Category Archives: Birds & Birding

African Greybeard

I’m coming down to Durban to buy a parrot. Where’s Overport? asks the ole man. Parrots can live for eighty years, so what better to get as a pet when you’re ninety five in the shade yourself?

Then the ole lady phones, all worried – as ever. Can you tell us how to get to West Road in Overport, Koosie? I say I’ll try, I’ll look it up, I’ll phone you back. I need to hatch a plot. I phone back and say, Come to my place for lunch, I’ll leave work early and I’ll take you, it’s not easy to find. She sounds dubious but she’ll try that.

She phones back, amazed. He saw sense. We’re coming for lunch, she says, relieved. A rare visit to the son’s home! She can’t see, he can’t hear, so she was dreading looking for a small parrot in a strange haystack, driving by feel and touch, with a driver very disinclined to listen to anything she has to say, and quick to blame.

When I get home they’re on my stoep and Jess has given them tea and Tommy is busy cooking lunch for everybody – pasta carbonara. My children! Bless them! I had told them, I’d love it if you’d give them a polite hello, but you needn’t stay, just make your excuses and go. They decided to completely exceed all expectations and charm the old bullets, the granma that loves them and the old goat who denies them. Proud of ’em!

Off we go to meet Sumie who has three baby African Grey Parrots in a box. His grandfather breeds them in Utrecht. The old man had asked Sumie to choose his own from the three. He checks them out on the tailgate of my bakkie in West Road Overport, picks one and now I think, Here comes the bargaining.

R2500, says Sumie. No way, says the ole man and shuffles off to the front seat of my bakkie. He comes back slowly on the uneven pavement with the bird magazine in his hand, stabbing his finger at Sumie’s ad: R2300; He gives a pained moaning, Now I have wasted my time coming all the way from Pietermaritzburg. Sumie says to me, ‘I thought I wrote R2500!‘ To the customer he says, Fine, Uncle Pieter, R2300.

And the food for free, says the ole man. That cost me R100, Uncle Pieter, I’ve just fed them, so give me R80, says Sumie. It’s my birthday on Friday (true), counters the ole man, You should give it to me as a gift. How old you’ll be? asks Sumie. Ninety Five says the ole man. So they settle on R50.

Now they debate whose box is better. Sumie has a shoebox – it’s wider. Ole man has a box some electronics came in – it’s deeper. Ole man realises if he takes Sumie’s box he gets both, so he settles on Sumie’s shoebox.

We go back home to eat chef Tom’s delicious pasta lunch, followed by ice cream and coffee, and off they go back to Maritzburg. The ole man changes into second too soon up the steep hill, has to stop and start over. He would have hated it that I heard that.

~o0o~

And I didn’t take a single photo! The parrot pic is off the internet. Damn! Well, here they are with great-grandkids:

Gogo Mary & Great_Grandkids (2)

And I just thought: When last did I post a recent pic of my favourite children? Here they are willingly posing for me:

Pests!

~o0o~

Return of the Wagtails?

For years I would watch a large flock of Cape Wagtails settle down for the night on a low tin roof above the parking area on the roof of my shopping centre, Montclair Mall south of Durban. They would gather in a long line under a roll of security barbed wire. Its just visible, arrowed next to the little grey lift tower far right in picture. True, its a long shot, but I wanted the clouds to show.

Montclair mall roof barbed wire.jpg

The ugly wire gave them a safe place to roost. The most I counted was sixty six of the lil guys.

Then they disappeared. For the last six years or more I saw none of them. Not one. My guess is poison on people’s lawns have put paid to them. Poor buggers do such a good job cleaning up people’s lawns but we humans are impatient! We prefer mass murder to waiting for little feathered tuxedo-clad workmen to neatly pick off the offending insects and grubs one-by-one.

This week one lone waggie made a comeback on the roof! Let’s hope a recovery is starting!

~~oo0oo~~

Cape Wagtail – Mocilla capensis

Lloyd’s Camp, Savuti

We flew east out of Oddballs from the nearby Delta Camp airstrip, leaving the green delta behind; then across the dry Kalahari to Savuti:

We flew on to Savuti

The flight was a bit bumpy in the hot clear air and Aitch started to go green about the gills, but we landed before she resorted to any lumpy laughter. I’m up in front, co-piloting.

