Trogon travails

The trials of nesting Narinas

- PIERRE HENSBURG

Strikingly beautiful, the secretive Narina Trogon Apaloderma Narina is notoriously difficult to find. These brightly coloured birds can be surprisingly tricky to locate in the already challenging forest habitat they frequent and their presence is often best revealed by their monotonous call. Even more difficult than seeing a trogon is locating the species' nest cavity, and data about its nesting habits are relatively limited.

The following notes were made after observing a single natural nest site in the hollow trunk of a dead avocado tree on the edge of a stand of riparian forest, south-west of East London in the Eastern Cape. They record the breeding attempts of presumably the same pair of birds for three consecutive summers, from the spring of 2019 to late February 2022.

The vertical nest cavity, some 1.5 metres above the ground, was 600 millimetres deep with an internal diameter of 200 millimetres and an entrance of 100 x 200 millimetres. All the data contained in the accompanying table were from this nest site. As no individual identification verification was possible, I have assumed that the breeding birds were the same individuals returning to the nest cavity on each of the recorded breeding attempts.

The rapid turnaround time of three weeks between the pair successfully fledging two chicks in November 2019 and laying a clutch of two eggs in December could be explained by the possible predation of the fledglings after they left the nest or by a different pair of breeding birds occupying the nest cavity.