Contrary to what many people might think, starting birding can be rather stressful if you aren’t too sure where to begin. Paging through a field guide, trying to distinguish between the lookalike warblers and cisticolas, larks and pipits, large brown raptors, not to mention seabirds... It can be daunting for even the most determined among us.
Invest in a field guide or download a mobile app
The most important step is to get a bird book that will serve as your introduction. In South Africa we are privileged to have an array of world-class birdidentification books. Coupled with this, in today’s technologically driven age, a fair number of these publications have easy-to-use mobile/tablet versions in the form of apps, which take no more than a few minutes to download onto your device.
Which is better: book or app? It’s your choice – both have equally good content as the developers and authors incorporate all content in the books directly into the apps. One advantage of having an app is that some are also accompanied by sound recordings of most species; some of the latest print publications also now have downloadable calls.
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EXPLORING NEW HORIZONS
Keith Barnes, co-author of the new Field Guide to Birds of Greater Southern Africa, chats about the long-neglected birding regions just north of the Kunene and Zambezi, getting back to watching birds and the vulture that changed his life.
footloose IN FYNBOS
The Walker Bay Diversity Trail is a leisurely hike with a multitude of flowers, feathers and flavours along the way.
Living forwards
How photographing birds helps me face adversity
CAPE crusade
The Cape Bird Club/City of Cape Town Birding Big Year Challenge
water & WINGS
WATER IS LIFE. As wildlife photographer Greg du Toit knows better than most.
winter wanderer
as summer becomes a memory in the south, the skies are a little quieter as the migrants have returned to the warming north. But one bird endemic to the southern African region takes its own little winter journey.
when perfect isn't enough
Egg signatures and forgeries in the cuckoo-drongo arms race
Southern SIGHTINGS
The late summer period naturally started quietening down after the midsummer excitement, but there were still some classy rarities on offer for birders all over the subregion. As always, none of the records included here have been adjudicated by any of the subregion's Rarities Committees.
flood impact on wetland birds
One of the features of a warming planet is increasingly erratic rainfall; years of drought followed by devastating floods. Fortunately, many waterbirds are pre-adapted to cope with such extremes, especially in southern Africa where they have evolved to exploit episodic rainfall events in semi-arid and arid regions. But how do waterbirds respond to floods in areas where rainfall - and access to water - is more predictable? Peter Ryan explores the consequences of recent floods on the birds of the Western Cape's Olifants River valley.
a star is born
It’s every producer’s dream to plan a wildlife television series and pick the right characters before filming.
