Week 01 - The trip Home

Sorry for taking so long with this post, there seemed to be problem with Blogger which looks as if it has been sorted out. I could not add or edit any blogs since the 6th Jan but it looks as if there were many people with the same problem. Hopefully it is resolved and I can keep you guys updated weekly again..

Week 01 birding was restricted to watching birds on the drive home. I'm getting quite good at identifying birds by jizz at 120km/h...no bragging intended (I probably mis-identified a few along the way). The bird list I compiled is quite varied, ranging from forest birds in KZN to grassland and water birds on the escarpment. All the typical roadside species were seen along way with 4 out of 6 Widowbird species identified, Long-tailed, Red-collared, White-winged and Fantailed were all seen from the car. The most noteworthy sighting being a huge mixed flock of Amur Falcons and Black-winged Pratincoles seen hunting over grassland between Warden and Villiers. JP will be jealous because we looked for the prats around Jo'burg on his last visit but couldn't find any. Maybe next time JP.



Amur Falcons





Black-winged Pratincoles


Another bird that we saw quite a lot of on the trip back was Spur-winged Geese, they seemed to be in almost every field we past. I wonder if the farmers were happy with that?




Spur-winged Goose

  Not much more to report from week 01 unfortunately. By the way I kind of cheated on the photos for this post because it is fairly difficult if not nigh on impossible to get good photos from the car at 120km/h so I used photos I had taken earlier on in 2010. Hope you don't mind, Toodles!!