Black-bellied Korhaan in Hwange

The Black bellied Korhaan is not a species that we see much here in Hwange  whereas the performances of the Red-crested are quite a common sight. You will appreciate my excitement then when yesterday I went down the road to see if i could see a lion and there performing on an ant-hill was this plucky male.
They make a really beautiful sound described as "Wwwwhhhhhhhaaaaaoooppppp!!!! by a very good friend of mine

Black-bellied Korhaan performing in Hwange

Needless to say that I forgot all about the King of the beasts and took a few images of this guy. It must have been quite a sight in itself because my bean-bag has had a huge hole worn throught the side by the big 400mm lens and I couldn't switch off my truck's engine for fear that it wouldn't start again!!
with popcorn seeds pouring out of the bean-bag i had to open the lens to its max at 2.8 and in rather grey light try and get a fast enough shutter speed to not capture the vibration from the engine.....

A real challenge but I managed to pull it off!

A Hwange rarity

Pelican Pete - Hwange

I have been touched by a tale of survival recently! The name of our hero is "Pelican Pete"
Pelican Pete arrived at a waterhole in Hwange several months ago, along with literally hundreds of others according to Hwange's own Santa....Mr B!

Pelican Pete not so much flying as plummeting!

To Mr B's surprise, the next day they had all flown away....well all but one! Pelican Pete had suffered an injury in the night and couldn't fly.

Well water was plentiful and "old Pete" was quite content until the dry season matured and his little pan was muddied up by hundreds of thirsty mammals. He was visited on several occasions by passing pelicans but they never stayed longer than a day or two before heading to some distant horizon!

Poor Pete has been seen running full-tap into gale-force winds with wings open in the hope that he too can head for the horizon but gravity has other ideas!

I spent a few days in that area and watched with dismay as his little pan dwindled!

His neighbours all want him too! but watch this space for news on
Pelican Pete!

Pelican Pete and his neighbours

                                                              The Hwange Birder

Post Cecil-mania....back to birds!

A Martial eagle dominates a puddle in Hwange

 Well, for those of you that know me, you will realize that my absence from my birding blog has probably been due to the phenomenon now called "Cecil-mania". It has been a roller-coaster of interviews and emotions but it is finally settling down and I can start to catch up on those items and pastimes that have taken a back seat. Just in time mind you as the migrants are returning to Hwange.
I have seen YBKs already and watching out for the others.

An Orchestra of Trumpeters in my garden in Mabale communal lands

As we approach our driest park of the year we are seeing huge numbers of birds at our birdbaths and elsewhere in our rural garden in the mabale communal lands with the highlight being anything up to 50 trumpeter Hornbills in our pod-mahogany and Mukwa trees in the early hours!

Glad to be back.......
                                                          The Hwange Birder

C212 again and more details of its movements

C212 - tagged Cape Griffon seen again at Ngamo

Yesterday I saw C212, the tagged Cape Griffon, again at Ngamo and this time all bloodied up from feeding on an elephant carcass with many other vultures.
I have sent this sighting in to add to the list of sightings that this bird is racking up!

Shortly before I saw it at Ngamo last week it as seen in the Limpopo region: This from their records

This bird was also spotted by Joseph Heymans 14/05/2015 248558.6 282124.3 On the sprinbok plains near Settlers in Limpopo Province.

We will keep you updated if we see it again

                                                                    The Hwange Birder 

Latest news on the tagged Cape Griffon in Hwange

This is the latest on the tagged Cape Griffon

Many thanks to Vulpro and the various people who responded.

David Pretorius 8:13am Jun 26 C212 was ringed G31869 and tagged as a juvenile on 24/01/2014 at Blouberg Nature Reserve in the Limpopo Province as part of EWT vulture monitoring project. There is a suggestion that the Cape Griffons we see here in Hwange are all dispersal aged birds exploring.                    The Hwange Birder

Another tagged "Capie" in Hwange

Just a day or so ago I was looking for lions in the Ngamo area of Hwange when a large vulture caught my eye. Its wing seemed to shine and when I put my bins on it I realised why......it had a tag!
I took a careful photograph from about 100m just in case i couldn't get closer but in hind sight I needn't have bothered because with a careful approach I managed to get underneath the tree it was in.
The 400mm lens did a superb job of getting me a shot clear enough to see the number on its yellow wing tags and as luck would have it.....I had 3G coverage on my cell. I Googled "Tagged Cape Vultures" and got a contact address and send in my re-capture sighting. Within an hour or two I had a reply from Kerri Wolter (Vulpro) to say that that bird had been rehabilitated and released from the Blouberg nature reserve in South Africa. More info is being collected for me on the other sightings but in the mean time I have looked back in my photos and found another Cape Griffon that I saw in Hwange with tags. That one too was a rehabilitated bird from the same area.

