Ken Borland

 

 

by Anthony Stidolph

I am not a man who deliberately courts disaster or intentionally goes looking for bad experiences. By the same token, I am not such a fool as to think the odd mishap won’t occasionally befall me. And when you go travelling with my birding partner Ken, rotten luck does have a habit of following you around.

For example: on a recent trip to Marakele National Park we found ourselves being chased down a narrow, twisting mountain pass in reverse by a very angry elephant who clearly resented our presence in his private domain.  Luckily – I have a feeling some benevolent deity saw fit to intervene – we survived that harrowing encounter. What I did not realise was that more trouble with elephants lay ahead…

 

From Marakele we had followed a circuitous route that took us to Blouberg Nature Reserve and then cut east along the base of the Soutpansberg range to Punda Maria in North Kruger. We planned to camp the night here and then press on to Pafuri the next day, where we hoped to get in some good birding.

Up until now the weather had been kindly – more spring than summer and I had even found myself wearing a jacket in the evenings and early mornings. In Kruger, however, the hot weather we had been expecting all along finally caught up with us, with the temperature soaring up to 39 degrees. The air around us was heavy and listless and steamy, almost tropical, perhaps hardly surprising since we had crossed over the Tropic of Capricorn some days before.

Eager to be off, I was up early the next day although I had to first wait for Ken to complete his complicated early-morning-ablution rituals. Once he was done with that, we set off northwards through the familiar vastness of flat grassland and mopane trees. On the way we stopped to allow the biggest herd of elephants I have ever seen cross the road. Shortly afterwards we were forced to repeat this exercise for an even bigger herd of buffalo.

The common bird in this neck of the woods – or at least the most vocal – is the Rattling Cisticola. There seemed to be one trilling its silly head off on top of virtually every second tree we passed.

As you draw close to Pafuri, the terrain starts to break up and rearrange itself and you are suddenly confronted by the arresting sight of Baobab Hill, with its commanding views over the Limpopo Valley. In the early days this iconic hill served as both a landmark and sleepover point for the ox-wagons travelling up from Mozambique.

By the time we got to Pafuri the sun was high and blazing. There had obviously been no rain here this season and the grass was pale and dry, although the trees had mostly come out in leaf.

At the crossroads we turned left down the Nyala Drive, which takes you into some wonderfully hilly country before taking a lazy loop back to the main road. Ken likes this less-used drive because, he says, it often throws up unexpected surprises.

There wasn’t much on offing this time around besides the usual suspects – Meves’s Starlings, Arrowmarked Babblers, Whitefronted Bee-eaters and Emeraldspotted Wood Dove. We passed a solitary elephant but he paid us no mind.

On the top of the small, baobab-clad hillock, directly above where the road swings back, is the Thulamela archaeological site, a restored Zimbabwe-type ruin. Unfortunately you can only go up with a guide and because of our tight schedule we did not have time for that.

From the Nyala Drive we crossed back over the main tar road and followed the dirt track that takes you to Crooks Corner, where the brown waters of the Luvuvhu collide with the blue of the Limpopo. The combination of water, sun and rich alluvial soils has led to a proliferation of vegetation along the rivers’ banks so that you drive through a glittering tunnel of Sycamore Figs, Nyala trees, Jackal Berry, Ana and Fever trees.

Crooks’ Corner, where you can get out of your cars, marks the border between South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. In the early 1900s this remotest of places gained its moniker and dodgy reputation with gun-runners, fugitives and others on the run from the law, using it as a safe haven because it was easy to hop across the border whenever the police from one country approached.

Distinctly, there was a sense of a frontier on that lazy meandering river, although I don’t think the solitary Saddlebilled Stork fishing in its waters gave a fig where the international boundary lay or as to who held sovereignty over the country he was standing in.

Normally, it feels like you can’t get much further away from civilization than here, but we had chosen a busy weekend to visit so it was like a major thoroughfare with a steady stream of traffic passing through. Many of the visitors didn’t even bother to wind down their windows or get out of their luxury 4x4s because it would mean switching off their air-conditioners. They just drove in, stopped, glanced around and drove out again, leaving me to wonder why they had bothered to come all this way …

Needless to say Ken – who, contrarily, makes it a rule to ALWAYS switch off his air-conditioner when he enters a park because he likes to experience Africa in all its extremes –  and I did get out.

