Discovering the world of birds

Dylan, Luke and younger brother Douglas

at Nahoon River Mouth in 1999.

This, my first article on birding, appeared in the Eastern Province Herald on August 28, 1999, under the headline, “Sweet lullaby of birdland”.

For the more than forty years I have walked this earth I have had only a casual awareness of my feathered friends, the birds. I have heard certain bird calls for as long as I can remember, but have never bothered to find out which bird is making them.

It has taken an eight-year-old child to change all that. For the past six months or so, Luke, my elder son, has developed a keen interest in wild birds. And I find it has rubbed off on me – although I will always remain a novice in the bird-watching stakes.

Cape sparrow

How many bird species does your average person know? More importantly, how many can he or she identify? Do you, for instance, know what a sparrow looks like?

I didn’t, until I asked Luke if he could identify the little bird with a black and white “helmet” that was chirping merrily on the TV aerial above us as we washed the car. “A Cape sparrow,” came the assured reply. So the proverbial “sparrow’s chirp” suddenly takes on a literal meaning and significance.

Early the next day I spotted a sparrow on our lawn – catching the worm, as it were.

Of course we all know what a swallow looks like. Or do we? In fact, in the past few months that we have been seriously bird-watching, the swallow (one of which doesn’t make a summer) has eluded us. But I’ve seen superb colour illustrations of various swallows in Luke’s Sasol Birds of Southern Africa field guide, so I’ll be hoping to spot those distinctive pointed tail feathers before long.

Red-eyed doves

I used to dismiss those omnipresent grey birds that make rumbling sounds as “sommer pigeons”. Now I know that we get at least three main types in this area: the feral pigeon, the redeye dove and the laughing dove. The egret I associated with cattle and farms, but we have even encountered species of these ubiquitous white birds in St George’s Park.

Pied crow

And why is it that when you become aware of birds, they suddenly seem to “find” you? Newton Park, where I live, appears in the past few months to have acquired a whole flock of pied crows. We see them all the time.

Speckled mousebird

Of course even I knew about the hadedah – but not that its real name is the hadedah ibis. The mousebird is not much liked, but I’ve discovered that the variety common around these parts is more accurately known as the speckled mousebird.

These, however, are the relatively mundane species. Birding becomes fun when you start spotting the real gems – and it helps to have a “fundi” around to put a name to them for you. And, in Port Elizabeth, where better to look than in the Baakens Valley? Settlers Park, early in the day, is a veritable birds’ paradise. From the moment you pull up in the main car park, you hear and see a vast multitude of wonderful species.

Greater double-collared sunbird

The nearby large coral trees, currently in bloom, attract masses of African black and greater double-collared sunbirds – two of the most beautiful species to be seen in our area. The double-collared, with its brilliant red, blue and green colours, is unmistakable, and a firm favourite with our family. They are the most spectacular fliers too, managing to plunge between branches at break-neck speed without so much as touching a leaf or twig.

Cape white-eye

About the same size as these tiny fellows with their long, curved beaks, are the more demure Cape white-eyes, which seem to fly around in happy troops.

Cape bulbul

Sombre bulbul

Another bird with a white-ringed eye to be seen in the park is the Cape bulbul. Its cousin, the sombre bulbul, has a call which for decades I had heard but only now have been able to fit to a bird: Willie! It shouts, for all to hear.

Knysna lourie (now terraco)

Each outing we make seems to offer up a new species – but about a month ago we had a double pleasure. Cavorting along the branches of a couple of tall trees were no fewer than four Knysna louries. Unlike in previous sightings, when we merely saw one or two fly past, this time we stood transfixed for about 10 minutes as they paraded their spectacular plumage in the early morning sunlight.

But Luke was troubled. His cousin Dylan – who is twice his age, lives in East London and has an encyclopeadic knowledge of birds – recently introduced Luke to the Roberts Multimedia Birds of Southern Africa CD-Rom, wherein southern Africa’s birds are shown in video clips, with each call recorded as well. The bird-watcher’s bible, they call it.

