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 Englebrecht from
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
I am making this post not because I have some beautiful photos that will win awards, but because I want to show how photography can be used under tough conditions to tell a story. Telling stories is what makes me want to find what I call ve
The wood kingfishers: jewels of the bushveld Visitors from Europe are often surprised when visiting this part of the world when they learn that we have so many species of kingfisher (10 species in South Africa), and that more than half of
Back in June, if I was writing this I would have said that two species of leaf warblers were known from South Africa. However, this changed in July when a single wood warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix) was found at the lovely Sefapane Lodge
The helmetshrikes comprise one of the most distinctive groups of birds that you find in the Hoedspruit area where I live, and throughout the South African bushveld. They are never far away, and family groups are often seen on their own or as
Oxpeckers and mammals – a relationship only found in Africa Everyone knows oxpeckers, those strange birds that hang around on mammals and make their living eating parasites, dead skin and blood. Watching them go about their business on mam
Birds’ nests are so diverse. The tiniest birds can build the most intricately woven nests that are well concealed and camouflaged and yet the large raptors can just pile together a lot of twigs out in the open in a tree or rock ledge for
Most people are familiar with the nest parasitism – or brood parasitism – that is shown by our cuckoos, such as the Jacobin cuckoo and Diederik Cuckoos, where the birds lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species. These other species,
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, mu