I spent the first two weeks of 2005 in South Africa, one of those in Cape
Town where my wife was attending a conference and the second at Tembe
Elephant Park in the north-east, about 40 km from the Indian Ocean coast and
adjacent to the Mozambique border.
We had been in Cape Town on two previous occasions and still had "Birds of
the SW Cape and where to Watch Them", Petersen and Tripp, published in 1995
and bought by me in 1997. It is still useful but its age is shown for
example in the section on Wildevoelvlei, where access to the lower vlei and
tidal lagoon seems now to have been cut off. I visited Kirstenbosch
Botanical Gardens, Rondevlei, Wildevoelvlei STW, Paarl STW, Strandfontein
STW, Paarl Mountain Reserve, Cape Point and Boulders Beach, all of which I
had visited on previous occasions. A useful recent website,
http://www.capebirdingroute.org/, gave good information on the west coast
area just north of Cape Town, and I had a day in the Silwerstroomstrand,
Darling and Yzerfontein areas. An E-mail from Mel Tripp three years ago had
advised me that these areas were very dry and not productive at this time of
year and this was certainly the case, but I did manage to see there for the
first time White-backed Mousebird and Karoo Robin.
I again looked very carefully among the Greater Flamingos at Strandfontein
for the Lesser bird. I counted about 1400 birds, all Greater.
Tembe, http://www.tembe.co.za/index.asp, is advertised as having the "big
five" animals and we did indeed see elephant, buffalo and rhinoceros as well
as the paw prints of lion and leopard. The birds were also very good,
highlights for me being Narina Trogon, Pink-throated Twinspot, Bateleur,
Lizard Buzzard, Long-crested Eagle, Crowned Hawk-eagle, Crested Guineafowl,
African Cuckoo, African Wood-owl, Crowned Hornbill and Woodward's Batis.
I had the usual trouble with names when putting my sightings into my
BirdBase database program, the program using Clements's 2000 taxonomy and
common names and my field guide, "Newman's Birds of Southern Africa", 7th
edition, 2000, seemingly based on taxonomy and common names used in the UCT
publication "The Atlas of Southern African Birds", 1997.
Although I was not trying to see as many birds as possible, I saw about 185
species in all, increasing my ZA list by about 40 species and my world list
by 28.
Please contact me directly if you would like further information.
Regards,
Gil Langfield
Melbourne, Australia
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