Britstown Bash

SABAP2 – The Britstown Bash

 

This bash was organized by Karoo birding legend Stefan Theron. Capitalizing on a local contact, a friend of his brother, Stefan managed to arrange free accommodation on the West Front Farm, 3 pentads southeast of Britstown. The purpose of the bash was personal for Stefan: he wanted to see if he could extend the range of Sclater’s Lark east, which we’d recorded in a visit prior to lockdown west of Britstown. Also, he wanted to validate if Karoo Lark really occur in this region (spoiler alert, they don’t). Most importantly, as with many Northern Cape regions, the area is chronically under atlassed, with many virgin pentads.

Given the limited facilities on the farm (we had access to a flat with kitchenette and just one bathroom), the bash was by invitation only to arguably the elite of Karoo’s atlassing community (Japie Claasen excluded): Salome Willemse (of the Namaqualand bird club), Alan Collett (Graaff Reinet), and Rudi Minnie (with special guest Henk Nel of Birdlasser).

The bash officially kicked off with a dinner hosted by Salome on Thursday evening (18^th March), which I missed as I only arrived on the Friday: defence of the family’s orchard against raiding baboons my excuse. As such I arrived on Friday evening after casually atlassing up the back roads from Victoria West to a pentad map already well marked off, especially with the likes of Salome, who does 4-5 pentads a day. For the following day I was put down to do 2 ‘inaccessible’ pentads by bicycle.

However, I had a terrible night: while I’d been putting up my tent, the pole broke, tearing a massive hole in the flysheet. Just after midnight, it started to rain, necessitating I use the groundsheet as new flysheet, which required finding string and jury rigging something to keep off the rain.

The next morning I was exhausted, so I headed off in my vehicle instead to follow try and flesh out some partially covered pentads from the previous day, and see if I could get landowner permission to get into an ‘inaccessible’. I arrived at the landowner, Johan Viljoen’s, house at 6:30, which I reckoned shouldn’t be a problem since farmers normally get up early right? My arrival was announced by barking dogs: and with a lack of any signs of life from the house, my guilt levels started to rise. After about 10 minutes the stocky, bearded, grumpy farmer emerged. Luckily, armed with large 1:150 000 coverage map, plus 'Voels van die Karoo' booklets (printing sponsored by Western Cape Birding Forum, organized by Brian van der Walt), I was able to explain my presence in a way that even had Johan enthusiastic about the project and providing details of the farm and where to go to maximise the bird list. Certainly, memorable from that pentad were the numbers of Greater Kestrel: these were in large numbers throughout the region, attracted no doubt by the growing locust swarms.

I dawdled through the adjacent pentad, thinking it had already been covered, and took midday nap in the shade of some pine trees to catch up on the previous night. Then it was off further south to finish a pentad started the previous day close to Victoria West, and refuel: one low point on the versatile Suzuki Jimney is the 40 liter fuel tank, which sinks into the nervous zone too quickly to feel comfortable in this region with long distances between petrol stations. On the way back, passing my siesta spot by the pine trees, I saw a dead bird in the road. I thought I better stop to investigate (thinking maybe I’d get a new species for the pentad!). I picked up a headless Ring-necked Dove, breast-meat eaten and blood still fresh. Realising it had just been dropped, I looked left and right into the bushes for a potential perpetrator, and then up into the pine tree above me. I could not believe what I saw: the face of a Verreaux's Eagle Owl stared down at me not more than 3-4 meters above my head! My dash to the vehicle to get my camera unfortunately was less cautious than it could have been, startling the bird away. I was very grateful to Stefan for returning a few days later to get the proof of this special record. Nonetheless my arrival back at camp was rather late, making my camp companions rather nervous, given that Alan Collett had started his day with two punctures. Still, the eagle-owl was nearly as big news as the Black-collared Barbet, way out of range but clearly resident in the farm gardens.

Sunday saw most of the team except myself and Stefan heading back home. Stefan was up for hiking the bike route through the inaccessible pentads to the east. Heading off at 5:30, we got to the start of the first target pentad at 6:30 as the first sun rays hit the top of the Dolerite hills we would be navigating for the rest of the day. I dropped of Stefan as he marked off African and Plain-backed Pipit from a set of 3 birds flying silhouetted against the dawn: his call id skills defy the imagination. I headed to the farm, to do the introductions and get permission to access the inaccessible, where I would spend the rest of the morning, and rack up my highest tally of the trip, with 54 species. Meanwhile, Stefan would be racking up close to 80 species as a reward for his sweat and sore feet, including Cinnamon-breasted Warbler, which I’d tried for and failed. CBWs are a special obsession of mine.

