Early in 2021, my wife Jeanie and I were invited to join a group of friends on the Pondo Trail, a slackpacking adventure from Port Edward on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, across the Mtamvuma River and into the northern part of the Eastern Cape, finishing at a small camp just north of Port St Johns. As unlikely as it seemed in the middle of a Covid wave that we’d be able to travel a year ahead, we still agreed to join the group, hoping that by February 2022 we would all be vaccinated, or immune, or both.
I did ask Jeanie for a moment of pause before we committed, while I quickly assessed the birding potential of five days away, as I always do. Leave taken from work and time away from home must always deliver some good birds. It’s one of the rules of the universe. Fortunately, that coastline represents a largely underbirded area of South Africa and while it’s mostly unknown, I surmised that the subtropical bush of southern KwaZuluNatal and the scarp forests and hilly grassland of the Eastern Cape would be excellent for birding.
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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.
