Thursday and Friday this week required me to travel to Kimberley to attend a meeting of the Northern Cape Raptor Conservation Forum. This forum was the brainchild of Mark Anderson and Abrie Maritz almost 17 years ago and aims to provide a forum to discuss and plan relevant raptor conservation issues in the Northern Cape with input from the full spectrum of organisations and individuals concerned, including important tole-players such as Northern Cape NatCon, SANParks, EWT-BoPWG fieldworkers and utility companies such as Eskom whose operations impact on raptors in the province. The forum gathers twice a year and I attempt to attend at least one of these meetings if possible as it also allows an opportunity to catch up with both of the senior field staff of the EWT-BoPWG, Abrie Maritz and Ronelle Visagie who work in the Kalahari and eastern Karoo respectively. The meeting was held at one of the De Beers properties, Dronfield Farm, situated just outside Kimberley in the southern Kalahari Sandveld and one of several sites where good numbers of African White-backed Vultures breed in good numbers in the Camelthorn-trees occuriing on the site.
Sunset in the southern Kalahari, Dronfield Farm outside Kimberley
Ronelle came to collect me from the airport early on Thursday morning and I felt a lot better after a good breakfast, considering that only 2.5 hours of sleep was possible the night before when Thea and I attended a CATS show at Montecasino in support of BirdLife SA and only got home close to midnight! Fist stop was a meeting with Law Enforcement officials of NCape NC, but we managed to get any queries sorted in good time to the beenfit of all fieldworkers in the NCape. The rest of the day was spent waiting for vultures to oblige and be captured in the mass-capture facility kindly built by the Hawk Conservancy on Dronfield. When there was no action by about 3pm, I suggested to Ronelle that we go for a drive on the reserve. Needless to say, we found good numbers of birds at one of the waterholes on Dronfield, about 5kms from the capture site! We counted no less than 54 African White-backed-, 7 Lappet-faced- and 6 Cape Vultures at the site. No birds were kind enough to have themselves captured to be fitted with sarellite ptt's to follow their movements.
Cape- and African White-backed Vultures at waterhole, Dronfield.
That evening, we met up with some members of the Forum as well as staff and volunteers from The Hawk Conservancy in the UK who had travelled to Kimberley to participate in the annual ringing and tagging of vulture nestlings and who had also been sitting at the hide and monitoring activities at the mass-capture facility in the hope to catch some birds to with with satellite tracking devices to follow the movements of these birds as part of our studies of the movements of these birds, for the entire day!. At the time of writing this, the team, working with Mark Anderson and his team of local volunteers, would have completed the first day of ring and tagging nestlings on the property. Sadly, no birds were captured at Dronfield during my stay there, but there is good potential to do a sucessful capture there in the near future. To make up for the fruitless effort spent on the vulture capture, we had a great evening of socialising and talking raptor and vulture conservation. It still amazes me how people with common interests can get along like a house on fire without having met before and it was only lack of sleep that finally forced me to retreat to bed at about 10.30pm, totally knackered!
Socialising with members of The Hawk Conservancy Trust
On Friday morning, I left the guesthouse we were staying at early to visit Kamfersdam just outside Kimberley on the national road leading north to Johannesburg. This site is world-renowned for the establishment of the first man-made breeding island, established by friend and colleague Mark Anderson with the support of large business in Kimberley about 2 years ago. The site has been a great success and several thousand Lesser Flamingo pairs have bred successfully on the island since, making it the first substantial breeding site for this species in South Africa and the third most important breeding site for the species globally. This site is however under considerable pressure from sewage effluent and other developments which have received extensive coverage in the local and international media over the last 18 months. This resulted in Mark resigning as Ornithologist at NCape NC, but also contributed to him being offered the position as Chief Executive of BirdLife South Arica about a year ago. For more informatio about the site and any issues, have a look at http://www.savetheflamingo.co.za/
Lesser Flamingoes feeding at Kamfersdam with breeding
island in the background
The Forum met on Friday morning and our fieldworkers and SANParks were also able to discuss and sort out some challenges with regard to the two research projects we have initiated this year at the Kgalagadi TFCA and the recently established Mokala National Park, south of Kimberley. With the vulture still not obliging by about 3pm, Ronelle finally dropped me at the airport and I returned to Johannesburg late afternoon.
As usual, there were lots of other birds to be seen and recorded in and around Kimberley and I was able to confirm my first records of both Eurasian Bee-eater, African Cuckoo and Rufous-cheeked Nightjar at Dronfield for the summer. many of the resident birds were actively breeding and nests of Ashy Tit, Red-eyed Bulbul and Golden-tailed Woodpecker were easily located. I was also able to photograph a pair of Greater Striped Swallows collecting mud at a waterhole to build their nest.
Greater Stripe Swallow pair collecting nesting material
The co-operative work between the Hawk Conservancy Trust and Mark and his team form EWT-BoPWG/BLSA has already paid good dividends and I am sure that it will go from stregnth to strength. Here to hoping that there will be sufficient time for me to participate in the entire weekend of fieldwork at Dronfield next year!
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