Thus, in the afternoon, I got on my bike to head to the adjacent virgin pentad. The eastern edge of the pentad was bordered by beautiful dolerite cliffs promising African Rock Pipits, Raven, raptors and Cinnamon-breasted Warbler. Indeed, my cycle and hike would reward me with all except the raptors: Verreaux’s Eagle a stark absentee from my final trip list, despite many rumours of their presence from local landowners.

Back at the farm, Stefan got me to confirm that the garden White-eyes were indeed Orange River, which was achieved due to some great views from below with view of the distinct flanks. Interestingly, my only very good view of a White-eye from the previous day had been unmistakably Cape, with grey flanks. There has been an interesting encounter with Henk and Rudi identifying different species from opposite sides of the same tree the previous day, although they’d marked them off as Cape to be safe in the end. Another interesting species boundary here is Karoo and Black-chested Prinia: while Black-chested was certainly the default for the surveys, I was amazed to get clear views of Karoo together with hybrids in the mountains. The mountains offer thick vegetation, and very different avifaunal communities compared to the barren ‘vlakte’ in between dominated by Rufous-eared Warbler, Large-billed and Spike-heeled Larks, and distantly calling Northern Black or Karoo Korhaan.

On Monday Stefan headed out to confirm the Verreaux’s Eagle Owl and tick off the adjacent virgin pentads en-route back home. My targeted pentad turned out to have already been done, so I turned my attention to another inaccessible. By the time I’d figured out who the owner was and gone through the explanations and booklet delivery procedure, it was a bit later than I’d have liked. Then I ended up going through the wrong gate and getting lost on the wrong pentad. But the rest of the day was spent on the right pentad, rewarded by Secretarybird, a small pan with swarms of Lark-like Bunting and a curious armoured cricket. Knowing that no-one will do these inaccessible pentads again for the foreseeable future, with the sparsity of atlassers and need to conduct bashes in other parts of the country, I do like to put in the best effort and time I can when presented with the opportunity to do so.

I’d spend my last evening alone on the farm, getting up early to do two more virgin pentads along the N12 en-route home, with mediocre lists of the usual Karoo suspects, but with a feeling of satisfaction from having contributed immeasurably to the progress of SABAP2.

The bash ticked off over 40 pentads for the long weekend, including over 30 virgin pentads, a significant effort in the painting of the SABAP2 coverage map. Thanks again to Rikus van der Merwe and the many landowners that accommodated our endeavours, and especially Stefan and the other bash participants. Look forward to seeing you all again at the next one.

 

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Publication: Tortoise mortality along fence lines in the Karoo, Journal of Nature Conservation

From experience, electric fencing burns are very painful: but of course, we can move away fast and get away from the pain!

But imagine getting shocked again and again for hours and hours. It was 2013 when I first recorded dead tortoises on an electric fence on a bird survey route north of the Baviaanskloof. Since then, I’ve seen hundreds more as electric fencing has become a dominant predator control strategy across South Africa. Tortoises, once shocked, withdraw to the safety of their shell and hope it stops. It never does… they endure pulse after pulse of current until they die. It is inconceivable to me that there are no controls on this infrastructure that take this into account: there are simple solutions that will allow the use of these fences without killing tortoises.

Fences require daily patrolling to remove tortoises. Alternatives could include thermostatic switches which turn off fences when tortoises are most active, or programmed ‘escape’ periods. These solutions are offered with the realisation that electric fences are not going away: they are too valuable for the control of predators or for restricting the movement of big game (SANParks have major electric fence infrastructure on many of their parks). 

Dead leopard tortoises on electric fences are an obvious problem. What this research also showed was the standard mesh fencing is bad for the smaller tortoise species (most of the species), which get wedged and stuck. This fence type is prolific across the rangelands of southern Africa. All of this is not good news for the world’s tortoise hotspot.

This is a situation that makes me feel sad and powerless: all I could do as a scientist was help document this tragedy. My effort to draw attention to the problem by making a YouTube video has had all of 150 views in 4 years. So: there we go, I offer the world another piece of sad information and hope those with the power to make change (which should be all of us) will act upon this.

I’m very grateful to Matt Macray, Conservation Biology MSc student at the Fitz, for doing the groundwork on this; as well as to Biosphere Expeditions for their support. I was able to facilitate this work through a postdoctoral research grant through SANBI: thanks to Phoebe Barnard for that. I’m grateful to Professor Graham Alexander, Wits University, for his collaboration and herpetological expertise. And lastly, I always thought my first co-authored paper with Professor Peter Ryan would be about birds: but life can be funny like that.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1617138120301916

The paper is free to view until February 2021, and I'm happy to provide a copy on request. Elsevier, the publishing house, were very fast and efficient in getting this article online after acceptance.  

