South Africa Birding Adventure: A How To Guide

Edging along the dirt path through the thorn scrub forest, I could almost see the watering hole in the distance. The early morning sun was starting to warm my back, and I unzipped my lightweight jacket but did not take it off. A cisticola rattled, unseen, in the nearby weeds. My friend Neil was a few steps up the path (as usual), and already peering through his binoculars. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the dry vegetation was bathed in the golden light of an July winter morning. “I see some blesbok, and some wildebeest… and I think a Marabou Stork,” whispered Neil. Three days earlier I was packing my bags in summery Seattle. Now I was exploring the wildlands of the Nylsvley Nature Reserve in South Africa’s Limpopo province. There was a rustling through the trees, a stone’s throw distance away. I froze. Neil glanced up from his binoculars. There was silence. Then came the crashing sounds of a large animal moving towards us. I caught a glimpse of something dark and shaggy bounding in our general direction. An 7-foot male ostrich burst onto the path, gave us a quick look, and then slipped away back through the forest. My eyes were big as saucers, my mouth had formed a round “O” shape but no sound had escaped my lips. I looked at Neil, whose face mirrored mine. Then he grinned, and said, “Welcome to Africa.”

When I told some of my friends that I was planning an independent birding trip to South Africa, they were quite surprised. How will you know where to go? How do you know where to stay? How do you know what birds you’ll see, or how to identify them? Is it safe? How will you get around? While an international birding trip, like our visit to South Africa, certainly requires some advance planning, it’s not a particularly difficult task. And traveling by yourself or in a small group can be hugely rewarding and much cheaper than going with an organized tour. In this post and the ones that follow, I’ll explain how I planned and executed my recent birding trip to South Africa.

The first step is to figure out if you are travelling alone or going with a group. For this trip, my traveling companion would be Neil Hayward, famous birder, author, adventurer, retired biochemist, and international man of mystery. I first met Neil during my big year in 2013, and we spent four memorable days birding Nome, Alaska. In 2015, we birded our way across Costa Rica for two weeks in August.

Neil checks all of the boxes for a birding buddy. He is a brilliant birder, adept at spotting skulking individuals and ID-ing cryptic species. He can survive for days on a diet of dried almonds and coffee, and is comfortable driving all manner of vehicles on both the left and right sides of the road. His boundless energy and enthusiasm are matched only by his encyclopedic knowledge of ornithology and his dry but hysterical sense of humor.

The next step was deciding on a destination. Neil and I talked about a number of different options, including Peru and Ecuador, southeast Asia, Australia, and South Africa. I perused the eBird.org website, using the Explore Hotspots feature. This function allows you to see where other people have submitted checklists, and color-codes the established hotspots according to the number of species which have been observed there (as recorded on eBird). Higher numbers of species diversity is indicated by warmer colors. Thus, if you want to see a lot of species, it helps to go someplace red and orange on the maps.

Central America was promising, but we just went there in 2015. Peru and Ecuador were strong contenders, and we debated about planning a trip there.

Southern and southeast Asia were also very promising. We investigated several countries in that region of the world, but ultimately decided that this was not the time for them for several reasons. (One reason was that our travel window in July was extremely hot and/or rainy in many of these destinations.) Eastern Australia was tempting, but both Neil and I had been there before, and we decided to save that for another trip.

And then there was Africa, a continent that neither of us had visited. After some research, we settled on South Africa. The country has a mix of many different ecosystems hosting a huge array of avian species. Visiting South Africa is very safe and relatively inexpensive, and the people there are very friendly. Their infrastructure is excellent, with good roads and lots of birder-friendly places to stay. There are also excellent field guide and bird finding books, and a lot of information on eBird and other websites about where to go and what to see. It was now time to begin to plan our trip in earnest, which is the topic of my next post.