At the Savuti strip we were met by pink-cheeked Emma the Pom in an open game drive vehicle. She was the camp chef – and the airstrip fetcher that day.

– fetched from the airstrip by pink-cheeked Pommy chef Emma who drives us right up an ele’s butt . . –

Just three of us in the vehicle. The last time I had been to Savuti was in 1985 when I’d arrived in a crowded old Land Rover full of two Aussies, a Kiwi, a Zim, a Pom and a Yank on a budget overlander. We pitched our tiny tents in the public camping area and the eles bust the water tank.

Sixteen years later, luxury! Emma took us on to camp and fed us overlooking the famed Savuti channel. After Oddball’s semi-roughing it: YUM!! Fresh food, cold beer!

– . . . and then feeds us at camp –

Jenny and Lionel Song hosted us. She was a honey and a gifted artist; he was lion-obsessed. And we had Texans with us, so we did a lot of lion-chasing. ‘Myomi’s pride’ (or Maomi) was the focus. Gotta see lions; Lions gotta have names.

So first thing in the morning we’d hare off to where the lions had last been seen and at last light we’d hare back to camp – Lloyd’s Camp game drives are in Chobe, a national park, so you can’t be out after dark. Once on the way we saw two ratels or honey badgers, ambling along busily, stopping occasionally to skoffel around. At least we did slow down to watch them awhile. A very special sighting for me – my first ratels in the wild.

In Lionel’s defence he was doing his job, the Americans – two guys and a lady – were frequent repeat guests who worked for Southwest Airlines based in Dallas – world’s biggest carrier at the time. They were delighted when he gunned the Cruiser after a lioness as she started sprinting at a giraffe. She and five others brought down the giraffe and that was it, we spent the rest of the day watching lion lunch.

The good thing is a vehicle is a great hide, so I could scan around for birds too. While doing so I saw two ears above the grass some 100m off. A cub watching and waiting. It stayed right there till the pride leader looked up and made a funny high-pitched bark and they – turned out there were three of them – came running straight onto the carcass and started making a nuisance of themselves. When we left they were all fat as ticks, but had hardly made a dent in the huge female giraffe.

Next morning we drove straight back at first light and all that was left was a blood stain on the grass, a chewed head nearby  and scattered bones! Two males had arrived and they were lying there the size of dirigibles. Eight round lions and three bloated cubs. They looked like the animals from Rollin’ Safari:

Roolin Safari
– find them on youtube – hilarious –
Botswana Oddballs Savuti (7)
Savuti Botswana (1)
– Lionel & Jenny Song –

In camp Lionel, teasing, said to a guest who asked about the Lloyd of Lloyd’s Camp: ‘You should meet him! Pity he’s not here. He’s 6ft 4in tall with long black hair tied back in a ponytail”. Yeah, right! Lloyd Wilmot’s a legend in deeds, but not in stature, and no longer in hair.