2020: A summary of a Blue Hill year in the shadow of Covid-19

 

I guess the year started normal. January, like most of the end of 2019 was steering the formation of the "I Love Nature fitness and environment center" (aka ‘the gym’) in Uniondale. That project of course would soon be put on the back-burner. February, I was in Kenya with Biosphere Expeditions helping a small conservancy, Enonkishu, monitor wildlife with a combination of local rangers and overseas participants. Despite heavy rains and floods it was mostly positive experiences with the memory echoes all positive: seems so long ago.

I managed to get back to South African beginning of March, a few weeks before the world realised what trouble it was in and hard lockdown was implemented, which lasted all April. We had a volunteer with us, Jeb, a charismatic 19-year-old Londoner into Tai-chi and telling stories, whose 2 week stay ended up being closer to 2 months before he got onto a repatriation flight.

With all tourism cancelled and repayment of Blue Hill Escape deposits, it was a significant financial blow.  Luckily, most running expenses for Blue Hill are covered by Chris and Elaine, who continue to be generally healthy despite additional age induced aches and pains. Importantly, Anja still had teaching income and translation contracts, all done by Zoom now of course. My time was put to home-schooling (wow was that hard at the start: a test of my patience and expectations, and Elena certainly missed school, friends and her far more patient teacher).

In-between depressing updates of a world on the brink, we had a constructive time at Blue Hill, in no small way aided by Jeb. The garden looks the best it has since 2012, we built a pizza oven from scratch, and a chicken run which is now populated with very keen egg-laying chickens. The ‘roads’ were dissuaded from their perpetual efforts to turn into dongas, another couple of dongas were straddled with stone bridges.

Winter was a mild one: but temperate afternoons outside enjoying the sun are always tempered with the nagging of ‘why is the winter so mild’. Of course, cold fronts did mean some days as well as the early mornings were spent with everyone in the kitchen around the wood-fired stove. A spectacular snow storm provided much needed light-relief, as well as moisture for life in the mountains. Thanks to that, spring was kick-started with a profusion of beautiful fynbos blooms. That would provide lots of opportunity to populate my latest hobby: uploading photos to the citizen science nature documenting platform iNaturalist. Nature on Blue Hill Nature Reserve can now be viewed here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/blue-hill-nature-reserve?tab=observations

With the SA Covid curve flattened, but paranoia running high, I’d also pack up Elena and Charlie for a camping trip to the Overberg to assist Sanjo Rose with her MSc project examining breeding biology of Agulhas Long-billed Lark. Then, only a few weeks later I was seeing some of the most spectacular Namaqualand flower displays being posted on Social media. Seemed like a good idea to drop everything and head that way for a second camping trip (September), except Francois van der Merwe gave us use of his empty research centre, so we could still social-distance and wander the Hantam Karoo looking at some of the most incredible botanical displays I’ve ever seen. Lots of hiking meant Elena and Charlie were now easily as fit as me, and certainly fitter than mom. Seemed like a good time for them to finally get to the top of Bloukop (Blue Hill) using their own 2 feet, which was accomplished in October. Another milestone in their lives ticked off. Another hiking trip to Duiwekloof in the Baviaanskloof at the end of November would round off the hiking year (so far…). Supposedly that leaves me with December to catch up on writing tasks, maybe do a bit more bird ringing, which had been mostly neglected without someone to help at the nets.  

I’m grateful to Mark Anderson for commissioning me to write up an article on the history of Ostrich, with the journal turning 90 this year. Certainly, the editorship of Ostrich continues to occupy much time, albeit sporadically: either lulls or storms. Most science writing has been done courtesy of Krista Oswald, writing up her PhD work on Cape Rockjumpers: the crowning good news on that is that they are to be bird-of-the-year 2021! Apart from that, a book review, an article on BirdLasser and a co-authorship on the Karoo birds work were the sum of my published ornithological contributions: a paper looking at bird size change having really been completed the previous year, together with a paper summarising body size metrics from the SAFRING database. But ornithological duties continue to demand attention: somehow Colleen Downs managed to draft me into the organising committee for the International Ornithological Congress to be held in Durban in 2022.

All in all, we end the year, healthy, with many marvellous memories to overshadow Trump, EFF and Covid induced misery, and optimistic that 2021 will be a good year too. If I could just have a few more braais with a few more friends, I’ll be happy. So here’s to you, wherever you are: we’re thinking of you and hope to see you face to face one day again.