THE FEEDING HABITS OF SOME AFROTROPICAL FOREST BULBULS
Summary Johnson, D.N. 1989. The feeding habits of some Afrotropical forest bulbuls. Ostrich suppl. 14:49-56. Ten species of bulbuls coexist in a 20 ha patch of secondary forest near Benin in Nigeria. Most are omnivorous and overlap substantially in diet. However, all feeding niches differ, and several species have behavioural adaptations enabling exploitation of an otherwise unused resource. Separation of feeding niches is largely based on the use of different foraging methods and feeding stations. Differing body size and the use of different vegetation strata contribute little to feeding niche separation.
In January to March 1975 I visited certain Fante food-growing villages near Cape Coast, in southern Ghana, with the intention of investigating the organisation of food-farming, with special reference to the position of women farmers. In the event, as I shall relate, much of my time was spent studying the outward migration which involved nearly all young men and women. In this short article I shall deal with the main sociological factors which account for what I can only assume to be the extreme inefficiency of most food-farmers in these villages in terms of crop yields per cultivator.