– Lloyd and his fellow safari guide sister Daphne –

It was 2001 and the Savute / Savuti channel was dry, so the only waterholes were supplied by boreholes. The Savute flows with water from the Linyanti river. It apparently flowed in Livingstone’s time, around 1845, then was dry in 1880 and remained dry for over 70 years. It flooded again in 1957, dried up again in 1982, flowed again in 2008 and the marsh flooded fully in 2010. This was documented by Dereck and Beverley Joubert in their films Stolen River and Journey to the Forgotten River. Mike Myers tells how the whole dynamic of the region changes depending on what’s happening with the water. I heard in Maun how Lloyd Wilmot had found a crocodile up under an overhang in the rocky hills above the marsh around 1982 after the channel ceased to flow.

~~~~oo0oo~~~~

skoffel – rummage; being a badger; badgering?

Some history from Lee Ouzman’s Jacana Enterprises site: The Wilmot family first came to Botswana in the early 1900’s. Grandfather Cronje Wilmot’s son Bobby Wilmot was part of the group that were involved in the early exploration and opening up of the Okavango Delta at a time when it was virtually unknown and unexplored. Bobby’s son Lloyd, once a hunter, now a conservationist, is a veritable mine of information. You name it – he’s done it. Swimming with elephants, tracking lion, leopard or cheetah on foot, building hides to view game at remote waterholes, following the amazing African migrations and more. His famous Lloyd’s Camp in Savuti was a legendary place of wonder and excitement and not surprisingly probably more credited in wildlife documentaries than any other camp in Botswana. It was here that Lloyd developed his special affinity for lions. It is not surprising that one delighted guest wrote of Lloyd Wilmot: “While Lloyd is my shepherd I Wilmot fear…”

– Lloyd and June Wilmot – early days at Savuti –

~~oo0oo~~

Lloyd has since retired and written his memoirs in a rollicking book of mischief, daring, fun and – yep, occasional recklessness! He identifies the South West Airlines people as Doug Reiser, Mike Costello and Linda Fuller. I’m going to search to see if any of them have written something about their hairy adventures with the naughtiest little boy (aged about 70 now) in the bush! ( . . . didn’t find anything, but look what happened 29 years later).

~~oo0oo~~

(Here’s Trish’s 1993 photo album on our trip – I have copied, posted here and discarded the album. Downsizing – Selling our home)

Oddballs Palm Island Luxury Lodge

Getting into Botswana’s Okavango Delta can be awfully expensive.

A cheaper way is to fly in to Oddballs Palm Island Luxury Lodge, get on a mokoro and disappear off into the wild with a guide who – unlike you – knows where he’s going and what he’s doing. In 1993 Aitch and I did just that, spending a night at Oddballs, where you are given a little dome tent to pitch on the hard-baked earth under the palm trees.

You get visitors:

Aitch watches our visitor rearrange the furniture
– near our bedroom

The name is ironic, see (“contrary to what is expected, and typically causing wry amusement because of this” – I made a quick check; don’t want to get ‘ironic’ wrong). While in camp you stock up on the meagre supplies available in their shop, like potatoes and onions; a tent, a braai grid; add it to the 10kg you’re allowed to bring in on the high-wing Cessna 206’s and you’re away! 10kg doesn’t go far when you’re a books, binocs and spotting scope junkie!

The next morning we pushed off in our gentles S-shaped tree trunk mokoro to enjoy six nights out on the water in the care of a wonderful man named Thaba Kamanakao. He rigged up the seats so they were really comfy, the backrests enabling you to fall asleep at times!

Thaba said we could choose where we wanted to camp – anywhere. Soon after lunch we saw a magnificent Jackalberry tree on an island and said ‘there!’ – my guess is he knew that! We set up camp – our tent and two deckchairs and a ready-made campfire spot which he’d likely used many times before. The rest of the day was given to lurking, loafing, listening, lazing. Thaba set his gill nets, gathered firewood, pitched his smaller tent and set his chair at the fire. We were all quiet most of the time, listening and loving as night fell. After we’d eaten we sat talking and listening some more. Then Thaba played his mbira – his ‘thumb harp’ – and sang to us; I’ll never forget his introduction as we switched on our tape recorder: ‘My name is Thaba; Thaba Kamanakao; Kamanakao is surname;‘

– shady jackalberry camp – Thaba and Aitch organise –

We chose not to move camp each day, electing to sleep three nights under a Jackalberry and three nights under an African Mangosteen, both giving welcome shade and birdlife. We had little food, but Thaba provided us with the fish he caught in his gill net each night.

I ate the barbel and he and Aitch the bream. Lucky me, it was delicious! He also loved barbel, but his lifestyle advisor – a sangoma? a shaman? a nutritionist? – had told him he wasn’t allowed it! So a myth robbed a man of a tasty and useful source of protein. The first night we were joined by newly-qualified Pommy doctors Louise and Richard and their guide “BT.”

When we moved camp from the camp Aitch named Jackalberry Camp, to her new chosen Mangosteen or Squirrel Camp, we decided we needed a bath on the way, so Thaba took us to a stunning clear lagoon, carefully checked for big things that could bite and then stood guard on the mokoro while we swam and rinsed – no soap, please! Anyone going to this beautiful inland delta: Pack some small swimming goggles and an underwater camera if you can. The clarity of that water is awesome.

David Doubilet pic

Beautiful underwater pic by David Doubilet – to show the clarity.

OddballsOkavango Camp

Squirrel Camp nights were again spent cooking and sitting around the fire; talking and listening to Thaba playing his mbira and singing;

Days were spent birding the camp, hiking the island and an daily foray in the mokoro. Once we we were ‘moved off’ by an impatient ele, Aitch getting mildly reprimanded for turning round to get a fuzzy picture as we retreated. Another time Thaba – scouting ahead – spooked a herd of buffalo, who thundered in a tight mass towards us. We climbed the nearby termite mound – Thaba had told us to stay next to or on it – and they thundered all around us;

– our ‘buffalo hide’ termite mound –

We would sally out daily on short mokoro trips,

– colourful dragonflies, lilies and reed frogs at eye level –

Back before the sun got too high so we could loaf in our shady camp, where the squirrels and birds kept us entertained for hours. Six lazy, wonderful, awesome days.

One night a herd of eles moved in and we lay listening to their tummy rumbles. We kept dead quiet and just peered at them in the moonlight through the tent flap, as they had a little baby with them and we didn’t want to upset mama.

Botswana Oddballs Savuti (2 small)
– still life with Sausage Tree flowers & leaves – Aitch saw the beauty at her feet –

Then we headed back reluctantly for a last night at Oddballs. Warm showers under the open sky; cold beer & gin’n’tonics on the deck, ice tinkling in the glass; watching spotted-necked otters in the lagoon, lounging in comfy chairs. Topped off that evening by a big hearty hot meal prepared for us and plonked onto a table on the deck. We ate watching the sunset turn the water red.

palm tree showers – warm water
– jackalberry tree pub –

And suddenly it dawned on us that, even though we did have to pitch our own tent again, Oddballs really IS a Luxury Lodge!

Oddballs (5)
– chandeliers of sausage tree flowers hang over the lagoon –

Then we flew east, to the Savuti.

