Martial eagle catches a helmeted guineafowl but loses it to a black-backed jackal
Martial eagle catches a helmeted guineafowl but loses it to a black-backed jackal During October, 2022, I was lucky enough to spend 4 days in Letaba Camp at Kruger National Park with a bunch of other birders as part of an event organised by the park’s Honorary Rangers. The birding was lead by Prof Derek […]
12 BILL DESIGNS IN BIRDS
Birds’ bills have evolved to serve various functions beside the procurement of food. Bills are also used for carrying nesting material when building a nest made of twigs or weaving an elaborate nest (weavers) or constructing a mud pellet nest (swallows). Birds use their bills in defending themselves against other birds or predators. Bills are […]
Swifts and Swallows: Convergent Evolution in Action
Swifts and Swallows: Convergent Evolution in Action I live in the Hoedspruit area of Limpopo province of South Africa, and every summer, our skies are full of agile and fast birds flying around picking insects out of the air. In the dying days of our summer, some such as the barn swallow, muster in large […]
Out of the blocks with a bang…
We’re now 2 months into the year, with a pretty explosive start to the rarities scene. On Birding Big Day on 28 November last year, a team in KZN picked up a gull at St Lucia estuary, only reported 5 days later to the disappointment of local birders, who were unable to locate it again. […]
The Rules of Twitching!
Here in Southern Africa, the start of 2021 has been a special twitching season. Over this period a host of good rarities have showed up in many parts of the country, most notably the Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu- Natal. This was the case even before the arrival of Tropical Cyclone Elouise – which added […]
Basic evolutionary biology for birders
The video contained in this page was a webinar on Learn-the-Birds in October, 2020. Birds have played a critically important role in the origin of the theory of evolution by natural selection, and continue to play a significant role in both our understanding of evolutionary biology and some of its core controversies that continue to […]