Cape Griffon (tag number C212) seen in Ngamo, Hwange

                                                                    The Hwange Birder

Perfect exposure!

Perfect exposure makes a happy photographer

Like a unicorn (or a pangolin for that matter) perfect exposure has been the object of my photographic search for ages now. I have looked high and low for situations where the light is strong and rich and the subject has that lovely soft feel. To capture that is a whole other story even when you do manage to find the situation. Well,  a couple of days ago I managed a series of shots that I just love. These birds were all roosting in the shallow pan at Ngamo in Hwange and I realised that if I was sitting with them as the sun rose...I would be onto something!

The photo above was taken with a Canon EOS 5D with a 400mm f 2.8. ISO 500 and 1/60sec for those of you who are interested.

                                                    The Hwange Birder

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!

Love at first sight!

 I sat and waited for a lion to drink after 5 whole days on a buffalo carcass. These beautiful Hooded Vultures flew down ahead of him and had a very welcome drink after 5 days of fruitless waiting.
I love the look of the first one as it seemed to be the first time it ever set eyes on itself!

Nothing washes down carrion like an ice cold drink!

Vulture drooling!

                                                                     The Hwange Birder

Bird on fire!!

Bird on fire!

So large are ostriches that I often don't think of them as birds!....sounds daft I know but at over 2 m tall they are in a league of their own. This female just couldn't resist getting my heart racing as she and her companions headed past me and into the sunset......

Nando's sponsorship photo or what??


                                                           The Hwange Birder

Combat

This morning I was tracking lions as usual when I stopped to glass over a small natural pan near the road. There were a couple of Hammerkops, Black-winged stilts, Greenshanks and Wood sandpipers.
I got the old 400mm lens trained on the woodies as there was some posturing etc going on and then took a number of shots as two of them had a brief but violent fight.

One "Woodie" dunking another

Incoming!

Combat at the pan

And here comes a flying round-house kick!

For this sequence I had the camera set on manual with an ISO of 1600, 1/4000sec shutter to freeze the action and f11 to give me sufficient depth to keep the birds in focus.

                                                                   The Hwange Birder

Hwange update:

A flight of Caspian plovers shoot over nyamandhlovu pan and past a drinking kudu!

Hwange is in its wet season now and it really has not been a good one. We had almost non-stop rain in December and then apart from some really violent storms.....we have had almost nothing since.
I have not seen the termite alate events as I have come to expect, neither the numbers of predatoy raptors here to feed on them!

But there is still some water about and at certain pans you are still seeing good birds. Just yesterday I saw the Caspian Plovers (shown in the image above) as well as Black-winged Pratincole, Ruff, Wood sandpiper, Black-winged Stilt and Egyptian goose at Nyamandhlovu pan.

We are expecting a hard dry season now as we can only really look forward to rain in about November. I will keep you posted

                                                                      The Hwange Birder

Bird Photography - Back-light!!

Today, on the way to drop my boy at school, I passed a field and was stopped in my tracks by the beautiful scene in the second photo!.
Red-billed Quelea were flitting around in the most stunning light and I took a few decent shots.
The typical light a photographer looks for is with the sun behind you and the subject is nicely lit. This can be great light for wildlife photography, especially in the late afternoons or early mornings when the colour temperatures are a little warmer. The image below is one such image (also taken this morning). It is a Ruff and you can't fault it as a decent representative shot.

Ruff in perfect light!

 But......if you are looking for something more artistic and dramatic in your photography then I cannot over emphasize the beauty of "back-light". Back-light does what it says on the tin and when the light is coming straight at you and your camera. For subjects like birds wings, grass heads and the long hair of a lion's mane......this is what you want and it is dead simple to achieve.

for best results set your metering to "spot", meter off the brightest part of the frame like the grass below these birds and then use your exposure slider to go -1 or -2 stops in the under-exposure direction. A fast shutter speed for freezing action (in this case 1/2500sec)

Back-lit Red-billed Quelea. 