~~~oo0oo~~~

Oddballs is fancier nowadays.

mokoro – dugout canoe; one mokoro, two mekoro, three mekoro, FOUR

sangoma – shaman? traditional healer? medicine man? says he communes with the ancestors; gives advice

mbira – thumb piano or thumb harp musical instrument

~~~oo0oo~~~

postscript 2018: This post was found by Thaba’s son, who informed me in the comments below that Thaba the legend had passed away. Damn!

R.I.P Thaba Kamanakao; You made our trip unforgettable.

~~oo0oo~~

Read an account of another 1993 trip to the Okavango Delta – Delta Camp right next to Oddballs) by Bill Keller, a US journalist for the NY Times based in Joburg.

~~~oo0oo~~~

(Here’s Trish’s 1993 photo album. I have copied, posted it here and discarded the album in my downsizing while selling our home in 2021)

~~o00o~~

Word Wakkerstroom

Wakkerstroom, but that’s actually a sunset.

‘Wakkers’ is a lovely little dorp in the high grasslands above the Drakensberg escarpment. The town has its quota of interesting mense. Early Sunday morning I was waiting to go on our drive when a sleek dark Jaguar sedan eased up the road very slowly. When he drew level with me outside the Inn the tinted window wound down and the driver peered at me intently. He looked of an age so I asked him ala 1965 Springbok Radio Squad Cars “Are you prowling the empty streets at night?” He gave me a long look and said mysteriously “I’m on a mission” and wafted off. Obviously undercover.

Maybe the mystery Celtic house was his abode?

The 16 Commandments

One of those thirteen Celtic Commandments is “Semblance Of Evil Allow Not Near Thee”. Ri-ight!

Wakkers has a large wetland area which is fairly well-preserved. These areas are scarce as they’re usually drained and ploughed, so Wakkers is a special refuge and has become a famous birding spot.

We stayed in the Country Inn, which apparently has been bought by HuntEssentials, who have a big game farm outside town. That might account for all the dead beasts on the walls.

Wakkerstroom Bird Guide David Nkosi – Mike Lello, Nigel Hemming

Wakkerstroom (8)

My highlight this weekend was a mammal, not a nyoni for once! Two otters frolicking in the water at 4pm on Friday and Saturday afternoons. I think they were spotted-necked. They were swimming and diving and baljaaring. Every now and then they would hold their heads high and shake them. Once one kept its head above water for a minute or so while it ate something. Their tails were flattened vertically like an eel’s – the main reason I thought they were spotted-necked as I think clawless’ tails are round – are they? The last time I saw otter was in the Okavango Delta at Oddballs Palm Island Luxury Lodge (which isn’t).

Wetland-Reserve-Melanie-van-Zyl-Wakkerstroom-6
Wetland hide

We didn’t see the special birds, it was windy a lot of the time. Next time . . .

