Odd Things Happen In Verlorenkloof

But they’re mostly good things, like the birding found in the seclusion of Mpumalanga’s eastern escarpment. And that’s what makes it so special

- Peter Sullivan

Verlorenkloof, a 160-hectare spread with beautiful stone crofts, is in a valley settled about 800 years ago by a tribe long lost, so an odd thing must have happened to them too.

It is a place for fly fishing, so it was odd that I never caught a trout. Not such a good thing, but then that’s a reflection of my skill. Our companions fared better.

Nick Jaff, best fisher of our group, had a Malachite Kingfisher (6 on checklist) sit on his rod. How odd is that? “I was so excited, my rod went up and down and bent this way and that. But he [or she] just rode on it, probably thinking it was a branch blowing in the wind,” Nick said, with a chuckle. We didn’t get a picture of that but I took a photograph of this jewel of a bird a few weeks before our trip to Verlorenkloof.

One of South Africa’s greatest birders, Geoff Lockwood has been to Verlorenkloof many times. He likes it so much he has often done a Birding Big Day there.

Genets are shy creatures. So it was delightfully odd that a very hesitant one, soon after sunset, carefully crept on to our croft’s veranda and took a bit of sausage from my hand. Odder was getting a picture with my slow aim-and-shoot camera of it doing just that. “Great camera,” everyone marvelled, no praise for the photographer.

During our extended weekend at the beginning of spring, we saw 67 bird species, dawn and dusk birding competing with fly fishing. Had we been dedicated we could have cracked 100.

Right outside our door, a ‘lifer’ lifted my spirits as much as a Klippies and coke could, when a Bushveld Pipit (5) fossicked around the tap and grabbed a grub. Took a few pictures, pored over Newman’s to identify it.