Adult male Caspian Terns teach their young the secrets of migration.
GPS tracking of Caspian Terns -has shown that male parents bear the main responsibility for leading their young during their first migration from the Baltic Sea to Africa.
Bird migration has fascinated humans for millennia. How do these creatures learn to find their way to distant wintering locations? In a new study, a team of researchers from Finland, Sweden and the UK tracked entire bird families with GPS devices to find out.
'We wanted to get a better idea of how the migratory skills of birds are passed from one generation to the next in a species where individuals normally migrate together, says lead author Patrik Byholm of the University of Helsinki.
This story is from the May/June 2022 edition of African Birdlife.
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This story is from the May/June 2022 edition of African Birdlife.
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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.
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CAPE crusade
The Cape Bird Club/City of Cape Town Birding Big Year Challenge
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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.