We saw lots of other good birds anyway. Blue korhaan was my best, as they dived under a graspol and ‘disappeared.’
Wakkerstroom (28).jpg

We had two excellent guides. David Nkosi who knew his way around the distrik, and Mike Spain who knew the full text of Monty Python’s King Arthur sketch! We scanned the lake and the forest but no watery tart proffered us no sword . . .

Wakkerstroom Trip_forest

word wakker – wake up; literally, ‘become awake’

dorp – village

mense – people

nyoni – bird

graspol – tuft of grass

baljaaring – frolicking

distrik – district

.

Wait!

Wakkerstroom-Excalibur

Seeing this pic below, Jon Taylor asked: “What were we searching for?”

Wakkers.jpg

I suggested: “our lost youth?”

Taylor sighed: “Need a Hubble telescope to spot that phenomenon receding at the speed of light.” (Me; There’d be lots of red-shift, I guess)

=======ooo000ooo=======

wetland hide pic by M vZyl in Getaway – thanks

Bass Straits and Dire Straits

Early Sunday morning I roust the lil bastids. C’mon, Up! Let’s go. Off to Inanda Dam where they’re going to slay the bass. Tom, Jose & Ryan. 45yrs of trouble on six legs and, according to them, fishermen of note.

We hire two canoes from Msinsi and off they go. “See you in about two hours, Dad!” shouts Tom as they wobble off.

Inanda Dam fishing (12).jpg

I chill and watch the terrific birdlife. Wrynecks, woodpeckers, waxbills, prinias, canaries, sunbirds, geese, a fish eagle, herons, neddicky, bush shrikes, etc.

Six hours later a weary and sunburnt crew return. They had flattened the eats and drinks I packed and it’s lucky I did: No fish were harmed in the filming of this movie (none were even disturbed).

Lugging the boats back to the boathouse (with much help from Dad) they unanimously decide they would not be doing the Dusi anytime soon.

Inanda Dam fishing (16)

Dusi – The Dusi Canoe Marathon, 120km 3-day river race from Maritzburg to Durban passes by this point on the Umgeni river.

 

Mfolosi Aerial Dogfight

It looked like a standoff. At a small pool of water in the dry sandy riverbed of the Black Mfolosi river a male Bateleur and a Tawny Eagle contested the scarce resource. Both stood on the sand at the water’s edge and hunched their shoulders at each other.

I watched a while then scanned all around. Suddenly I heard a cry above me. Two birds circled each other in the air just above our vantage point on a bluff overlooking the river. I looked back at the waterhole. They were gone, this must be them. It was. The eagle was dive-bombing the Bateleur shouting a hoarse kraak kraak. The Bateleur screamed defiantly, dodging the move.

The eagle circled to gain height and folded its wings and took aim again, the agile Bateleur dodging with a sideways roll.

The Bateleur then landed in a tall dead tree while the eagle was climbing again. Soon the Tawny was on his way down again, zooming straight at him and knocking him off his perch. They banked and circled and strained to gain height again, the Bateleur’s wingflaps surprisingly noisy. Once again the Tawny won the climb and launched a dive.

The Bateleur folded his wings and flew away low over the tree tops away from the river.

The Tawny landed back at the pool where it all started, victorious.

High above a white-backed vulture and a Yellow-billed Kite, witnesses to the dogfight, still circled in the thermals.

Wow! Who needs a lion kill?

Oh, Jessica. Yes, dear. I didn’t realise how long we’d been here. We’ll drive now and look for lions, honey.

pics from https://willemkruger.wordpress.com/ and birdguides.com – thank you!

Here’s the spot overlooking the river on a different day:

The Photo Archives

I hardly ever carried a camera back when I was beautiful and had just the one chin. “I’m video’ing it in my head” I would say.

Of course now I’m really grateful other people carried cameras and I could get pics from them. Even in the days when you loaded a roll of film in the dark and wound it on by hand frame-by-frame some people carried cameras. I salute them!

