There have been two phenomenal birding sightings in our area this last month. One was on a telephone line, and one was in a puddle.
I’ve been off social media for a while trying to eke out time for my many commitments as a mommy to three little people.
Scrolling steals too much of that, which means I haven’t seen the South Coast Birder’s group in a while. I miss it.
Anyway, the first sighting was by yours truly. A casual drive-by and a glance up at a telephone wire revealed a turquoise shimmer on a biggish little bird, undoubtedly a roller.
We get quite a few European rollers here over the summer. I love to admire these rather impressive and beautiful birds whenever they pop up.
Maybe because I always used to love seeing the lilac-breasted rollers in the July holiday visits to the Kruger Park as a child.
They would be shining in stunning purple and blue on top of a brown bush, a striking contrast that’s not easy to miss. So, seeing rollers in my backyard as an adult has been rather special.
But at the last minute, I saw this one jump and turn around. As it faced the other direction, I saw long tail streamers behind it, with little rounded bits on the end. I gasped a little. It was truly spectacular, but I wasn’t aware of why. I didn’t know that European rollers had long tails like that! Wow.
It turns out they don’t. I drove home, chatting to the kids, looking for reedbuck, jackal buzzards, water mongoose, and tractors like we do every day.
We spied vultures above Leopard Rock. We saw a jigaduza (a Bell loader) that always gets my boys very excited.
So, when I got home and remembered to look at my birding app, I was shocked to find that what I had seen was not, in fact, a European roller at all. I wouldn’t have known that it wasn’t one of those gorgeous blue birds so common on our telephone wires in the summertime if I hadn’t driven past at the exact moment it jumped up and showed me its spindly tail.
It was a racket-tailed roller. And it was hundreds of kilometres south of where the map distribution indicated it should be.
I couldn’t believe it. I even messaged a birding fundi to check that I wasn’t going mad. I wasn’t.
There was apparently a sighting in Harding a few years back, but it was still incredibly rare to see it here. It was also my first time seeing one.
Maybe, I should be travelling with my camera in the backseat instead of chattering farm boys shouting with delight at the tractors, TLBs, and cane-loading machinery we pass.
Oh, and the other sighting was by one of the farmers down the road who saw another wayward bird, the African crake.
Birder’s eat your heart out in Oribi Gorge, hey!
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