Black-headed oriole

Anyway, a couple of outings with his cousin and a few hours spent browsing on the CD-Rom – not to mention regularly having his nose in that bird book – has equipped Luke with a growing ability to identify birds by their calls. And yes, what he was hearing, he said to me in a conspiratorial, David Attenborough whisper, was definitely the call of a black-headed oriole – which he had yet to see.

We followed the sound and there on a branch of the same tree as the louries was a fine specimen, the identity of which he quickly confirmed with the aid of binoculars and his bird book. Another “find” was the delightful little bar-throated apalis, two or three of which we watched for several minutes frolicking in a bushy thicket metres away from us.

Swee waxbill

Our most recent sighting was a flock of delightful little swee waxbills, with their distinctive red markings. To see them in their natural habitat – chancing on them as we did – is an infinitely more exhilarating experience than to see them, say, in a cage at a zoo.

Egyptian goose

But Settlers Park isn’t the only good place to see interesting birds. We’ve had excellent results at Dodds Farm (further up the Baakens River), spotting several Egyptian geese, Cape weavers and numerous sunbirds.

But if you happen to live in an area with a reasonable number of trees, you’re away. Some of our most exciting “finds” have been made in our back garden, including a one-off sighting of a Burchell’s coucal, which Luke miraculously managed to pinpoint in his book.

Cape wagtail

And the more we look, the more we see: European and red-winged starlings are in plentiful supply, as are Cape wagtails and the similar-looking fiscal shrike and fiscal flycatcher. Then, of course, there’s the beachfront, estuaries, mountains . . .

According to the Sasol book, there are more than 900 species of wild bird in southern Africa – and many of them are on our doorstep.

Introduction

THE WELL-KNOWN CALL OF AFRICA

There is one sound above all others that places one unmistakably in southern Africa – or, more precisely, in the southern African bushveld.

I could be blindfolded on the moon, placed on a spaceship and landed on Earth and I’d feel at home the moment I heard that sound.

Could it be the roar of a lion? Or the high-pitched yelp of a hyena? The trumpeting of an African elephant, or perhaps the distinctive cry of an African fish-eagle?

With the latter one is getting warmer, but the maker of the sound I hanker for is not some great and impressive denizen of the African bushveld. Indeed, I can honestly say that, until recently, I had never actually seen the bird which so inhabits my soul that I count its call among the most evocative sounds of southern Africa imaginable.

When I was very young, growing up in East London, my mother Brenda would teach us children how to make sounds by cupping our hands together and blowing into the small gap created between the two vertically adjacent thumbs. By rapidly opening and closing the outer, right, hand – much like a blues harmonica player – one could achieve lower or higher notes, and imitate certain bird calls.

It was through this childhood activity that I first became aware – albeit only in my subconscious – of the call of the Cape turtle dove:

Kuk-cooo-kuk. Kuk-cooo-kuk.

It was not until I was well into my forties that I finally became fully conscious of the origin of that call. I had no doubt heard it many times subliminally before, but it took a commitment on my part to explore the rich diversity of our sub-continent’s birdlife before I was able to pin down precisely the call of the Cape turtle dove. This book is the story of that journey of discovery, a discovery of what to my mind is the real jewel in the crown of our region’s wildlife. Make no error, I delight in all manifestations of our natural environment – fauna and flora – and pray that we can manage our ecology in such a way that all species are protected and allowed to flourish.

I may sound parochial, but I would say unashamedly that Africa boasts the finest, most diverse and most impressive of the globe’s animal species.

Our antelopes, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, buffalos and wild dogs, jackals and elephants, lions and leopards, cheetahs and hyenas – you name it – constitute a collection of wild animals without parallel anywhere on the surface of the Earth.

Long may they be spared and long may their habitat be protected so they can continue to survive mankind’s rapacious ways.

