A nine night birding trip in the Sine Saloum delta for the dry season is yours to reserve

Nine nights on brackish water

The delta sits about one hundred and eighty kilometers south of Dakar, where two rivers spread into a flat maze of tidal creeks. Local usage calls those creeks bolongs. There are hundreds of them, and at low water many are too shallow for a loaded pirogue.

The delta is an inverse estuary. Very little fresh water comes down the Saloum now, so the sea pushes in and evaporates, and the inner channels end up saltier than the ocean. That one fact explains most of what you see. Mangrove thins as you go inland. Bare salt flats, called tannes, take over, white and hard as a road by April.

The trip is based in two mainland villages and on one island. Movement between them is by pirogue, sometimes for two hours at a stretch. Nothing about the schedule is quick. Most mornings start before six, because the light and the birds are both better then, and because the tide will not wait for anyone.

Shell islands, made by people

Parts of this delta are built out of shells. People here have eaten arch shells and oysters for two thousand years, and they piled the empties in the same places century after century. More than two hundred of these mounds are recorded. Twenty eight of them hold burials.

Some mounds run two hundred meters long and stand several meters above the water. You walk on them and the ground gives slightly and crunches, like coarse gravel that was once alive. Paths, house floors and cemetery walls are all made of the same material.

Two days go to the island villages, which stand on this ground and have no other. There is no stone in the delta. There is no hard rock at all. Everything solid that people stand on, they made themselves, or the tide made from mud. Look down and you can pick out single shells, whole and still hinged, packed edge to edge with fine sand in the gaps between them.

Count the birds, or just watch them

The delta holds one of the larger wintering grounds on this coast. Waders arrive from Europe in September and stay into March. Curlews, whimbrels, godwits and gray plovers work the sand banks at the river mouth, alongside several thousand terns. In the same water you get great white pelicans, goliath herons, ospreys and African fish eagles.

A guide who knows the colonies takes the group out on three mornings. The colony islands are approached slowly and never landed on. Nesting terns lift off the sand if a pirogue comes close, and an exposed egg cooks in this sun in about a minute, so distance is not a courtesy.

You do not need a list to enjoy this. Some people count. Some people sit under the canopy and watch one heron fish for twenty minutes. Both are ordinary here. Nobody on the trip will test you on plumage, and the guide will happily name the same bird four times.

Heat, wind and the tide decide

This is the honest part. The delta is hot, flat and exposed. From December into February a dry wind carries dust off the interior and grays the sky, and there are mornings when the horizon is simply not there. Photographers find that disappointing. By late March the haze clears and the heat climbs past thirty five degrees before midday.

There is very little shade on the water. Pirogues carry a canopy, but the glare comes off the surface as well as out of the sky.

Tides govern everything and the schedule bends to fit them. A departure can move by two hours the night before. On a low spring tide a channel that was open at eight is mud by four, and the crossing goes the long way around. Twice in the nine nights you should expect a day that does not happen as written. Fish is smoked in the villages, and near the racks the smell stays in clothing.

Where $2,875 else goes

This departure sits on the $2,875 rung, and it is not alone there. The office keeps every trip at that figure on one page so the number can be seen doing different work in different parts of the world. It does not rank them and will not tell you which is the better buy, because that is not a judgement a figure supports.

• The whole of the $2,875 rung
• All eight figures side by side
• Every departure in one table