666 species recorded at national birding day competition
Birdlife Lowveld members participated in a national birding day organised by Birdlife South Africa (BLSA).
MBOMBELA – BLSA’s 35th Birding Big Day took place last Saturday and this competition was open to the public.
A total of 273 teams took part.
Teams could enter either the open category or the community category. The open category teams were limited to four members, while the community category could include an unlimited number of participants. Teams had to register with BLSA before the event.
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The objective of the competition, which ran for 24 hours and was restricted to an area demarcated by a chosen centre point and circumscribed within a radius of 50 kilometres, was to encourage birding as a hobby, raise awareness of South Africa’s bird populations and also to raise funds for BLSA’s bird conservation efforts.
The recording of bird species identified has been made very much easier with the introduction of the app, BirdLasser. This app can be loaded free of charge onto a smartphone.
Birds are pre-listed and need a tick to register a sighting. This information was immediately transferred to the central computer and the team’s progress was updated.
BirdLasser websites were created for both the country as a whole and each province. As records were updated minute by minute, teams could plot their own progress as well as those of other teams in the province or country. The competition resulted in 666 species being recorded and 40 058 records being submitted.
The leading team was A Bowl of Corncrakes of Limpopo with 325 species, with Hamerkop of Mpumalanga and Zonke iNyoni of Limpopo in joint second place with 311 species each.
Zonke iNyoni was the 2018 winner and Hamerkop won in 2017. Other Mpumalanga teams with Birdlife Lowveld affiliations were The Stared Eagles and Brown Bus Birders with 203 species each, Swift-Swifts with 185 species, VierVees with 172 species, Pipit & Portret with 140 species and SABP2 – JoeAli with 135 species.
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