Nearby, the persistent call of the Gorgeous Bush-Shrike rose above the calls of other birds. Suddenly, the Kingfisher stopped dead, suspended in mid-air, strong filaments encircling its head and wrapping around its wings. The more it struggled, the tighter the filaments became, digging deep into its shoulder.
As it hung suspended, exhausted, barely a breeze stirred the hot morning air. No one would know what the little bird was thinking but as the tall drab olive figure approached quietly, it began to struggle again.
I crouched nearby under a spreading Flamboyant Tree, my legs cramping and beads of sweat hanging on my upper lip. I wondered for a moment how I had ended up in this predicament.
After soaking in the architectural heritage of Ihla de Mocambique and being whisked through the expat eccentricities of Pemba, I had flown to Ibo Island, climbing down from a small Cessna and falling straight into a nest of rabid ornithologists.
I encountered them at the bar in my hotel and was immediately whisked into their lifestyle of late nights and even earlier mornings. Their leader, a tall, broad, handsome Indiana Jones of a man was mercurial, charismatic. His three acolytes were: a dark-haired Afrikaner, a bear in drab olive with a steady smile and the most florid ‘rrrr’s imaginable; a shaggy Englishman with a flushed red face and the demeanor of a severe yet kindly school teacher; and a tall, lean mystery man with dark eyes and a soul patch and a hard-to-place accent. The little gang included a circle of much shorter local men with ebony skin and serious faces and several slouching, global teens.
The four had blown into town a week earlier to ring birds – catching them in the bush at 4am as the sun rose, and on the mud flats at 5pm, as the tide rolled out. Each bird that was caught in their mist nets was banded (ringed), identified, measured and weighed and then carefully examined for clues to its age and moult pattern.
They let me tag along – their birder groupie - and shared with me some of the most beautiful birds I had ever seen; the Emerald cuckoo, Striped Kingfisher, Gorgeous Bush Shrike (with the primary colours of the Mozambique flag), the Scarlet Chested Sun Bird, Melba Finch, Blue Waxbill, Black Throated Wattle Eye, Madagascar Bee-Eater – 26 species in all in 2 short days. I learned how to spot feathers that are damaged in the nest or on 15,000 km migrations from Siberia, saw evidence of glue used by children to trap birds for the pet trade, and understood how moulting can be delayed by the need to migrate. I felt their excitement when they reached into a white cotton bird bag, just brought back from the nets, and extracted a bird deemed hard to catch.
The local men were all rangers with the Querimbas Archipelago National Park – trainees who were patiently given opportunities to ring, identify, and age the birds. The man with the hard-to-place accent turned out to work in Tourism and Hospitality with the Mozambique government and put in yeoman service translating and explaining to the rangers – although he seemed far too hip to be a civil servant.
For most of the week, the five of us were actually the only tourists on Ibo, until the Dutch girls showed up.
Ibo is far off the usual tourist route. It was, until the 1920s, the capital of the northern Mozambican province of Cabo Delgado and is now a bizarre remnant of the former Portuguese Colony. Today, the wide, white sand main street is lined with hulking ruins of high, one-storey buildings, empty windows behind broad, low-slung porches. Some had lost their roof and several walls were in the process of melting back into piles of stone. 
On the second street, narrower, and shaded by mature trees, the long, low porches met in a continuous nave along one side. Some of the dwellings appeared intact, if empty, but many more were facades shielding open interiors with huge trees. Further along, the buildings had melted away into wall fragments – true ruins that looked more like the aftermath of Armageddon.
But there were also reconstructed and renovated homes interspersed amongst the desolation. The three hotels – Cinco Portas, Miri Watiri and the elegant Ibo Island Lodge led the way with crisp white walls, red tile roofs and beautiful carved doors. Despite the lack of electricity and the isolation (accessible only by small charter planes or traditional dhows that cross from the mainland on high tides), there are many who believe that this ghostly, ruined town has the potential to be a magnificent tourist destination. There are others, the local communities among them, who believe that the hulking, empty colonial buildings are inhabited by ghosts.
My favourite part of the visit was walking alone down the middle of the sandy main street, under the bold full moon, stark black on white shadows animating the buildings on either side, the quiet murmur of voices from the porches, either gathering ghosts or a few brave locals huddling in the cool night air behind the railings.
In the end, I spent 4 full days here,
- Wandering aimlessly through the ghostly colonial town and the bustling coral stone, mud and thatch villages around the edges;
- hiking through the mangroves to the ruined lighthouse facing the open Indian Ocean,
- being invited to enter an enclosure to watch 14 women (and one very drunk man) practice traditional dance and song routines to the sounds of 3 drummers using octagonal metal drums;
- hiring a dhow with Anna and Pauline, the two strong confident young medical students from Holland, to snorkel off a white sandbar miles out into the turquoise ocean;
- and always eating whatever the fishermen happened to bring in that day – prawns, octopus, lobster, squid, and huge chunks of some white fish.
- Wandering aimlessly through the ghostly colonial town and the bustling coral stone, mud and thatch villages around the edges;
- hiking through the mangroves to the ruined lighthouse facing the open Indian Ocean,
- being invited to enter an enclosure to watch 14 women (and one very drunk man) practice traditional dance and song routines to the sounds of 3 drummers using octagonal metal drums;
- hiring a dhow with Anna and Pauline, the two strong confident young medical students from Holland, to snorkel off a white sandbar miles out into the turquoise ocean;
- and always eating whatever the fishermen happened to bring in that day – prawns, octopus, lobster, squid, and huge chunks of some white fish.
And of course I got to hang out with my new posse, my "buds", the world class bird ringers. Yup, me and the boys and the birds. I was in awe and very happy to be included.
Oh, and the Pygmy Kingfisher, it was expertly extracted from the net, unharmed, ri
nged and before it was released, placed on its back in the open palm of an elderly local woman who chortled happily as it lay momentarily, playing dead, before it flitted off into the bush.
nged and before it was released, placed on its back in the open palm of an elderly local woman who chortled happily as it lay momentarily, playing dead, before it flitted off into the bush. 