 If I had to sacrifice photographic situations.....this is the type I would keep.

Good luck and get back-lit!

                                                              The Hwange Birder

Colour!

Not that I believe in such things.....but I remember as a child my mother went to a fortune teller. She came back and told us that my twin brother would be rich and look after the whole family (we still wait with baited breath every lottery night!) and that I would have a career where I would look for colour in everything! That struck me because I have always valued my eyes more than any other organ!! (keep it clean!)

Three-banded plover and a painted snipe

A rainbow bursting!

I marvel at the colours in the bird world an remember that it is the females that are responsible for it.....so a big cheer to all those others that are looking for colour in their daily lives, oh and to my twin...I await your call!

                                                                 The Hwange Birder

Rainbow after the storm!

A drongo and a juvenile African Golden Oriole add colour to a rainbow

Let's meet in a rainbow

Four African golden Oriole's and a drongo enjoy a rainbow

Yesterday we had a storm at home the like's of which we rarely see in a landlocked country!!
Trees were blown down and snapped and more than one person hid under a table during its arrival. We had 25mm of rain in about 20min and we thought the world had ended!

Then when all was said and done....not one but two rainbows appeared in the most beautiful sky and a family of African Golden orioles added their colour to an already amazing scene.

                                                                 The Hwange Birder

Mob justice!

The act of mobbing a predator is a behavior that is common to many species and found in many families of animals. I regularly watch impala in the open walking slowly after a lioness or zebra following and then chasing wildogs. The theory says, "if you let a predator know it has been seen, it won't try hunt you!". There secondary purpose of this behavior (accompanied by a lot of alarm calls) is to notify others of your kind that a predator is around. As a birder you will be rewarded if you learn the alarm calls of the birds in your area and even mimic them to call-in birds.
Yesterday I heard the familiar alarm call of the African paradise fly-catcher in my garden and raced off to see what he had spotted. To my delight, in the perfect light, was a Lizard buzzard being dive-bombed by a pair of flycatchers.

The male Paradise fly-catcher mobbing the Lizard Buzzard

Then the female!

another one for my "Birds and Lions challenge"

A lioness watches a passing swallow

I know its been fairly slow but you try getting images with both lions and birds in the same frame!
That was a challenge I set for myself a while back and here is another.

So below is the complete series to date:

                                                                 The Hwange Birder

The importance of Peanut-butter!

It is this time of year that I harp on about the importance of Termites to the Hwange ecosystem.
Indeed I feel it is impossible to overstate the importance of these little peanut-butter flavoured beasties!
Just yesterday I was tracking for lions and the sun was shining. We had had almost non-stop rain for weeks and now was the termite's chance to spread wings and look for mates. The air was once again filled with Alates and the predators that eat them!

some unusual predators too......here is a Grey Hornbill taking one in the air.

There were doves and finches, sparrow weavers and white-crowned shrikes as well as kites and eagles, rollers and guineafowl.

A Yellow-billed Kite searches for termites

Hundreds of Bee-eaters cruising for peanut-butter filled termites!

This is the stuff of birder's dreams......
Get out there if you are in Southern Africa...better still, come to Hwange and see it for yourself!

                                                                       The Hwange Birder

Quirky birding!

You will notice that my page header has changed to a new Quirky version of the photographs I have posted over the year. This was put together by a really wonderful illustrator at http://www.quirky-ink.co.uk/ whom I have had a long association with. Follow the link and see what they can do for you!

Lush abundance!

Vultures flee from a protective lioness

Hwange is looking beautiful now as we have had nonstop rain for a couple of weeks now. There are natural pans everywhere and the expected migrants are here and widespread. Its a season of plenty with a noticeable change in the animals behavior as they can relax a bit and enjoy life.

Still I wait for those large termite emergence s when the Amur Falcons, kites and eagles congregate in their thousands to catch the new Kings and Queens on the wing so watch this space for pictures soon.

All the best for 2015

                                                            The Hwange Birder

Stuff yourself!

Well guys, it is very nearly Christmas! I saw these Ground Hornbills this morning on the way to work and thought the bright colours were appropriate for the season.

Go on......one last mouthful on Christmas day!

Down the hatch!

Unless a Pectoral Sandpiper or that Grasshopper Buzzard pitch up you won't hear from me until after Christmas so have a good one and I wish you all a Bird-filled 2015!

                                                      The Hwange Birder