And I admit I would grumble when they said “Stand closer together” “Smile” “Hang on! Just one more!”. Of course some people would think they had put in the roll of film when they hadn’t and all our posing (“poeseer!” remember SanMarie the game ranger’s joke?) was in vain. Yes, I’m thinking of you Taylor. He posed us in various ways on a buffalo carcase and when we eagerly asked for the photies weeks later (they’d had to go off “for development” of course) he had to sheepishly admit he hadn’t had a roll of film in his steam-driven camera. Luckily Trish had been there and took this:

 

Anyway, my memory of that moment was much better than his pic would have been: I remember a bloody carcase with glistening red meat still on the bone and lion prints around the sandy scene. We were posing looking over our shoulder, worried the lions might chase us off their prey at any minute. When later we did get a pic from someone better organised than Taylor – Trish – the truth was far more mundane. The photo spoilt a good story! Here we were, not one of us looking over a shoulder:

Wilderness Walk.jpg
Intrepid non-photographer on the left with impressive camera bag, no fillum

So although I do have some slight regrets I still think I was generally more “in the moment” than many camera-occupied companions over the years – and I saw more birds. Anyway, my memories of what happened are usually far better than boring reality. Usually I play the starring role in them.

Once I met Aitch things changed of course and we had a fulltime photographer in the house. The years from 1986 are well documented. Then the kids arrived and the number of pics went through the roof. Thank goodness for digital! Even now when we drive through a game reserve Jess will say “Mom would have said ‘Stop! Go back!’ and you would have to reverse and she’d take a picture of a flower, remember?”

With cameras as ubiquitous as they now are all this smacks of days gone by. I was prompted to write this post when I read this yesterday: ‘If a millennial goes to a beautiful place but doesn’t get a photo, did they ever really go?’…

To end, some advice for Taylor:

Life like Camera.jpg

Here’s a graph showing camera sales in 1000’s since 1933:

Camera sales.jpg

Unfair Birding

Young David was a casual birder back then. Under the tutelage of his fine wife Goldie he has since come on in leaps and bounds. Knows a warbler or two now. He was also a rugged driller back then. He would drill boreholes for water in Malawi, Mocambique and other beautiful Southern African places, boring holes deep into the earth searching for the nectar of life.

His drilling company’s motto was “On The Hole Our Work Is Boring”.

One fine day in Mocambique he got caught short and had to pull over on the way to a drilling site for an emergency evacuation in a lovely patch of forest. He would have noisily scratched a nest (Dave is not a tiptoe-er) and got rid of his voluminous shorts so as not to cause any stains, and settled himself comfortably for the job at hand, probably with some grunting and sighing.

Suddenly, this beauty hopped into view in a patch of sunlight in the gloomy forest interior and gazed in fascination at the amazing and unusual sight squatting in the clearing. Maybe it thought the moon had risen with a weavers nest hanging below it? We’ll never know…

African Pitta

It was a bloody Pitta! Many serious birders search for these things for decades, spending time and money and only getting heartache. Hill saw one while having a ‘veldie’.

Talk about unfair. This is birding a la (com)mode. Mind you, I often say “Don’t chase them. Sit and they’ll come to you.” But this . . !

~o0o~

Mkhuze in Winter

Jess and I spent two nights at Mkhuze. It’s looking very dry and animals were few and far between. Still, we saw lots of the usual dependables: giraffe, zebra, impala, hippo, nyala, wildebeest and – at last! – one elephant. A young bull right next to the road. Jess, who watches too much youtube of eles goring and flipping cars, and had a scare in Tembe Elephant Park ‘thanks’ to bad behaviour by a senior ranger, did not want to hang around, so we drove past him.

Also one band of Banded and two individual Slender Mongooses.

But lots of birds. I won’t give the boring – to me exciting – list (78 species) but I will tell this story. In Mantuma camp – here:

Mkhuze July2017 (3)

I went looking for pinkspots (pink-throated twinspots). Like this:

Pink-throated_Twinspot_Mkhuze
– oops! dont know where I got this image to credit – I see it’s all over the web now – whoever took it: beautiful and thank you –

I followed their high-pitched trilling cricket-like sound and found them and more! There they were, in a bird party in the grass! Blue waxbills, green-winged pytilias, grey-headed sparrows, yellow-throated petronias, yellow-fronted canaries, red-billed firefinches pecked alongside the pinkspots on the sandy soil. And in the tree directly above them a small flock of red-billed wood hoopoes, a dark-backed weaver and a golden-tailed woodpecker. Just that one bird party made the whole trip worthwhile. I stood twenty metres from them and watched through my Zeiss’ for ages. ‘Saturation Views’!