Rich plant life invariably means rich animal and bird life and Pafuri is no exception. In the past the storied riverine forest has provided both of us with some good sightings. It was here I saw my first Gorgeous Bush Shrike, Bohm’s Spinetail and Ayre’s Hawk Eagle. I have also recorded Lesser Jacana, Greencapped Eremomela, Hooded Vulture, Tropical Boubou and the palm-dwelling Lemonbreasted Canary.

This time, we could hear both the Gorgeous Bush Shrike and a melodious Whitebrowed Robin-Chat calling from the depth of a nearby thicket but could not entice either of them out.  Instead we had to make do with a bunch of waders and a noisy party of Trumpeter Hornbills who, I think, were off to join the celebrations in neighbouring Zimbabwe.

It was now well past lunchtime so we doubled back to the Pafuri picnic site on the edge of the Luvuvhu. Feeling somewhat dehydrated, I was desperate for an ice-cold coke but had to wait patiently in queue behind an American who was explaining to the bemused coke seller-cum bird guide – who, I suspect, knew the answer but was too polite to say so – what a turkey is (“It’s a big black bird with a red head”).

At this juncture of its journey the Luvuvhu is always a ruddy brown colour such as might be achieved by mixing cans of tomato soup with cans of chicken soup. There was an enormous crocodile lying directly opposite us, not, as one would expect, by the water’s edge but high up on the bank under some trees. I had a feeling some unsuspecting animal was in for a nasty surprise.

On the way back to Punda Maria, we took the shortcut via Klopperfontein Dam, another place which can throw up some unexpected treats even though the area around the dam has been grazed as smooth as a billiard board. Sure enough, we were rewarded with a wonderful sighting of a Painted Snipe snooping around in the shallows of the nearby stream.

It was getting on for late afternoon by now. Ken consulted Emily, his prissy, admonishing Satnav, and worked out how far we had to go and what time we had to do it in. What neither factored into their calculations was our old nemesis, the elephant.

The first one, which we encountered just after Klopperfontein, kept us waiting for ages, while it feasted on the side of the road, before moving off into the surrounding bush. A little later we passed him siphoning water by the trunk load out of the top of a reservoir.

We ran in to the second one on the home stretch with the hills around Punda Maria in plain sight. Although this bull appeared much more amiable then the one who had chased us down the mountain in Marakele, he had obviously decided he held all the rights to this road.

The whole thing quickly degenerated into a stage farce. We kept reversing and reversing and he kept trundling on towards us. I suspect he was headed for his evening sundowner at the same reservoir where the other elephant was sloshing water around.

One of us had to blink and we did so first. Muttering angrily to ourselves about the beast’s poor road etiquette, we turned around and headed back to the tar and took the much longer route home to Punda Maria.

In Kruger, as in other parks, you are not supposed to arrive in camp after dark, which we now did, finding the gate locked on us. Fortunately, the guard was still at his post but Ken had to use all his silky skills as a sports writer and commentator to try to convince him it wasn’t really our fault. I am not sure he bought our explanation, but he let us through without imposing a fine.

So we drove into camp feeling like a pair of naughty schoolboys who had just been caught bunking …

But we were not done yet. We arrived to a scene of utter devastation – in our absence a troop of baboons had ransacked the place, flattening my tent, breaking its poles and ripping gaping holes in the fly-sheet (even though there was nothing inside but my bedding and clothes), as well as scattering our possessions far and wide.

To tell you the truth I was getting seriously tired of this. I had just bought the tent to replace the one that got ripped by monkeys in Mapungubwe on my last trip which, in turn, I had bought to replace the one that had suffered a similar fate at the hands of baboons when I attended a wedding in De Hoop Nature Reserve in the Western Cape. At the rate I was getting through tents, it would have been cheaper to have just booked into a luxury lodge!

I am not sure what one does about this menace. The problem is both monkeys and baboons have become habituated to both human beings and human beings’ food.

We did discover afterwards that there was supposed to be a guard on duty to stop these opportunistic raids but, even though the campsite was virtually booked out, he had decided to take the Sunday off …

I was still sulking about my poor tent the next morning when we drove out of the gate, destination Mapungubwe. There to wish us on our way was the scruffiest Ground Hornbill I have ever seen. It flew up into a tree from where it regarded us quizzically through its girlishly-long eyelashes.

