Zimbabwe – Bulawayo

Atlasville, 20 Nov 2010

Since returning from by birding trip to Kenya, work has seen me shuttling between Johannesburg and Lusaka, Harare and Bulawayo. On these trips I do not carry my birding camera and lens, nor do I have the time to fit in any birding. However, I do carry for work use my old Canon 20D with a wide-angle lens.

I am just back from a 10-day trip to Zimbabwe, where a colleague and I found ourselves with a free Sunday in Bulawayo. We decided to go to the Matobo National Park, with its spectacular granite inselberg scenery, some 35km south-west of Bulawayo. It is also the site of the grave of Cecil Rhodes, mining magnate and politician, after whom the former Rhodesia was named. I first visited here with my father and daughter in 1998, and my grandfather was here in 1950.

While I managed to note over 20 bird species in the national park, they were all relatively common species like Magpie Shrike, Mocking Cliff Chat and Golden-tailed Woodpecker, and summer visitors such as Red-chested Cuckoo, European Bee-eater and Yellow-billed Kite. Although one good sighting was a Little Sparrowhawk.

The camera did get put to use at the top of Malindidzimu, the granite kopje where Rhodes is buried. There are hundreds of rainbow-coloured small lizards scurrying around there, the local sub-species of the Common Flat Lizard, known as the Zimbabwe Flat Lizard. They grow up to 12cm, nose to tail, but are dwarfed by the other species seen here, the 25cm Kirk’s Agama. I added a third lizard species, Wahlberg’s Striped Skink, found in the sink of my hotel bathroom when we returned to Bulawayo.

The grave of Cecil Rhodes lies among granite boulders perched atop Malindidzimu. The rock surface around the summit of the kopje is covered with brilliant yellow and orange crustose lichens.