Mangrove Tours in Kenya

Mangrove forest covers around 61,271 hectares of the Kenyan coast, and most visitors go past it without noticing: it lines the creeks behind the beaches, fringes the islands and fills the deltas. A mangrove tour is a slow, tidal, quiet kind of outing, on a boardwalk or in a boat, and it is the only place on this coast where the ecology, the birds, the fisheries and the local economy are all visible at once.

What a mangrove tour in Kenya involves

Three formats, and the difference is mostly about the tide.

A boardwalk walk goes out over the mud and roots on a raised timber or recycled-plastic walkway, usually with a community guide, and works at any state of the tide. A boat trip, by canoe, small boat or dhow, goes up the creeks and needs water, so it is timed to the tide rather than the clock. A birding walk on the exposed flats at low tide is the third, and is a different activity again.

Most of the organised options in Kenya are run by community groups rather than tour companies, and the money stays local. That is unusual enough to be worth stating.

Kenya's mangroves in numbers

The national picture comes from the Kenya Forest Service, which has managed mangroves as gazetted reserve forests since Proclamation No. 44 of 30 April 1932, reaffirmed by Legal Notice No. 174 of 20 May 1964.

Two things follow from that table. Kenya's mangroves are overwhelmingly northern: nearly two thirds of the resource is in Lamu County alone. And the forests most visitors actually walk into, at Mida and Gazi, sit in the two 14 per cent counties, not in the main body of the resource.

Nine species, and how the forest is arranged

Kenya has all nine mangrove species recorded in the western Indian Ocean. Two of them, Rhizophora mucronata and Ceriops tagal, make up more than 80 per cent of the forest.

The forest is not random. Walking from the water inland, the usual sequence is Sonneratia alba on the seaward margin, then Rhizophora with its stilt roots, then a Ceriops and Bruguiera belt, then Avicennia and Xylocarpus towards the land, with Lumnitzera fringing the landward edge. A guide who can name that sequence is worth listening to, because it is the clearest thing in the forest once it has been pointed out.

Kenyan mangroves rarely exceed 15 metres, though at creek edges with recent sediment they can pass 30. Heritiera littoralis is scarce almost everywhere and forms a pure stand only in the Tana River delta.

Mida Creek, and a claim worth correcting

Mida Creek, behind Watamu, is the mangrove system most visitors meet. It is a tidal inlet with channels, mudflats and mangrove stands, reached from the village of Dabaso, where a community conservation group runs a raised boardwalk through the trees and a seafood kitchen on stilts over the water.

Mida Creek is very widely described online as a Ramsar site. It is not one. Mida Creek lies within the Watamu Marine National Reserve and inside the Malindi-Watamu Arabuko Sokoke Biosphere Reserve, designated by UNESCO in 1979 and now covering 487,278 hectares, and it is an Important Bird Area. The coastal wetland Kenya has actually listed under the Ramsar Convention is the Tana River Delta, added in 2012. The designations Mida does hold are real and substantial; the Ramsar claim is simply wrong and has been copied from page to page.

The creek is also where the connection between mangroves and the rest of the coast becomes obvious. Mangrove poles cut in creeks like this were a principal export of the Swahili coast, carried north by dhow to the treeless Gulf, and coral-and-mangrove construction is what the old towns at Lamu and Gedi are built from.

Gazi Bay, Vanga and the blue carbon projects

Gazi Bay, on the south coast in Kwale County, is one of the best-researched mangrove forests anywhere and holds all nine Kenyan species in a small area. Two things are worth visiting it for.

Mikoko Pamoja, which means "mangroves together", is a community-owned project that sells carbon credits generated by protecting and restoring the Gazi and Makongeni mangroves, and puts the proceeds into schoolbooks, school buildings and clean water in the villages. It was the first community-led blue carbon project of its kind and it won the Equator Prize in 2017. Vanga Blue Forest, further south at Vanga Bay near the Tanzanian border, was set up by the Vanga, Jimbo and Kiwegu communities on the same model.

Alongside it, the Gazi Women Mangrove Boardwalk is run by a women's group in the village, taking visitors out over the forest on a walkway built partly from recycled plastic, with income going to bursaries and village services.

Lamu, the Tana delta and the northern forests

The serious mangrove country is north, and it is the least visited. The Lamu archipelago is threaded with mangrove creeks, and a dhow sail between the islands passes through them as a matter of course rather than as an excursion. The Tana River Delta, Kenya's largest deltaic system and a Ramsar site since 2012, holds extensive mangrove alongside floodplain and grassland.

Access to both is shaped by current travel advice on Lamu County and the coast north of Malindi, which is set out in the island hopping guide and should be checked before anything in the far north is planned.

Birds, crabs and the tide

Mida Creek is an Important Bird Area and a wintering ground for Palearctic migrant waders, and counts running into thousands of birds have been recorded there. The crab plover, a heavy-billed black and white shorebird that breeds in the northern Indian Ocean and winters on the East African coast, is the species birders come for, and Mida is one of the more reliable places to find it. Whimbrel, Eurasian curlew, greater and lesser sand plovers, grey plover, curlew sandpiper, little stint and sanderling are among the regular migrants between roughly September and April.

The tide runs the whole show. Waders feed on the exposed flats as the tide drops and gather at roosts as it rises; on the biggest high tides they leave the creek entirely for beaches and rocky islets outside it. For birding, the falling tide and the period either side of a moderate high are the productive windows, and a very high spring tide is the worst possible time to arrive.

Below the birds, the mud is the point: fiddler crabs signalling on the flats, mudskippers, mangrove crabs in the roots, and the juvenile fish and prawns that use the forest as a nursery and end up in the fishery outside it. The wider coastal birding picture belongs with the birdwatching guide.

How to visit: boardwalks, canoes and dhows

The straightforward options are the Dabaso boardwalk at Mida Creek, the women's boardwalk at Gazi Bay, canoe and boat trips in Mida and Kilifi Creek, and mangrove channels on dhow sails around Lamu and Manda. Nothing here needs special fitness, and a walk takes about an hour.

Three practical points. Time the visit to the tide and ask when booking a boat, because the creeks empty. Go early or late: the middle of the day is hot, still and birdless. And take insect repellent, because mangrove creeks at dusk are exactly what they sound like.

Questions travellers ask about mangrove tours in Kenya