For some reason the sight of that lugubrious bird, peering around its branch, cheered me up no end. It made me realise that on the Richter Scale of Travel Disasters we had got off relatively lightly compared to what other great explorers, like David Livingstone or Scott’s Antarctic expedition, had been forced to endure…

 

 

ANTHONY STIDOLPH

 

The KwaZulu-Natal North Coast is generally extremely degraded habitat due to the development of extensive sugarcane fields and timber plantations, as well as the high levels of urbanisation and the roads and alien plant infestations it brings.

The natural vegetation of the coastal belt is classified as Endangered; comprising Moist Coastal Forest, Thorn and Palmveld; bushed grassland and bushland thicket. But these days, as you venture north from Durban, it is just a sea of sugarcane, endless and monotonous.

The undulating topography of the area – rolling hills heading westwards to the plateau in the central regions of the province – with steep sloping ground, means only sugarcane can really be considered as a permanent crop, because the ground is either too wet or too sloping to grow much else.

The valley bottoms are where more indigenous flora is found and, having spotted a dam on the maps of the Maidstone area, I decided to head there to see what the birdlife would be like around this colonial village that was built for the employees of Tongaat Hulett Sugar Company.

But in order to find my way down to the dam, I had to negotiate a myriad of little tracks through the monoculture. Being towards the end of May, it was also the dry season and I wasn’t expecting much. But it was proven otherwise as the canefields threw up some birds of their own.

For good birding habitat, the drainage streams between canefields with irrigation water still in them proved a hit with the birds, including Whitewinged Widow, but it was still a surprise when a couple of Spurwinged Goose turned up where the water had collected into a small pool near the road.

You wouldn’t find Southern Africa’s largest duck (it’s not a real goose) in the actual sugarcane but it is generally common and conspicuous at inland waters and fallow fields, usually being seen in flight.

Two Southern Red Bishop males, surprisingly still in breeding plumage, went towering upwards in the sky nearby.

While the Stonechat was the most common bird, the Fantailed Widowbird is the common Euplectid of sugarcane fields, flying up out of the rows of green, alongside the Yellowthroated Longclaw, which is more a bird of the lower reaches of South Africa, as you head towards the sea, being far more widespread than the endemic Orangethroated (Cape) Longclaw, and flying up from the grass on the tracks that cut through the cane.

The only natural habitats available on-site are restricted to a few isolated patches of riparian vegetation along water courses, where I was able to confirm the winter presence of Redwinged Starling along with a family of Vervet Monkey, and the major feeder for Dudley Pringle Dam is the Wewe River, part of the Tongaat River catchment.

The dam itself is not very accessible but I did manage to find one spot to walk around, a launching area for a local canoe club.

Little flocks of Fantailed Widowbird, the males with their red shoulder patches, flew up out of the tall, moist grassland around the dam, over which Egyptian Geese were flying.

A Threebanded Plover, which has been recorded breeding in the area, was nodding along on the dilapidated weir, while a few pairs of African Jacana, an unlikely bird to see on sugarcane farms, were squabbling and flying around and then settling in the waterweed.

Another surprise was when a Whitebreasted Cormorant came gliding into view from around the corner of the dam, and I was delighted to see a few Little Bee-Eater hawking insects from the reeds on the dam shore.

There is more vegetation, including stands of bamboo, around the dwellings on the farm, and it was interesting to see a Fiscal Flycatcher in the same tree as the more fierce bird it mimics in appearance, the Fiscal Shrike.

A similar example of mimicry in which one birds looks confusingly similar to another highly aggressive bird occurs between the Southern Black Flycatcher and the Forktailed Drongo, with the Flycatcher hypothesised to gain some sort of advantage by looking like the more rapacious Drongo.

Coincidentally, a Southern Black Flycatcher was spotted in the tree right next door to a Forktailed Drongo.

Where is Dudley Pringle Dam?

Sightings list

Forktailed Drongo

Hadeda Ibis

Redwinged Starling

Southern Black Flycatcher

Cape Wagtail

Fiscal Shrike

Grassveld Pipit

Fiscal Flycatcher

Tawnyflanked Prinia

African Stonechat

Vervet Monkey

Southern Red Bishop

Spurwinged Goose

Redeyed Dove

Blackeyed Bulbul

Whitewinged Widow

Yellowthroated Longclaw

Fantailed Widowbird

Egyptian Goose

Threebanded Plover

African Jacana

Whitebreasted Cormorant

Little Swift

Litte Bee-Eater

 

 

The Swartkops Estuary in Port Elizabeth is well-known as one of South Africa’s 112 Important Bird & Biodiversity Areas (IBAs) and while the river and mudflats have the greatest density of birds and hog the limelight as the most natural areas, my sunset visit on December 30 was to the salt pans and threw up a special that is often difficult to find elsewhere.

