Bird-watching (5 Jan 09)
Bird-watching may sound like the ultimate waste of time to most people. I used to have the same mindset from childhood.. Then I went to study and became mildly interested in birds, nothing serious though. But today that all changed..
I took a guest for a birding safari specifically to get pictures of birds. This man knew exactly how to bring the birds out!
When you just drive around you don't get to see a lot, so he brought a MP3 player and when we stopped he played the call of the pearl-spotted owlet. Birds started to flock out of the trees! They came looking for the owlet to mob it and drive it off, the reason for this would be that a pearl-spotted owlet won't think twice about eating some of the smaller birds and has a soft spot for chicks..
Every time we stopped and he played the call the same thing happened. We determined that dark-capped bulbul's especially did not like the owlet to be around as they were always the first ones flying into the trees around us looking for the source of the call.
It just goes to show how a simple device like a MP3 player can make a very quiet birding expedition turn into something spectacular! In some instances we didn't even manage to identify all the birds that came towards the call because there were simply too many.
We did get to see a tremendous amount though, from the common dark-capped bulbul, blue waxbill, chinspot batis, grey go-away-bird, lilac-breasted roller and cape glossy starling to the more rare violet-eared waxbill, violet-backed starling(female), long-billed crombec, green-winged pytilia and white-bellied sunbird.
And another thing to remember is that although it is a birding safari, birds are not the only thing you are going to see, we also got some exceptional pictures of three young elephant bulls play-fighting in makorwane dam, sometimes even submerging completely with not even the trunk exposed..
All in all it turned out an amazing experience, so good that I think I might be becoming a "twitcher"..
Neill
Ranger
Ivory Tree Game Lodge
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