My boyhood life was bisected due to geographical relocation by my family. I spent the first seven years in a culture full of herding and hunting engulfed with last two years of schooling. For a typical Kipsigis herd’s boy, that was the stage of ornithology. A boy under ten years would hunt for birds like nobody’s business besides looking after goats, sheep and calves. Such boys had powers to name birds and rename others. Bigger boys had heavier duties of herding cattle at farther places probably with men playing undercover watchdogs at war prone pasture zones at the borders.
During this period, I managed to differentiate between edible and inedible birds of the forest and grasslands. Most edible ones were grain eaters while most inedible were majorly worm and flesh eaters. My grandfather’s land was the best hab for a variety of ground birds.
While at Ololmasani, something was a bit different with naming and the variety of birds. The hunting tools were different too. The most common tool was olchepet, a hunting stick with both ends sharpened. A bird called Segeteet or Chemunjereet in my earlier home is called Segeemba in Ololmasani. Teetee, twitter or nightingale for example, was edible to boys to the east of Mogor river but not in the west, Ololmasani. In my earlier home, we had ground birds like Chepkering, Tiikwiria, Raigotit, Chepyakwaet, Cheepo-wiirit among others. But in Ololmasani, the only common one was Chepyakwaet but replaced by swampy birds like Cheepo-gilgil at Cheserton river. It was in Ololmasani in Transmara that I saw Cheporgoiyoot bird and a ground hornbill called Ketutunyeet that foretold return of rain after the drought and famine of Sipiinsi when I was in class four, in the year of our Lord. Olchore The Anthropologist
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