From my Hide: The Dead Tree Society
David Holt-Biddle enjoys a bird party and some other wildlife from his Hide.
UP until just a few days ago we had a huge dead pigeonwood tree in our garden (I say ‘had’ because it has since been cut down and carted off). Anyway, we were sitting in the Hide one day when we noticed the beginnings of a bird party in the pigeonwood, we called it the Dead Tree Society (with apologies to Hollywood).
It started with a puffback shrike, a spectacular bird and one that we have seen quite a lot recently. He was followed by a forest weaver, then a Cape glossy starling. A fork-tailed drongo chipped in, then a yellow weaver, a black-collared barbet followed, a red-winged starling and finally an LBJ (Little Brown Job, in other words, unidentifiable).
Elsewhere in the garden we could see and hear a golden-rumped tinker barbet and a black-eyed bulbul. They were all chirping, cackling, singing and what have you at the same time, an extraordinary performance. Sadly, I fear the Dead Tree Society has left us along with the dead tree.
On a very sad note, we had a strange incident in the Hide the other evening. We suddenly realised there was a bird in the house, so we opened all the windows onto the Hide and rounded up our visitor. It eventually flew out through the French doors and then immediately tried to fly back in through the window. We managed to stop it and closed everything, but it kept flying into the glass of the windows and the French doors. It was at this stage that we identified it as a juvenile Natal robin.
It was fluttering all over the place and eventually flew up to a fishing basket hanging next to the ceiling in a corner, unfortunately a corner also occupied by a nest of our common or garden wasps. The little bird was flapping around up there and must have flapped into the wasps’ nest because in an instant it fell to the deck, thrashed around for a very few seconds and then was dead.
The message is clear, don’t mess with wasps. Actually, our policy is that if they don’t disturb us, we don’t disturb them, but this was an unpleasant incident to witness, but as I said to my wife, simply nature at work.
And more birds, we (the Trafalgar Conservation Group) took part in a most interesting exercise the other day, a shorebird survey initiated by Birdlife South Africa and conducted by the local branch, Birdlife Trogons, down here. The survey was of parts of the KZN coast, but Birdlife Trogons teams covered much of the coastline from Kelso in the north to the Umtamvuna River mouth in the south. We covered the Trafalgar Marine Reserve from the Mpenjati River mouth to Centre Rocks near Marina Beach.
The tick list was extensive, with lots of gulls, terns and white-fronted plovers, quite a few African pied kingfishers and even a giant kingfisher, a fish eagle, quite a few cormorants and African black oystercatchers and a woolly-necked stork. All this and a walk on the beach. Thanks, Trogons. Cheers!