The Chatty River flows from the west into the Swartkops River and alongside it, next to the R367 main road, there are commercial saltpans which can provide quality foraging opportunities for many birds, especially when the salinity and water level are just right for a host of invertebrates to be crawling around in the benthos.

The elegant flamingos – both Greater and Lesser – immediately catch the eye and I was also drawn to the Pied Avocets, one of my favourite birds, sweeping and scything around in the water.

But dotted around the pan were smaller birds – the Blacknecked Grebe.

The Chatty Saltpans hold globally significant numbers of this uncommon nomad, which has the propensity to suddenly colonise a flooded area and start breeding. There are usually good numbers of this cute little diving bird at Swartkops though, and I did not notice any birds in breeding plumage, so perhaps they were moulting, with the widely-distributed Blacknecked Grebe known to utilise saline lakes overseas for this purpose.

Another special that can be picked up at the Swartkops Estuary is the Hartlaub’s Gull, which has a recently-established breeding colony in the area. It was previously considered a bird of the Western Cape, its distribution tied to that of Kelp, with only vagrant birds moving east of Cape Agulhas, and it interbreeds with Greyheaded Gulls in this river valley. Being omnivorous, it seems to have adapted to new foraging opportunities around human settlements.

Nicely built-up embankments between the pans allow one to approach the vulnerable Flamingos and their friends reasonably closely as they continue their search for invertebrates, and other birds that have adapted well to man-made wetlands were also busy foraging for their dinner in the gathering gloom – Blackwinged Stilt, African Spoonbill, Cape Cormorant, Kelp Gull, Egyptian Goose, Blacksmith Plover, Cape Wagtail and Sacred Ibis.

Where are the Chatty Saltpans?

Sightings list

Greater Flamingo

Kelp Gull

Pied Avocet

Blacknecked Grebe

Blackwinged Stilt

Lesser Flamingo

Egyptian Goose

Cape Cormorant

Blacksmith Plover

Hartlaub’s Gull

Cape Wagtail

Sacred Ibis

African Spoonbill

 

 

 

by Anthony Stidolph

 

I am, by nature, a wanderer. For me there is nothing quite like the thrill of departure, the joy of being on the road again, of heading off to remote and cut-off places.

As an antidote to this restlessness I have travelled the length and breadth of South Africa searching out new places I can claim as my own. In recent years this has involved launching several expeditions up to the Limpopo, along the way taking in Punda Maria and Pafuri in North Kruger, Mapungubwe, Ratho on the Botswana border,  Hans Merensky on the Groot Letaba, the forests of Magoebaskloof, parts of the Soutspanberg and that little-known gem, Blouberg Nature Reserve near Vivo.

Having explored and fallen in love with this sun-drenched landscape, my birding partner Ken and I recently took a notion to recreate these epic treks by heading back up there once again, only, this time, adding Marakele National Park, which would be new country for me.

A Tshwana word, aptly meaning “Place of Sanctuary”, Marakele falls within a transitional zone between the dry western habitat, made up mostly of Kalahari thornveld, and the typical bushveld country of the moister eastern sections of South Africa. It also lies within the Waterberg range of mountains, with an altitude ranging from 1050 metres on the plains to 2088 metres at its highest point.

Because of this broad range of vegetation types and its diverse topography the area boasts a wide variety of game (including the Big Five and Wild Dog) and an abundant bird life. Its biggest attraction, for birders anyway, is the around 800 breeding pairs of Cape Vulture which nest high up in the cliffs of the Kransberg

Arriving at the park, which is situated about twenty kilometres north of the old iron-ore mining town of Thabazimbi, we set up camp and then headed off on our first drive. I was immediately rewarded with my first lifer of the trip – a Greyheaded Kingfisher.

As we sat having a celebratory beer that night, listening to the clear, articulated noises of the bushveld at night, a tiny African Scops Owl landed on a branch above us and began its odd but strangely comforting, frog-like, “Prrrt…prrrt…prrrt…” call. This was more like it. My latest Excursion Into The Great Unknown had officially begun.

