Birding in Africa

I've counted up my birds from my Namibia holiday now and the total came to 105. This trip took place in June of 2002 and was just 10 days. So in only those 10 days I saw more birds than I had ever been able to count before. This was my first proper list of birds. On this trip we started out in the Caprivi Strip which is the bit that sticks out of Namibia on the North East side. This is right on the border with Botswana and we spent 2 days there as well crossing into the country on a small boat. From here we also flew to see the Victoria Falls and then back to Windhoek where we rented a car to drive around Etosha National Park. All the birds were great for me on this trip with the birds that stood out at the time being the secretary bird afore mentioned and a giant eagle owl. I simply couldn't believe how big it was. Nothing really prepares you for your first trip to Africa. For me it was a life long ambition come true. Seeing African animals in the wild is a million miles away from seeing them in the zoo. Elephants are particularly surprising the first time you see them not because of their size but simply how alive they look and act. Also on this trip I was privileged enough to see a pack of wild dogs with a kill. They were eating a still born elephant calf which, according to the guides is practically unheard of as wild dogs are known only to hunt and kill their own food. My photos of the wild dogs have white-backed vultures in the background waiting for any leftovers. I don't think there could have been much left though.

My next trip to Africa was the best holiday I have ever had so far. This was primarily to see the mountain gorillas in Rwanda but we also saw many other primates in Uganda. We arranged the holiday through an eco-tourism company called 'Discovery Initiatives' who then used a company called 'Volcanoes Safaris'. We mentioned that I liked birds and asked if we could maybe have a guide on one of the days who knew a bit about birds. Guiding I find generally can be quite hit and miss, especially when it comes to birds. You sometimes feel you know more than they do. When we arrived in Uganda we were met by our driver who was also to be our main guide for the whole trip, Sam. It turned out that Sam was an expert birder and a great guide. This was perfect for me as we could look for birds the whole time. It wasn't so perfect for Lindsey who was constantly worried we weren't going to get to our various destinations on time as we seemed to be always stopping to look at birds.

We arrived in Entebbe and immediately went to a restaurant for lunch. Already we could see black kites scrounging for carrion and huge maribou storks doing the same. From our table at lunch we could clearly see a maribou stork nest with 3 chicks. They are as common as pigeons there which I think is just great. It reminds me of watching Australian tourists in St James's Park in London photographing the squirrels with glee. There are no squirrels in Australia I believe so this is a novelty just like the storks were for me. During this first part of the trip we saw and photographed several great blue turaco's which were fantastic to see in the wild. Regent's Park zoo have several turacos so although theirs are not this species I was familiar with the family.

When I go on a trip like this I keep a diary the first page of which is reserved for a list of all the birds. I don't write down birds that I have seen previously on the trip, only the new ones. On this basis you would have thought that on the first day you would see the most and then it would trail off in the end. Although this does happen a little bit the beauty of Africa is that there is so much bio-diversity that you keep seeing new species every day. Seeing 15 or 20 birds a day was common in the beginning and on one day we specifically went on a boat ride in order to look at the birds. This was in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda. Sam had told us that we should sit on the left side of the boat, which seemed like the wrong side at first glance. There were lots of super geeky birders who all crammed into the right side of the boat but were then disappointed when the boat turned around and they found themselves on the wrong side. There were so many birds on this trip that it was hard to keep track. The highlights for me were seeing a goliath heron standing almost 1.5 m tall and taking a photo of an Egyptian goose with a hippo in the foreground.

I got engaged on this trip so our next trip to Africa was our honeymoon and this time we went to Botswana. This was a great all round trip. Botswana was probably one of the first African countries to really figure out how to capitalize on safari tourism. Safaris in Botswana tend to be expensive but highly rewarding. For both birds and mammals this trip just got better and better as it went along. We started in the Kalahari and stayed at a camp with a resident pearl-spotted owl who was perfect to photograph. It was interesting going back to Southern Africa and recognising local birds like the red and yellow-billed hornbills, bul-buls and francolins. Birds of prey in the UK seem virtually impossible to see and I haven't got a single interesting UK bird of prey on my list. In Africa, though they are commonplace and spectacular. On day 2 alone of this trip I saw a tawny eagle, a martial eagle and a bataleur.

After the Kalahari we went to the Okavanga Delta, another life ambition achieved. As you would expect, the camp was teeming with life. My screen saver is a great shot of 2 slit-faced bats hanging down from the roof of one of the outside toilets! The birding highlight was again probably the great view of 2 giant eagle owls and this was on the same day as we saw a wild dog from a mokoro boat which is a sort of dugout canoe which is poled along. Our third stop was at a camp in the Moremi game reserve which was not surprisingly great for birding. One of my favourites was the spur-winged goose as I am a particular fan of wildfowl. Here we also got up close to a leopard and saw the first lions of the trip. I remember the other people making fun of me for turning my camera lens away from our first lion (I had already photographed it to death) and turning it on what turned out to be a three banded plover. The other wildfowl we saw was a group of hottentot teal which I was pleased to identify without the need of the book!

