“Dr. Pasha’s weaver, I presume?”

I’m visiting Kinshasa, in the Western Congolian Forest-Savanna Mosaic (AT0723) Ecoregion, but not much birding to be done in this city. I always have breakfast in the pleasant outdoor area of the Pullman Hotel, ringed by potted papyrus. Each morning, there is a flock of little yellow siskin-like birds dashing in and out, stealing crumbs. They are so fast and so little, that over the last few years I’ve never been able to identify them, especially as this is before my second coffee of the day. This visit I summoned all my ornithological prowess, and finally figured them out – Slender-billed Weavers. A lifer for me! They are specialists of papyrus swamps along the Congo River but have spread out a bit, including to urban gardens. These birds have a storied history.

Sir Henry Morton Stanley is mostly famous for two things: he is the namesake of the Stanley Hotel in Nairobi where the Grahams hung out in the 1970s, and he made an astonishing trek in 1871 through the wildest areas of eastern Africa to rescue the missionary David Livingstone, a meeting forever memorable for his reported greeting “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”

But that was not Stanley’s only search for a lost doctor. In 1886, Stanley and a team of hundreds of men, made the most amazing trip to rescue Dr. Emin Pasha, the Governor of the province of Equatoria, of what is now South Sudan. Extraordinarily, Stanley started at the opposite side of Africa, at the mouth of the Congo River, and traveled up through the heart of Africa, past immense and unending papyrus swamps and jungles, for thousands of km, in a steamer of Belgium’s King Leopold. By the time they reached the eastern Congo, with most of the expedition already dead or having deserted, Stanley and a few men headed due east overland through the nearly impenetrable Ituri Congolese rain forests. With pygmies hunting them along the way, mistaking them for slave traders, Stanley and a few other survivors improbably finally emerged from the jungles and staggered down to the shores of Lake Albert. 

Equatoria was then under Egyptian administration, under England’s control. Under attack from Sudanese Mahdists, Emin Pasha had fled southward. Communication was not easy in Africa at that time, and Pasha had not even heard about this incredible rescue attempt which had been underway for a year. Hearing of Stanley’s arrival in his neighborhood, Pasha sought him out and a few months after Stanley’s arrival at Lake Albert, they finally met up. Their conversation was not recorded but I imagine that after the traditional “Dr. Pasha, I presume?”, Stanley surely would have excitedly recounted seeing interesting small slender-billed weavers as he passed by the vast papyrus swamps near to present-day Kinshasa – the very same species that Pasha had just discovered a few years earlier in 1879!

Isaak Eduard Schnitzer was an incredible man indeed. A German Jew, he became a doctor in 1864 but then headed out for something a little more adventurous. He ended up joining the then very powerful Ottoman Empire. He learned Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, and a host of other languages. His linguistic talents were such, along with more than a little mischievousness, that he would later simply pass himself off as a native-born Turk. He worked his way up the Ottoman ladder, and was eventually named Governor of Equatoria and took on the name of Emin Pasha. He was an amateur naturalist and collected a number of animal and plant species in his travels through Africa. When he collected the first Slender-billed Weaver known to a European, in what is now Magungo, Uganda, he recorded that it was one of five weaver species in the area, so he must have known his birds to be able to assert that. 

Not only had Pasha not heard about Stanley coming to rescue him, it turned out he had absolutely no interest in being rescued! Money had been raised by rich business men in England to finance Stanley’s trip. An earlier English hero, Gordon, had been recently killed by the Mahdi, and it seems that this might have been behind the wave of enthusiasm to rescue his successor, apparently similarly threatened. The English undoubtedly also had annexation/military objectives. After meeting, Pasha and Stanley argued bitterly for months but finally Stanley had to give up, and the rescuer had to leave without his prize. Pasha was happy to stay on in his province. 

Stanley later wrote a book called In the Heart of Darkness, about his adventures in the Congo, which sold 150,000 copies back in Europe (and would later impress a certain Joseph Conrad). Pasha would not be so fortunate. At what must have been a great blow-out party in 1890 in Bagamoyo (Tanzania) on the occasion of another visit with Stanley, Pasha stepped out onto what he thought was a balcony but it turned out to be an open window! He fractured his skull and it was all downhill after that. Two years later, now in the employ of the German East Africa Company, the dedicated anti-slaver was murdered by Arab slavers at the Congolese town of Kinena, about a 100 km east of Stanley Falls.

But what of the real hero of this story? Pasha’s three weaver skins wound their way through various European collections before finally being named as a new species by the German ornithologist Hartlaub in 1887. Hartlaub named them Ploceus pelzelni, after the Austrian ornithologist August von Pelzeln (1825-1891), who never stepped foot in Africa. This form would become the nominate race of East Africa. In 1890 a second race monacha was described, with a slightly shorter bill, the form along the Congo River and in West Africa.

Hartlaub in 1880 named the handsome Chestnut Sparrow Passer eminibey after Emin Pasha, who collected the first specimen. I last saw one at Lake Magadi in Kenya exactly 40 years ago but now I think I need to seek it out again, and pay it proper hommage!