The next day we were up at dawn and driving through heavy bush country towards the impressive pass that leads up to the top of the Kransberg mountain. A friend of ours had told us that her biggest concern going up this narrow, winding, precipitous road, was what she would do if she encountered another vehicle coming down the other way as there is little room to pass. That proved to be the least of our worries.

Rounding one steep-sided corner we suddenly found ourselves coming face-to-face with a young elephant bull that had stepped out on to the road. Having been in this situation many times before, Ken immediately pulled up short, stopping a sufficient distance from the animal so as not to make it feel threatened or think that we were encroaching on its space. It didn’t help.

Coming face-to-face with a wild animal so much bigger than yourself can be a slightly intimidating experience and this one decided to remind us of its size advantage. Without even affording us the courtesy of a warning mock charge, it let out an almighty bellow and came thundering down the road.

There was nothing to do but slam the car into reverse and head back down the road with me craning my head out of my window, shouting directions, while Ken did the same on his side.

The kilometre or so we drove in this manner was like a rapid ride through eternity. We kept hoping that each time we rounded a corner and the elephant lost sight of us it would lose interest. No such luck. The beast definitely did not like the cut of Ken’s jib and was determined to drive us clear off his mountain stronghold.

We went back down into the valley and somehow – and I shall never know how we did it – managed to do so without plunging down the mountain side or getting stomped on by the elephant. Once safely back on the flat we found a turning point, backed into it and sped off in the direction we had earlier come from.

A half-an-hour or so later we gingerly ventured back but, very bravely, decided to allow another vehicle – that had come driving up while we were parked on the side of the road observing, of all things, a Neddicky (the ultimate Little Brown Job), while considering the sagacity of continuing on our journey – go up ahead of us. Once we had seen they had safely cleared the ridge we sailed forth ourselves, this time, thankfully, unmolested.

At the top of this particular stretch the road evens out on to a trough through which you drive before getting to tackle the final, most spectacular, stage of the mountain. Here the road begins an even more torturous ascent. On the one side rise the naked sandstone towers of the Kransberg massif itself, weathered into the shapes of fantastical beasts and strange deformed reptiles. On the other side the slopes plunge steeply down into a treeless, meadowy grassland in which several more elephant and a herd of wildebeest were feeding.

As we advanced the road got narrower and narrower. What got us perspiring heavily all over again was that there were yet more fresh elephant droppings at regular intervals all along its surface, virtually to the top.

On the summit it was like another world. The view was colossal. Below us the mountain stretched away in every direction before dropping down, in a series of steps, to the plains, fading away into the blue distance.

Immediately in front was another castle-like knob, a labyrinth chaos of rock, fitted with clefts and chimneys. It was here the vultures nested. There were many of these large, endangered raptors wheeling gracefully above us, trailing their shadows on the ground beneath them.

The protea-covered hillsides on top of the mountain also provide a home for some other unusual species like the Gurney’s Sugarbird and the Buff-streaked Chat, birds which I more commonly associate with the Natal Midlands, where I live, and the foothills of the Drakensberg. Another occupant is the Kransberg Widow, a very rare and beautiful butterfly which puts in an appearance in November and early December and then, like Cinderella, sheds its finery and disappears. This is the only place in the world where it occurs.

We were reading all about the insect on a large information board they have erected up there, alerting us to its presence, when one came fluttering past. A few minutes later it came fluttering back again … and again. It may be scarce but it certainly wasn’t shy about showing off its beautiful cream markings.

 

A cold wind was blowing across the mountain top and a storm was brewing in the distance and so, after a warming cup of coffee, which we shared with a pair of very tame Cape Buntings and a cheery Mocking Cliff-Chat, we made our way back down the same twisting road, this time without having to face down any elephants with murder on their minds. Heading into camp I did, however, have another good sighting of two more Greyheaded Kingfishers, dive-bombing a family of Banded Mongoose.

Two days later, in Blouberg, I had an even better view of the kingfisher sitting at the end of a dead branch. This meant that after fruitlessly searching for the elusive bird for years I had now seen four in four days …

The grumpy pachyderm who had chased us down the Kransberg may have scared me witless, but I couldn’t help wondering afterwards if he hadn’t deliberately engineered the whole encounter just to make sure I kept running into the bird!

 

ANTHONY STIDOLPH

 

Where is Marakele National Park?