South Africa – Wakkerstroom and Phongolo NR

Atlasville, 18 Dec 2010

After a further trip to Zimbabwe and one each to Zambia and Mozambique since my last post, I have some time off and will be heading to London with my wife for Christmas and New Year with the family.

Just time though to fit in a day of birding. When I heard on the birding grapevine that a rare vagrant had been spotted in the Phongolo Nature Reserve (formerly Pongola NR) in northern KwaZulu-Natal, I decided to make the trip to see this arrival, a Golden Pipit.

So, yesterday I undertook a 1,177 km (732mi) round trip. This is easier than it sounds. With South Africa’s good road network and low-volume traffic, half of the distance on national highways with a 120kph speed limit and almost 14 hours of daylight no overnight stay would be necessary.

I set off at 04:30 armed with the GPS co-ordinates of the previous day’s sighting (and confirmatory photo – I wouldn’t be going if this were a case of mistaken identity, a Yellow-throated Longclaw perhaps). The co-ordinates happened to be the intersection of two of the roads within the Phongolo reserve, known as Tsessebe Drive and Nkonkoni Drive. Upon arrival at the spot, I couldn’t believe my eyes. No other birders (or in this case I suppose ‘twitchers’ is more applicable) were around and I had a Golden Pipit all to myself, sitting out in the open on a tree about 20m off the road exactly where it had been seen the previous day. I took photos. Job done.

[P.S. This bird, a male in full breeding plumage, became something of a celebrity among the South African birding fraternity. All previous sightings of this rare vagrant had been ‘one-day wonders’, seen by a handful of people and then disappearing. This individual set up its territory around the road intersection and stayed in place for many weeks allowing hundreds of birders to travel from all over the country (and region) to see it.]

A short drive around the immediate area turned up another uncommon non-breeding summer migrant, an Osprey, as well as expected species such as Rufous-naped Lark, African Pipit, Red-backed Shrike, Pin-tailed Whydah, White-winged Widowbird, Chinspot Batis, Burchell’s Coucal and Magpie Shrike. A section along the shore of the lake (a dam) provided Yellow-billed Stork, White-faced Whistling Duck, Black-winged Stilt, Goliath Heron, Kittlitz’s Plover and Wood Sandpiper.

After lunch in the town of Pongola and a good chance to stretch my legs after sitting in my twin-cab for many hours, I headed home. Retracing my steps as far as Vryheid, I decided to bird the road from Vryheid to Wakkerstroom and on to Amersfoort. From there 99% of the journey home (I arrived an hour after dark) would be on the main N11 and N12 highways. A lot of the birds seen were those that were obvious while driving at around 50kph, either large ones in the fields, such as Wattled Crane, Southern Bald Ibis, Western Cattle Egret, Blacksmith Lapwing and Helmeted Guineafowl, or smaller ones perched on roadside poles and fences, such as Amur Falcon, Black-winged Kite, Banded Martin, Cape Longclaw, Red-collared Widowbird, Long-tailed Widowbird and Ant-eating Chat.

If you wondered how I manage to retain all the details of my birding trips, my modus operandi is to ‘ping’ a waypoint for each location on a hand-held GPS and then enter the waypoint number and bird(s) seen at that location into a digital voice recorder. All this data is later downloaded and entered into a database.