On Thursday night the rain was coming
down so hard I could hardly hear the speaker at our local farmer's
meeting. In only a few hours time I would be waking up to head east
towards Port Elizabeth, together with volunteers Jessy and Adrian to
the van Staadens wildflower reserve to catch birds.
At 3.30am the windscreen wipers were
still working, but they were also off as often as they were on. By 4.30, with the
first glow of dawn on the horizon, it finally looked like our
rendezvous with Ben Smit and Jerry Mokgatla would not be in vain
after all. We pulled up at the locked gates at 5.30am. Now what!?
Ben arrived a bit later and we scouted
around for someone to open the gate – no-one! Only thing to do was
set the nets up close to the gate, as the Watsonia's were flowering
prolifically and we could hear Cape Sugarbirds among the scattered
pincushions.
The reason for our visit was to meet
Jerry, who will be doing a Master's with Ben. The target species
being Cape Sugarbirds, and the questions being whether there are differences between the sexes in terms of foraging behaviour and
physiology.
Our first sugarbirds were in the net
before we'd even finished tying down the last strings, and all in all
it proved to be worth the drive, with 50 birds processed from a variety of species, including
some I had never rung before.
Exhausted by lunchtime from our night
drive, we headed to Falcon Rock campsite, where we set up tents and
collapsed for a well deserved siesta.
In the late afternoon Adrian and I
still had enough energy for the one-hour hike up Lady's Slipper –
the hills overlooking van Staden's. We were interested to see if we
would be able to spot Cape Rockjumpers, which were know to occur here
until recently. We had to settle for lovely views instead.
Saturday morning we set up nets in a
patch of pincushions to target the Sugarbirds. However, a stiff
easterly wind had me concerned about safety of birds in the nets and
we wrapped up the day by 10am. However, again, not a bad haul...
below are some of the highlights...
|
Black Cuckoo-shrike, male. A ringing-lifer. Amazing orange gape. |
|
Black Cuckoo-shrike, female |
|
Black-headed Oriole |
|
Common Waxbill |
|
Forest Weaver |
|
Ringing station, with Jessy, Adrian and Jerry |
|
On top of Lady's Slipper |
|
Lazy Cisticola, another lifer! |
|
Red-faced Mousebird. |
|
Southern-masked Weaver |
Love all the pictures , including the mountain top one. Trying to recall ever seeing a bird with a blue iris
ReplyDeleteAnd how quaint, dawn glow starting at 430. We wont see that until late next May
I really enjoyed the ringing sessions. Looking forward to the next major field work in January.
ReplyDeleteJerry
Hi, this is so nice to see that you were so successful at the van Stadens Wild Flower reserve. One of our aims as Friends of the van Stadens Wild flower Reserve is to make the reserve more bird friendly eg by maintaining the levels of the dam,taking out aliens etc. Would be nice to read the result of your research!
ReplyDelete