Introduction

The idea of a bird atlas is to show distributions in some detail. The literature on the birds of Kenya is extensive, so the task of abstracting records was considerable. The primary sources of reference were Jackson, Mackworth-Praed & Grant, Hall & Moreau, Snow, Britton and Brown. Ringing in Kenya has been concentrated at several places, including Nairobi 75B, Magadi 75C, Nyanza and the coast. Kenya has one of the richest avifaunas in Africa. Kenya is predominantly a dry country, only about a quarter of the land being capable of supporting rain-fed agriculture. One of the more puzzling patterns of bird distribution in Kenya, seen in a number of species, consists of two more or less separate populations, one at the coast and the other in the highlands. The chapter considers five environmental factors in relation to the distributions of birds in Kenya: altitude, rainfall, moisture, forests and woodlands, and, for aquatic species, types of water bodies.