On my way back to the chalet I watched a black cuckoo-shrike give a full, relaxed display all round me. I didn’t know this jet-black bird could be so BLUE! In the sunlight his ‘black’ shone a beautiful cobalt blue. This picture I found on ethiobirds is the only one that captures it well. See the difference!

– thank you ethiobirds and birdseye.photo –

Jess was our chief photographer:

Mkhuze July2017 (27)
– pajama ponies slurping pea soup –

~~oo0oo~~

Two Fowl Swoops

Jonathan sent a video where a leopard stalks and catches a guinea fowl in one fell swoop in the Kruger Park. Well, a leap, really . .

Amazing! But of course, we saw a similar event down in Cape Town about seventeen years ago.

The target was also a guinea fowl, but this time . .

. . the stalker was a Tiger . . .

tiger-guinea.jpg
. . this Tiger. Tiger Swanepoel –

~~~oo0oo~~~

Jess on a Field Guide Course

Set in a beautiful sand forest, Ehlathini bush camp is where Bhejane Nature Training courses take place. Up in Zululand north of Hluhluwe village within sight of the north-west arm of Lake St Lucia, the camp borders iSimangaliso Wetland Park.

Jess to Zululand Training Course (15)

Jess was assigned a wooden cabin in a mango orchard to share with Lydia from London.

Jess to Zululand Training Course (13)
Jess to Zululand Training Course (39)

Better than a tent, eh Jess? “Just, Dad!” Lydia from London had arrived before her, so got the better bed! She wasn’t around when I dropped Jess off.

With much trepidation and bravery Jess waved me goodbye and started her first extended spell away from home!

Visit Jess Bhejane (1).jpg

Update: She’s now in Ebandla Trails Camp in Amakhosi Reserve up near Nongoma. She’s out of comms but today they were up on a hill and she borrowed her friend Blessing’s phone and let me now she’s well: Hey Dad, I met Lydia she’s great. She’s a bit older than me and kind. We walked right near an ele herd, and a lioness with a cub, and we’re staying here till Sunday 28th May, and will you visit when we get back to Ehlathini that day? – “Sure thing my love!”

At night they took turns standing guard while their colleagues slept.

Jess & Lydia being brave:

Lions roared in the dark nearby. This scared them, but not as much as a harmless rain spider they found in their wooden hut back at base camp.

Jessie’s Team: She was one of the two teenagers. The rest ranged from low twenties to mid-thirties – and one aged 67.

The course proved very challenging, the lectures long (“and boring, Dad”) and Jess decided not to wait for the exams.

The books and notes were more extensive than I’d have predicted when I booked her on the course:

Ehlathini – ‘in the forest’

Ebandla – ‘where men assemble’

Amakhosi – ‘of the chiefs’

Bhejane – ‘black rhino’

Hluhluwe – ‘thorny monkey rope (creeper)’

iSimangaliso – ‘miracle; wonder; surprise’

~~oo0oo~~

Three Raptors

Three raptors soared over my valley yesterday:

Fish Eagle

Fish Eagle flying

Crowned Eagle

Crowned Eagle flying

African Goshawk

African Goshawk flying

My pic of the Crowned Eagle: (see why I used photos from the great sites I’ve listed below!?)

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(find lovely bird pics at theflacks.co.za; africageographic.com; wilkinsonsworld.com – thank you!)

 

Armchair Birding

Quietly sipping tea on my patio today I spot a Grey-headed Bush Shrike – a first for the garden. I’ve been hearing him, but today’s the first glimpse in the garden.

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– thanks Con Foley –

Also a boubou, puffback, golden-tailed woodpecker, hadeda, yellowbilled kite, white eye, olive sunbird, yellow-breasted apalis, spectacled weaver, yellow-fronted canary & fledgling; black flycatcher & fledgling; purple-crested touraco, hlekabafazi (the woodhoopoe); toppie bulbul, tawny-flanked prinia, white-eared barbet, yellow-rumped tinker, red-eyed dove, red-winged starling and a fork-tailed drongo.

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Earlier I’d received a call from a Westville estate agent. Wanna sell? You’ve been in that house eleven years. Nah thanks, I’m going to die here, I told her.

Thanks Con Foley for the pic. See his amazing galleries.