A 06h05 wake-up for Alec was a rude arousal for a teenager, but we had to get him off for a test as soon as possible. His eyes widened as he quickly realised that his holiday was about to be cruelly abbreviated. As expected, the test came back positive and suddenly, along with Alec’s, our busy plans changed dramatically. We would be in isolation for the next five days while we sat out the incubation period before we could be tested.
My mind raced (unnecessarily, I guess, as I really had nowhere to go) until it dawned on me that our five days of isolation would dovetail perfectly with a five-day full protocol SABAP2 atlas card.
So I went birding. There couldn’t have been a better place to do it. The Plett pentad (as I call it) is the birdiest in the Western Cape. And that is an official statistic, as it had the highest single SABAP2 atlas card submission count of 174 species for a five-day period. It was something I knew well, after learning of the record-breaking Western Cape card set by Pretoria resident Pieter Verster in 2018, as he blitzed the pentad while on holiday in Plett with his wife Janelle. The locals were shocked at the time, as he bettered the existing Plett pentad record total by an astonishing 35 species. When Pieter bashes a pentad there are usually no half measures – he is the joint national record-holder (with 247 in pentad 2520_3150 near Crocodile Bridge) and the recently crowned Eastern Cape record-holder with an outrageous 201 species in the Kei Mouth pentad (coinciding nicely with the Sooty Gull twitch).
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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.
