The Birding Blog — The Birding Blog

DID YOU KNOW?   In spite of it's top heavy appearance the beak of the grey hornbill is made up of a light skin of keratin overlying a bony support. The beak has lots tiny holes that are air chambers, resulting in the beak being incredibly light. The large bill may be the reason why hornbills have the first two neck vertebrae fused together. Nesting african grey hornbills are monogamous. When nesting natural cavities are used. The female lays two to four white eggs. The female undergoes a molt of all her flight and tail feathers at the time of...

The best sound to wake up to in the morning is the sound of birds chirping. To attract them to our gardens requires bird feeders, bird food, bird baths, bird houses and lots of indigenous plants and shrubs.   Once we have the perfect bird garden, there are a couple of ways to care for our birdies and to keep our feeding stations safe and clean. Bird Feeders Bird feeders can become dirty very quickly, especially when it is a very busy feeder. To reduce the likeliness of spreading disease: Remove bird seed debris daily. Old husks and seeds can...

Attracting a sunbird to your garden can stir up a lot of excitement. Who can resist watching that small, agile little bird, with its magnificent colouring and unique call. The question is, how do we attract them to our gardens? To start off with, sunbirds love the nectar of plants. People try making all sorts of nectar cocktails in an attempt to attract sunbirds, most of which are very difficult for sunbirds to digest. We are very much for nectar feeders, however, we believe in the correct nectar mixture. We wrote a blog post “6 Nectar Feeding Questions and Answers”...

We recently spent some time in the Kruger National Park. Along going on a game drive, we came across a group of Southern Ground Hornbills. While a traffic jam of vehicles stopped for a pack of sleepy lions, just a short distance away we had also stopped, but it wasn’t for the lions. Many shots were fired, camera shots that is, and we watched these amazing birds in total awe of them. These incredible birds inspired me to dedicate a blog post to them. Below are some Southern Ground Hornbill facts, as well as some of my Kruger photographs of them....

You may think that bullying is done on the school playground, but birds have their own bullies to contend with. We’ve discussed which birds can potentially become bullies and what can be done about these “Bird Bullies.” Bird Flocks I know “flocks” is a very broad term, and you are probably thinking “a flock of what?” Well, in our experience any group of birds that becomes too large seems to take over the bird feeders. Take for example, sparrows. A few of them are great to have, fifty of them and every morsel is eaten up, leaving nothing for the...