Cart 0

The Birding Blog

The Urban Kudu

The Urban Kudu

Kudus love rose petals. I know this because I have seen them. I have an old uncle who owned a game farm near Nylstroom some years ago. His wife fenced off a 400m2 rose garden using an 8 foot fence – to no avail. The kudus cleared the fence with ease. If you were patient enough to chase them for a time by day, they simply seemed to return at night. Here it appears to me that there are two kinds of people – those who try to protect roses from kudus, and those who grow more roses to try...

Read more →


Songbirds

Songbirds

Several years ago we were on holiday in Plettenberg Bay, when one evening my wife found a young penguin that had been washed up to shore. The little fellow was exhausted and in shock. Our dinner plans were postponed, but to summarise, penguin volunteers were called (I prefer to view them as “penguin experts”), and the precious chap was saved. In fact we have rehabilitated and released many birds ourselves over the years including injured birds and abandoned chicks. None have given me greater pleasure than the Cape White-eyes, who regularly come back for the first 2 or 3 weeks...

Read more →


A New Visitor!

A New Visitor!

This morning broke to real palpable excitement in the household. A pair of cut-throat finches were bouncing around on the seed feeder! This is the first time we have ever seen cut-throat finches as far south as Pretoria, and definitely the first time in our backyard. Our previous sightings were Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe, with the most sightings in our Limpopo bushveld area. In fact the best ever was Marakele. I decided to research, and found increasing numbers of sightings in places like the Pretoria National Botanical Gardens. There even appears to have been one or two stragglers that were...

Read more →


Does the Blind Bird Find a Mealworm?

Does the Blind Bird Find a Mealworm?

Gary Player was notorious for doing the amazing, and sometimes “impossible”. Jealous contemporaries sometimes commented negatively, to which he famously said “the more I practice the luckier I get”. I have a friend who is a very good golfer and tends to get “lucky” very often. Every time he chips in from off the green, he irritates his opponents by saying “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn from time to time”. Can blind squirrels find acorns? I am more interested in our avian friends and ask – can a blind bird find a mealworm? The little nieces are very...

Read more →


The New Volga: Dreaming a Better Future

The New Volga: Dreaming a Better Future

  If you wish to spoil your senses, give the “Wolgalied” (from Der Zarewitsch by Franz Lehar) a listen. It tells the story of a lonely soldier overlooking the Volga River far from home. It was written in 1926. Fast forward 16 years, and a shattered 6th Army overlooks a hostile Volga River, lonely and far from home. The prophecy was fulfilled, and no-one even knew it was a prophecy. Our far-fetched fantasies of 2018 may also be fulfilled in a single lifetime. Will there be forests in the Amazon? Will the organophosphates have finally bleached and destroyed every coral...

Read more →

Sale

Unavailable

Sold Out