which patches of bush held Northern Lesser Galagos, where the Naked Mole-rat colonies were, and where we would run into each of the three did-dik species.
There were bat colonies in the village school and medical centre. I don’t think these are visible from inside the buildings and we did not send much time trying to see the bats emerge from a distant roof. We took three short night drives. Opportunities for driving far at night are limited but we saw a few nice species including Lesser Galagos and an Ammodile gerbil. If we had had our heat scopes we would have seen more.
Ian searching for sengis
The Mammals
Rufous Sengi (Galegeeska rufescens)
Rufous Sengi (Galegeeska rufescens). A handful of these dashing for cover in the daytime and a better look at another animal one night that froze under a bush. But Håkan took us to a rock pile where we had good looks at one or more animals each time we visited. Gerdame is fairly close to the known range of the similar looking Somali Sengi and so we took many photographs to be sure which species we were looking at. These sengis did not have the Somali Sengi’s diagnostic tuft on the end of the tail. Lifer.
Northern (Ethiopian) Lesser Galago (Galago senegalensis dunni)
Northern (Ethiopian) Lesser Galago (Galago senegalensis dunni). We saw several animals around Gerdame at night but restricted to just a couple of forest patches. We saw more around our campsite on the last night. The fur color was variable: some animals were grey whereas the one above was brown. This is a little known subspecies and there are few good photographs of it. Nor do there seem to be any recordings of its vocalizations so if you visit please try to get a recording.
Abyssinian Hare (Lepus habessinicus)
Abyssinian Hare (Lepus habessinicus). A few.
Speke’s Gundi (Pectinator spekei)
Speke’s Gundi (Pectinator spekei). One of our targets, Speke’s Gundis – or Speke’s Pectinators – were reliable at a couple of small rock piles that Håkan directed us to, including the Rufous Sengi site mentioned above. Lifer.
Naked Mole-rat (Heterocephalus (glaber) phillipsi)
Naked Mole-rat (Heterocephalus (glaber) phillipsi). A few days after I got home I heard (thank you David Huckaby!) that Naked Mole-rats may now comprise three species. If that split is accepted by mammaldiversity.org then it looks like the species here is H. phillipsi, which is different to the species I have seen in Kenya’s Meru National Park. Mole-rat colonies were common including near camp. Seeing an animal was more of a challenge.
Step 1: look for dirt flying out of the mound.
Step 2: sneak very quietly up to the hole and peak down.
This worked more or less and I got various views of various bits of mole-rats including – once – the face and teeth.
Naked Mole-rat (Heterocephalus (glaber) phillipsi) digging
Two things surprised me.
First, that digging activity seemed to be synchronized across a colony. When we saw dirt flying out of one mound, we would see dirt flying out of several others nearby.
Second, we only saw activity in the middle of the day, rather than at dawn and dusk as I had expected.
Unstriped Ground Squirrel (Xerus rutilus)
Unstriped Ground Squirrel (Xerus rutilus). A few.
Gerbil species, possible Somalian Gerbil (Gerbillus somalicus)
Gerbil species, possible Somalian Gerbil (Gerbillus somalicus). The village kids caught this for us, apparently in a trap they had made of seed burrs, which so covered the animal it stopped moving. Gerbils are hard to identify at the best of times – even in the hand – and there is much to be discovered about the species in this region. This species – with a head-body measurement of 80mm, a tail of 110mm and a hind foot length of 30mm – might be Somalian Gerbil (thank you Venkat Sankar!). Or it might be something else.
Ammodile (Ammodillus imbellis).
Ammodile (Ammodillus imbellis). This distinctively colorful and large gerbil froze under a bush during one of our night drives. Another little known species and a lifer for us all.
Neumann’s Grass Rat (Arvicanthis neumanni)
Neumann’s Grass Rat (Arvicanthis neumanni). A family of juveniles were active at our campsite on the last night and should be this species on range. Lifer.
Heart-nosed False-vampire (Cardioderma cor). There were many wells around our campsite and several held groups of these distinctive bats roosting close to the top of the well. They were flighty and I didn’t manage to get any photographs.
African Golden Wolf (Canis lupaster)
African Golden Wolf (Canis lupaster). Several.
African Wildcat (Felis lybica)
African Wildcat (Felis lybica). Two, both in the late afternoon, including this very skinny animal that appears to be taking Ozempic to try to turn into a Cheetah…
White-tailed Mongoose (Ichneumia albicauda). One during a night drive.
Common Genet (Genetta genetta)
Common Genet (Genetta genetta). Three during night drives.
Dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei). Photo Charles Foley.
Dibatag (Ammodorcas clarkei). The main event. Ian and I saw animals during three different tracking sessions. More information earlier in this report. Just a wonderful species. Lifer.
Gerenuk (Litocranius walleri)
Gerenuk (Litocranius walleri). Annoyingly common. On at least three occasions while we were stalking Dibatags I saw a Gerenuk and threw my fist in the air in short-lived euphoria.
Guenther’s Dik-dik (Madoqua guentheri)
Guenther’s Dik-dik (Madoqua guentheri). Abundant and often sharing the same areas as the Salt’s and Sliver Dik-diks. We counted over 100 dik-diks (of all 3 species though primarily Salt’s and Guenther’s) over an eight kilometer drive one night!
Silver Dik-dik (Madoqua piacentinii)
Silver Dik-dik (Madoqua piacentinii). A major target of the trip, ranking just behind the Dibatags for me. This is the smallest of the dik-dik species and was only recognized by science as a separate species in the late 1970s. It was thought to be restricted to a small area of coastal Somalia until 2006 when animals were discovered in Ethiopia’s Somali Region. Although they share habitat with the other two did-dik species they seemed more conservative in their requirements. Håkan correctly predicted – to within a few hundred meters – the areas where we would see Silver Dik-diks. I couldn’t see anything different about those areas but I guess the did-diks could. Lifer.
Salt’s (Harar) Dik-dik (Madoqua saltiana hararensis)
Salt’s (Harar) Dik-dik (Madoqua saltiana hararensis). Abundant and often sharing the same areas as the Salt’s and Sliver Dik-diks. We counted over 100 dik-diks (of all 3 species though primarily Salt’s and Guenther’s) over an eight kilometer drive one night! The subspecies here – hararensis – is sometimes treated as a separate species in its own right: Harar Dik-dik.
Desert Warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus)
Desert Warthog (Phacochoerus aethiopicus). Not as common as I had imagined. We saw several sounders but only after staking out a couple of water holes in the early morning. This was my first decent look at this species which I had seen only once before, distantly in Kenya’s Tsavo East.
Twenty species including seven lifers.
Other Stuff
Little Brown Bustard
Fear not, I am not going to write a bird report. But there were birds. This Little Brown Bustard is a species we were told that birders get excited about and we saw a few. Also I enjoy Vulturine Guinea Fowl.
Vulturine Guinea Fowl
Herps were thin on the ground. We saw a couple of enormous Leopard Tortoises and this beaked snake – probably Rufous Beaked Snake – was fun to watch periscoping in the sengi/gundi rock pile.
Rufous Beaked Snake
Thank you
Team Dibatag
Many thanks to Hakan and Brook and his team from Magic Land for organizing this trip with military precision, and to the local guides and trackers especially Hassan ‘Mr Dibatag’ Yusuf. A big thanks to my companions too: a good group is a prerequisite to a great trip.
If anyone is planning to visit after reading this please do let me know. We are sending the village some football jerseys so they can officially form Save Dibatag United football team and we need to find a way to get their new team kit out there.
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