Ken Borland

The False Bay Coastal Park, in particular the Strandfontein Sewage Works, is a waterbird mecca and it provides just the right sort of habitat for one of my favourite birds – the Pied Avocet.

Having spent most of my life in KwaZulu-Natal and done most of my birding in lowveld areas, the Pied Avocet is not a run-of-the-mill sighting for me. As the name ‘Pied’ makes clear, this wader features just two colours – black and white – and yet the combination of them is so perfect, so crisply elegant and pleasing to the eye.

Added to this is the sight of their unusual bill – long, thin and upcurved – and their stately comportment, walking slowly through shallow water while swiping right … and left … with their scything bill to capture small crustaceans and insect larvae, which just makes them thoroughly interesting and pleasant to watch.

They have become particularly fond of artificial water bodies, especially saline or nutrient-rich ones. So sewage works have been a particular boon for this species.

And the Strandfontein Sewage Works, which are the central feature of the False Bay Coastal Park, situated between Muizenberg and Mitchell’s Plain, occasionally holds globally significant numbers of Pied Avocet – at times as many as 1% (550) of the African population, thereby qualifying as an Important Bird Area trigger species.

On this visit, on a lovely sunny evening in late March with a fresh breeze blowing, there were discrete handfuls of this nomad on the settling ponds.

With them were Blackwinged Stilts, also a member of the long-legged, long-billed Recurvirostridae family.

There are 20 different pans at Strandfontein, linked by a system of tracks which a normal sedan car can comfortably navigate, except sometimes for those next to Baden Powell Drive which runs right alongside False Bay and the ocean.

The pans have differing water-levels, some of them manually manipulated, which means they provide subtly different habitats – from reedbeds to large expanses of open water, both shallow and deep – and their different features range from artificial roosting platforms to well-vegetated edges, coastal dunes and sand islands.

This promotes a high diversity of species which is why 76 different waterbird and 18 coastal birds have been recorded at Strandfontein. And they are there in their numbers, making it a popular destination for large numbers of birders from all over the country. And every now and then a national rarity pops up; it really does feel like anything is possible on or above the pans or in the Cape Flats Dune Strandveld surrounding them.

My sightings at the end of summer were more mundane, but still enough to whet the appetite for future visits.

The near-endemic, plankton-loving Cape Shoveller can be uncommon elsewhere in South Africa, but is common in the sea-level freshwater wetlands around False Bay, and it was joined by other Anatids in Yellowbilled Duck, Cape Teal and Spurwinged Goose, while Kelp Gulls were common, flying over the coastal dunes and nearby dump site.

Lots of Hadeda and Sacred Ibis were along the fringes of the pans, along with Cattle Egret, Blacksmith Plover, Cape Wagtail and Grey Heron. Redknobbed Coots quietly munched on water weeds, Dabchicks appeared and then disappeared again as they dived underwater, and Whitebreasted Cormorants were standing around drying themselves before contemplating heading off to roost.

Cape Reed Warblers gave their rich, bubbly calls from inside the reedbeds, before one eventually came into view at the top of the stalks. European Swallows owned the skies above the pans.

The grassy areas where one enters the False Bay Coastal Park are also good for birding. A Jackal Buzzard was standing sentry at the entrance before patrolling for rodents in the verges of the tar road.

The road goes along the eastern end of Zeekoevlei, and has picnic sites underneath a row of Eucalyptus trees; a Pied Crow was flying around looking for scraps and even a Small Grey Mongoose came dashing from cover to see what morsels it could find.

The bushier areas mark the beginning of the Cape Flats Dune Strandveld, an endangered vegetation type unique to this area. It is prime habitat for the Cape Grassbird, an endemic skulker that is not often seen despite its long tail, but on this occasion I was sharp enough to be fortunate.

Karoo Prinia is another endemic and a habitat generalist as long as it has some shrubby thickets to dive into when disturbed, and it was spotted on one of the dune ridges close to the Grassbird.

A Blackshouldered Kite perched nearby and kept a beady red eye on proceedings.

Birders are well-advised to watch like a hawk in the False Bay Coastal Park because one will seldom be disappointed given the number of species that frequent this area. And there is always the possibility of spotting a rarity. That’s what I’ll be hoping for next time I’m there.

Sightings List

Jackal Buzzard

Small Grey Mongoose

Spurwinged Goose

Kelp Gull

Blackshouldered Kite

Cape Grassbird

Hadeda Ibis

Karoo Prinia

Pied Crow

Cattle Egret

Blacksmith Plover

Cape Teal

Yellowbilled Duck

Dabchick

Cape Shoveller

Sacred Ibis

European Swallow

Cape Wagtail

Whitebreasted Cormorant

Grey Heron

Pied Avocet

Blackwinged Stilt

Cape Reed Warbler

Redknobbed Coot

 

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