Our final camp was just outside Chobe National Park. Chobe national park is safari paradise. It is basically like being in a BBC 2 natural history programme as everywhere you turn there is an abundance of wildlife. The park is right on a river so the safari trips were a mix of boating or land trips. All the boat trips were great for birding with usually 2 wire-tailed swallows joining us on the prow of our boat. Here I took the best bird photos yet being a great close up of a malachite kingfisher, white-faced whistling ducks in flight and in focus and also African skimmers in flight. I was also really pleased to see a giant kingfisher which had been one of goals and we got really close to an African fish eagle.

That's enough on African birding. If I figure out how to get some photos on this post I will add some later.

Goals and Goldfinches

I hadn't planned on getting to actual bird sightings yet but feel compelled to say that as I write this I have 2 goldfinches eating from my niger seed feeder. I live in Kilburn in London and despite this being fairly central I actually regularly see goldfinches either in my garden or just generally around the streets. This is the first time I have seen them actually eating from the niger seed. I have had the feeder out for about 2 months so it actually hasn't taken that long for them to discover it. Funnily enough I saw a blue tit feeding from the niger seed earlier. I wonder if the goldfinches were watching.

Although I haven't really been counting the birds I see until the last two years I can distinctly remember trying to count for the first time all the different species I could actually remember seeing. I could only get to 66 species. I don't have this list anymore so can't remember what birds were on there but it would certainly have included a few American species like the bluejay, american robin, cardinal and chickadee because we lived in America when I was a kid for three years. I remember being shocked at how few species my 'life list' contained. Up until this point I had never been to Africa. It was only on my first trip to Africa that I wrote down or tried to write down every species I saw. When I came to list these birds in my database I saw that there were a few inconsistencies there and had to discount a few birds through inaccuracy but nevertheless, on this trip, I could note down many more than 66 species. (I have just checked my database and amazingly I have discovered that I haven't listed these birds from this holiday in Namibia at all. I definitely listed them once but this was for my table of species rather than my actual observations table. Now I am going to have dig out that holiday diary and go through the process again. As I have since been to Botswana I wonder how many actual new species there will be. Watch this space!)

Africa is such a wonderful place to begin birding. The savannah generally allows you a good view of the birds and there are lots of different species many of which are easy to identify. I can remember screeching to a halt on the long, straight and largely empty road to Etosha National Park from Windhoek on seeing the first and so far the only secretary bird I have ever seen. These impressive birds of prey stand over a metre tall with long, loose, black feathers coming from the back of their head (this is where the name comes from). It also has a red face so comes into the category of birding that my wife, Lindsey approves of i.e. seeing birds that are large and colourful!

I began to form the rules of listing that I have since developed during this trip. Probably, like most birders, I get a lot of pleasure out of seeing a new bird for the first time that I can't immediately identify but then identify it by reference to bird books. My favourite method for doing this it to take a photograph (usually a pretty shoddy one will suffice) and then compare the bird in the book later. However, I am not too fussy. If I am with a guide who points out a bird to me that I can clearly see and then the guide identifies it, that counts for me too.

Despite writing down the birds on this trip and then subsequently going on bird watching excursions near where I lived at the time I still did not write down the birds I was seeing in any reliable form. Since that time I have been to Africa twice more where I listed the birds I was seeing. These birds have made it on to my current list as the lists were reliable and included the dates I was seeing the birds. The only other birds that I have transcribed on to the list are birds from photographs taken from digital cameras where the date is easy to see. This means that there are quite a few birds that I know that I have seen but are not on the list as I don't have the specific dates I saw them or any photos. Mostly this does not worry me as I know I will catch up on all these birds. For instance, I once saw a peregrine falcon nesting on a building you could see from Regent's Park. The RSPB had set up a tent with some scopes to watch them. I don't have the date so they're not on the list but I'm sure I'll see peregrines again. There are a few birds that I am not so confident that I will see again in the locations that I saw them. These include the flamingos and European bee-eaters that I saw in the Camague but you have to draw the line somewhere and I have drawn it there.

The Goal

My goal in writing this blog is to record the development of my interest in birding. My first few entries will be a little bit about me and where this interest comes from and thereafter I will simply be recording my sightings of birds and keeping track of where I am against the various goals I will be setting myself.

I should say from the outset that I am not a serious birder or twitcher. Colin Tudge, in his excellent book simply called 'The Bird' defines twitchers as people mainly interested in counting the different species of birds they see and birders as sort of amateur scientists. Although I don't like the label I would definitely be counted among the twitchers according to these definitions. I work in an industry where Microsoft's Excel is the software of choice which means I have a geekish fondness of manipulating data. I have spreadsheets for everything from paying off my mortgage to listing the books I read. My bird database is actually an Access database although I am a newby at Access so I am doubly an amateur. I have grown up with parents who are both lovers of nature so knowing the birds in the garden, for instance, is knowledge I have simply always known. This means that I became a birder long before I became a birder. Having two older brothers in a family that loves games I am fiercely competitive. Although I am only competing with myself in my birding (I really can't say twitching), it helps to have the competitive spirit. I love to travel so have a great opportunity of adding new birds to my list when visiting new places and finally my wife, though rolling her eyeballs as I write this, allows me to indulge my interest to a reasonable extent. My goal is not to become the kind of birder who spends every weekend waist deep in mud searching out birds or the type who flies off at a moment's notice to see a vagrant blown off course. I simply enjoy birds and I like the idea of writing about this pleasure.