Raptors in RESIDENCE

The crowned eagles of the African rainforest don’t mind life among people. In Durban, South Africa, these raptors can be watched right from the living room.

- Christine Sonvilla

Cowies Hill nestles in the suburbs of Durban, South Africa. Alongside spacious family homes are supermarkets, shops and schools, all bisected by busy roads. If Shane McPherson, a scientist from the University of KwaZuluNatal, wants to check on his charges, this is the unlikely but perfect place.

Shane parks outside a house and walks down the garden path to a sturdy eucalyptus tree. This is an ideal nest-site, not for a ‘birdie’ but for a fully-grown raptor perfectly at ease in the vicinity of people’s homes: the crowned eagle.

Named for the distinct plumage adorning its head, the crowned eagle inhabits the tropical forests of sub-Saharan Africa, and is also found along the east coast from Tanzania to South Africa. It’s a large but shrinking kingdom, where once-pristine forests of mahogany, Macaranga and African yellow-wood have been increasingly replaced by lucrative timber and sugar cane plantations. According to the IUCN – which lists crowned eagles as Near Threatened – between 5,000 and 50,000 adults exist across Africa today. But Shane believes the IUCN underestimates the severity of the situation: with habitat degradation continuing apace, the raptor could be in a far more threatened state than the figures suggest.

In the city

Shane does not look like your typical scientist. Usually clad in a batik shirt, a knife on his belt and never without his climbing gear, the New Zealander is a cross between a hippy and Indiana Jones. He has spent the past eight years studying crowned eagles in South Africa, particularly those that live and breed in the city, and can monitor up to three nests per day – which requires him to scale nesting trees to heights of 40m.