All Creatures Great and Small

A typical safari might give the Big Five top billing, but on a bird-watching tour of Botswana, Jeffrey Gettleman discovers that the country’s winged species offer a unique—and thrilling—way of seeing the African wilderness.

-  Jeffrey Gettleman

Halfway through our birding safari in Botswana, my wife, our two sons, and I had somehow identified more than 150 winged species-no small feat for a family that had only recently taken up bird-watching as a hobby. We'd spotted giant kingfishers, pied kingfishers, and woodland kingfishers (the boys are big on kingfishers). We'd seen spindly saddle-billed storks and graceful herons, bee-eaters, sunbirds, and a difficult-to-find Pel's fishing owl, with its orange feathers and black, marble-like eyes. But one little sucker remained elusive: the violet-eared waxbill.

This diminutive creature sports an amazing paint job, with red eyes, a pink beak, violet cheeks, an orange body, and a striking indigo tail. In the pictures I saw, the bird looked like a figment of the imagination. But it is also really hard to spot. "Private," even "secretive," is what the guidebooks say. So one afternoon we made that our mission: violet-eared waxbill or bust. We loaded into our open-sided safari truck, cruised out of our camp in the Okavango Delta, passing herds of red lechwe and kudu nibbling on the grass, and headed to an empty airstrip where someone had allegedly seen a violet-eared waxbill once, several years ago. That's how desperate we were.

As we rolled along, I was overcome by the sense of space miles and miles of waist-high grass stretching in every direction, the woody smell of bush sage filling my lungs. There wasn't another truck in sight, or house on the horizon. Though bigger than France, Botswana has only 2.5 million inhabitants. It's vast, empty, and gorgeous.

When we arrived at the deserted airstrip, Diphonso Ditshupelo, one of our guides, cut the engine. He and lan Lombard, a bird specialist who was traveling with our family, raised their binoculars and scanned the thornbushes-a favorite habitat of the violet-eared waxbill.