If they had their way, most Kampala residents would shoot all the marabou storks in town. The ungainly birds are a real nuisance, littering the streets and turning once leafy trees into scrub.

On rainy days, you don't want to come across the stinking muck that piles up on the sidewalk below marabou nests. Every day, more streets are reverting to darkness as the birds perch on lampposts, breaking off vital components.

While residents feel that the scavenger birds are a nuisance that the city authorities should end, City Hall says its hands are tied because the birds have "friends in high places."

When they invaded the city in the early 1990s, withering the trees on Kampala's famous seven hills with their acidic waste, marabou storks caused a public uproar, with everybody imploring City Hall to do something about it. A well-meaning City Hall then sought the easy way out.

"We tried a smart way of dealing with them, but it did not please everybody and we came under attack from all directions," says City Engineer Abraham Byandala. 

The smart way involved trapping or laying out poisoned bait, which killed hundreds of them within days. 

Conservationists, supported by a legislature that had turned green, rose up in arms to defend the birds and Kampala City Council beat a hasty retreat. 

With such endorsement and an ever-ready supply of food, the marabou population grew, extending all the way to Entebbe, 32 km from Kampala, where they became a menace to civil aviation, getting sucked into aircraft engines at the international airport.

"Even with the danger they posed to aviation, nobody wanted the birds destroyed, so there is nothing we can do but to keep cleaning up after them," Mr Byandala says, suggesting that the marabou have gained a permanent tenancy in the city.

From another perspective, environmentalists blame their presence in the city on the poor social habits of an increasingly affluent Kampala. 

Lillian Nsubuga, public relations manager at the Uganda Wildlife Authority, says that, "Kampala is simply a good place to be for a marabou; people should learn to look beyond their more destructive aspects.

"It is difficult to appreciate the value of these birds until one knows how much the city is indirectly saving in refuse collection bills, due to their scavenging role," she says. The city is infested with potentially more dangerous invaders such as civet cats that are not attacking humans because they have marabou to eat, says Ms Nsubuga. "The birds feed on the garbage and they are, in turn, eaten by the civet cats; city residents are saved the menace the cats would have posed if they did not have an alternative source of food," she said. 

Mr Byandala says that the city's sanitation habits lie at the centre of the marabou problem.

"They were not here in the 1970s; they were attracted to the city only recently by a big and careless population that has little regard for refuse disposal," he says, blaming Kampalans' love affair with matooke (banana meal) for the mountains of uncollected garbage.

When it comes to sanitation, Kampalans tend to be their own worst enemies, playing straight into the beaks of the marabou, said Mr Byandala. "They throw litter anywhere. The drainage system is permanently blocked because they stuff refuse down the channels."

He also blames the city's bursting population, living off infrastructure that has not been expanded in decades. From less than 100,000 residents in the 1960s, when City Hall had 40 trucks to collect easily recyclable refuse, the population has grown almost twenty-fold. "With its newfound affluence," he said, "Kampala generates one million kilogrammes of refuse daily. Only 30 per cent is collected, leaving more than enough to feed the scavengers."

Nobody knows the population of the marabou in Kampala, although they have colonised virtually every tree in the capital's central business district. And recently, vultures have joined them, swelling the number of scavenger birds in the city.

The marabou have become so much a part of the city's landscape that, although many residents resent their presence, they have learned to share the dirty metropolis with their feathered neighbours. 

An example is the scene on the grounds of City Hall, where vultures and marabou mingle freely with law enforcement officers. 

Mr Byandala says that if City Hall had the means, it would have used "blind bullets" to scare away the birds, or broken their breeding cycle by disrupting their nesting season. Even then, Byandala is not sure City Hall would not come under fresh attack.

It is Mayor John Ssebana Kizito's unenviable task to cater for a daytime population of nearly two million, half of whom don't reside in the city and therefore contribute little or nothing to the towns' revenue. 

Efforts to collect refuse have recently been stepped up, but officials readily confess to a wide mismatch between the resources required for the task and budgetary allocations. Lack of money is a perennial problem and even when City Hall receives donations of trucks at high profile functions, the fuel to keep them running is in short supply. 

Attempts to decentralise the service have yielded improvements and the more affluent neighbourhoods have hired private garbage collectors. But that still leaves enough free food for the marabou to multiply.

"We don't have a choice, we will just keep cleaning the city in the hope that this will one day force the birds out towards the dumping sites far from the city centre," said Mr Byandala.

 
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