I used to assist Anne Koeslag and her team monitoring Black Spar-rowhawk Accipiter melanoleucus nests on the Cape Peninsula as part of the raptor research programme at the FitzPatrick Institute. We would find nests, both new and old, at the start of the breeding season in the Western Cape, which unlike the rest of the country is in winter. Once the birds started mating and building new nests or refurbishing old ones, we would visit regularly to watch the progress. It was both very time consuming and totally addictive as I discovered that every bird has its own personality.
In the middle of the season we would wait to see fluffy white chicks appear on the nest and then our amazing tree climber would go up, place them in a basket and lower them down to us. Ann would ring them and take measurements, then place them back in the basket to be returned to their nest, adorned with shiny, coloured and numbered leg rings.We often wondered why we never noticed the juveniles a few months after they had fledged. For a while we would see them, usually with their noticeable rufous fronts, and then they would disappear. Approximately three years later some of them would return as adults to breed, looking for territories or to take over a territory where one of the pair from the previous year failed to reappear.
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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.
