After an early morning pick-up from your hotel, you will enjoy a morning exploration of Lamin Bolong Creek by dugout canoe, crossing towards The Gambian River, with the opportunity to spot a wealth of colourful resident and migrant birdlife – blue-breasted kingfishers, giant cormorants and terns. You will also see oyster farmers going about their daily work. After a continental-style buffet breakfast in a charming restaurant built on stilts, we drive to Abuko Nature Reserve with its rich wildlife. This was the first area to be given protection in The Gambia purely to conserve its wildlife and the habitat is one of the rarest in the whole country, extremely rich in biodiversity, with many thousands of species of fungi, plants, trees, insects and invertebrates living in and beneath its tall leafy canopy. However, not all of the reserve is gallery forest and as you travel away from the banks of the stream the forest gradually thins out as the ground becomes much drier, eventually changing into Guinea Savannah. We return to your hotel at approx 11.30am.