But all the animals that run and crawl and creep across the Earth, that swing through the trees or swim through the waters of our rivers and seas, to my mind cannot hold a candle to the collective magic that constitutes the 900-plus species of wild bird to be found in the southern African sub-continent and its adjacent oceans – about a tenth of the globe’s total of some 9 000 equally special species.

It took my then eight-year-old son, Luke, eager to hone his recently acquired reading skills, to drag me into a hitherto – in my experience – unexplored source of grace and beauty: the world of birds.

I mean, here I was, past 40, with a fine arts qualification under my belt, and I had been overlooking this wonderful, tranquil world of creatures which live so close by – yet at the same time are so independent and remote as to occupy another world altogether.

This blog starts with a selection of articles I wrote for the Eastern Province Herald and the Weekend Post’s Leisure supplement after my initial introduction to birding in the late 1990s and during several subsequent years exploring the realm of the birds with my son.

It all began in earnest on Luke’s eighth birthday, in May 1999, when we gave him the Sasol Book of Southern African Birds, although he had already started recording birds earlier that year. His first bird book, Southern African Birds: A Photographic Guide, he received for Christmas in 1998.

My initial article, with the headline “Sweet lullaby of birdland”, appeared in the Herald on August 28, 1999. About a dozen followed, most of which I kept and reproduce here in the hope that others who are as unaware of the bird world as I was, will perhaps be inspired to get a decent field guide, an adequate pair of binoculars – mine are from a second-hand shop and cost about R150 several years ago – and go out and enjoy our unique bird life.

As Luke got to senior primary school, and then high school in 2005, and the demands of his schoolwork increased, so our joint birding activities waned. But we still kept a keen twitcher’s eye open for any interesting sightings and our ears receptive to the calls which Luke so readily can identify, largely thanks to the study he has made of the bird calls on the wonderful Roberts Multimedia Birds of Southern Africa CD-Rom he acquired when he was nine.

After a lay-off of several years, in mid-2005 we resumed our regular birding trips, stories about which make up the remaining chapters of what is essentially a birder’s diary. These, I hope, reflect a more mature approach.

But back to that turtle dove. While my memory is far less retentive than Luke’s, there are several bird calls I can readily identify. Many others sound familiar, but I often forget the bird’s name and need to check with Luke, or his mentor and older cousin, Dylan Weyer, who inspired Luke’s interest in the first place.

But the call of the Cape turtle dove is not a problem. It is ingrained.

And one thing has continually intrigued me about this bird since I first ascertained, with Luke’s help of course, that it was the source of that kuk-cooo-kuk call. Unlike the more common call of the redeye dove, which along with the laughing dove and feral pigeon can be found in most urban or peri-urban domains, the Cape turtle dove seems only to inhabit relatively wild environments.

I travelled out to Sumcay, a school holiday camp on the Swartkops River near Despatch recently, and there was that call again, out of nowhere; a Cape turtle dove, reminding me that I was in a wilderness area in southern Africa.

I have even turned on the television and watched golf at Sun City – only to hear in the background this sonorous call. I’ve thought of all the US or European, Indian or Japanese television viewers taking in the golf. Do they get emotional when they hear the call like I do? I bet the bird-lovers among them do. The rest probably ignore it altogether.

To me the Southern Cross is a highly symbolic anchor in the heavens. That constellation of stars places one indisputably in the southern hemisphere. The nations of the antipodes may have commandeered it for their flags, but it is as much a southern African symbol as an Australian or New Zealand one. However, the call of the Cape turtle dove we don’t have to share with anyone. It is, for me, a southern African lodestar. As long as its call can be heard, I know I’m in Africa.

Indeed, when consulting Luke’s Sasol Birds of Southern Africa to read up on the Cape turtle dove, I couldn’t help feeling a surge of emotion at their dispassionate description. The bird, they say, is an “abundant resident” with “the well-known call of Africa, kuk-cooo-kuk”.

On that note, so to speak, let me conclude by hoping and trusting you’ll enjoy these birding stories.