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.
Denne historien er fra September - October 2020-utgaven av African Birdlife.
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Denne historien er fra September - October 2020-utgaven av African Birdlife.
Start din 7-dagers gratis prøveperiode på Magzter GOLD for å få tilgang til tusenvis av utvalgte premiumhistorier og 9000+ magasiner og aviser.
Allerede abonnent? Logg på
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.
