I’m in Ghana for a month, staying at the Library of Africa and the African Diaspora, and each day my dawn chorus is unfamiliar: the sounds of cocks, chickens, goats, dogs, crickets, motorcycles and human cries intermingle to make up the early morning sounds of Accra. Birdsong too; one particular bird starts its day before dawn and it sounds like it’s asking itself a question then answering itself, impatiently.
Through the gauze of a mosquito screen, I look down on to a small canopy of cassava plants that are vibrantly green, in a garden with maize, chillies, yams and plantain. Butterflies abound. I hear a bird with a falling cadence like a tree pipit, sparrow-like chirrups, and a cluck resembling a blackbird alarm call, but they’re each not quite the birds I know.
It’s the rainy season here, and we’ve had some downpours, but I’m astounded about what’s happening back home in the Cairngorms. My partner sends me photos of her bus ride north. The River Spey has burst its banks, and at places the landscape has become a huge loch. I’m reminded that Badenoch, on the river’s flood plain, is Gaelic for “drowned land”. This time the river reached its highest level since 1988, and homes and businesses are flooded. Near home, the burn is in full peaty-brown spate, and so high it’s splashing against the crossbeams of the small bridge to our house.
Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
In this heat and so far away, I can’t quite imagine it. And as I write, elsewhere in Ghana they’re experiencing terrible flooding too. I think about how climate change affects us all – here, the rainy season in recent times has become much more unpredictable.
I’m slowly starting to name some birds: northern red bishops, village weavers, pied crows and cuckoo‑like birds that I think are blue-headed coucals. Small warblers dart about in the undergrowth. We talk of our summer visitors “wintering” in sub-Saharan Africa, but now that I’m here, wintering is a misnomer – the mean temperature over the course of a year is 25–30C, and while we have four seasons, there are two in this part of Ghana, dry and rainy. Sunrise and sunset are within 20 minutes of 6am and 6pm all year.
Being here is making me think about the perspectives we hold, and how we often can’t quite imagine where we are not. Swallows and swifts soar above me, and I read that the Akan people call the African palm swift Ankadaade, which means “never lands”.
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