Adapting To The New Normal

In an article in the July/August 2020 issue of African Birdlife, I tried to piece together the impact of the Covid-19 lockdown on birds from anecdotal reports across the country. One of the more effective ways to confirm that behavioural changes were linked to the lockdown was to monitor what happened as it eased. In the case of Muizenberg beach, outside Cape Town, the signal was clear.

- Peter Ryan

I am fortunate to live overlooking the beach at Muizenberg, so for the first three weeks of the lockdown I spent a fair amount of time scanning it for birds for my lockdown list. Then on 20 April I was given a permit to conduct beach litter surveys in the absence of beachgoers. As a result, I was able to see first-hand how birds adapted to the empty beaches through the end of April and in May, and how they reacted when people returned to the beach in June.

Kelp Gulls are the most abundant birds on Muizenberg beach, feeding mainly on clams at low tide. The absence of people saw many more gulls roosting on the beach throughout the day. One unexpected result of this was a massive increase in the number of gull pellets, many of which contained plastic bags and cling wrap from scavenging on the nearby Coastal Park dump site. By closing the beach, we exchanged human litter for gull litter!

With the effective opening of the beach on 1 June, the Kelp Gulls swiftly returned to their old habits. Numbers on the beach decreased and roosting was confined to the more remote areas of the beach towards Strandfontein. A small number of Caspian Terns regularly forage over the surf at Muizenberg, mainly targeting mullet. During lockdown, up to 11 Caspians roosted with the gulls on the beach. And like the gulls, they stopped doing so overnight when people returned to the beach.