South Africa: Early Morning Bird Twitchers

Early start this morning, even earlier as Tiny decided to meow at 5am this morning. After getting up and opening doors for her so that she could wander home and making a fuss of her it turns out she just wanted the company. To a lot of people that would be irritating, to me it was a little bit of home. Well apart from the fact that Honey normally paws me round the face to wake me up.

So this morning we were out the door by 6:30am so that we could do a bird survey. We heard a lot of birds rather than actually seeing them (thank god Liam knows the different bird calls). We were out for a couple of hours before the rain turned up. I managed to get some good pictures of the Village Weaver's and the Egyptian Geese. But we could hear the calls of the "Black Collared Barbet, Folk-Tailed Drongo, The Hoopoe, The Cape Turtle Dove and the Southern Boubou to name but a few.

We headed back to the house and started work on our presentations which we will be delivering to the local School in Colenso on Saturday. Well Leanne and I did. Nicole and Christina had a cat nap. I am getting quite into mine. It started off being about the difference between white and black rhino, and then I have started talking about poaching. Some of the articles I read made me feel quite sick. Rhino poaching is rife again due to the fact that China and Vietnam seem to think that rhino horn is a remedy for everything including fever and cancer. Science has proven that it has no medical benefits. The article below was particularly horrible;
http://www.savingrhinos.org/rhino-extinction-crisis.html

We then headed back out to do some more soil corrosion control. Another truck full of hay and we went back to finish off the tree we hacked down. The best bit was throwing the bits of branch down the hill. If anyone had been watching it would have looked like a cross between the highland fling and the poo sticks.

After lunch which consisted of a meatball and cheese toastie all round we headed back out with Carolynn to do a giraffe survey. It took us a while to find them and on the drive round the reserve Carolynn attempting murder whilst driving. To avoid a rut in the road she veered to close to a tree and nearly knocked Christina out. We thought about all pitching in and buying her some 4x4 lessons. Anyway, after Leanne had pulled herself together and stopped laughing we then found a lone male giraffe which we followed around for an hour whilst every other minute making note of what he was doing. To be fair most of the time he was looking at us wondering why the hell we were following so closely. After disturbing his afternoon tea we headed home.