South Africa – Marievale Bird Sanctuary [15]

Atlasville, 09 Jan 2012

News broke yesterday evening of the appearance of a rare migrant at Marievale, a Baillon’s Crake. There had been some heavy, overnight rain, and conditions were still very overcast. Nevertheless, this morning, armed with the GPS co-ordinates supplied, I headed for Marievale. I knew that it would be like looking for the proverbial ‘needle in a haystack’, as the co-ordinates fell along a road that had 2-3m tall reeds on one side and lush wet grassland on the other. I hoped that there would be some other birders already there, who may have found the bird already, or who could at least help mount a group effort to search for the crake.

This was not to be, however, and I spent a fruitless hour trying to find the bird, before seeing what else might make good photos. Due to the overnight rain many of the birds looked somewhat bedraggled, especially their tail feathers. These included Common Reed Warbler, Yellow-crowned Bishop, Fan-tailed Widowbird and Burchell’s Coucal. Others photographed were the always photogenic Malachite Kingfisher, and Greater Striped Swallow, White-throated Swallow, Whiskered Tern, Black-headed Heron and Yellow-billed Duck.  

I had expected the Baillon’s Crake to be my lifer today, so the biggest disappointment of the day was seeing another lifer but not being able to photograph it. I had called in at the Hadeda Hide, which was unoccupied, sat down and immediately saw movement at the base of the reeds at the water’s edge, no more than 5m away. Something was moving around, coming fleetingly into the open and then darting back into cover. It turned out to be a Red-chested Flufftail. As that realisation sank in, I lifted the camera, probably a bit too quickly, and the flufftail darted for deeper cover, not emerging again in the 15 minutes that I waited it to return.