March 2019 - Colourful Birds of Africa
On Friday 1st March, we listened to a delightful talk about the Birds of Southern Africa by Richard Veitch, a member, with photographs from over 20 years of travel with Carol, his wife, to Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, Zambia, Zimbabwe and over 40 trips to South Africa and the Kruger Park. All of the photos he showed had been taken by himself or Carol.
Richard & Carol are Honorary Rangers of the South African National Park which enables them to raise funds to help anti-poaching. Southern Africa has an extremely wide variety of birds with over 950 species. Richard showed some videos of birds that they had taken - with some spectacular, weird noises made by them! Richard covered a range of spectacular birds from raptors, waders, specialist birds, colourful birds, lbis (little brown jobs!). The largest bird is the ostrich which produce from one male and two or more females up to 20 to 30 young, but because they are unable to fly, they are easily predated. Often the brood is wiped out completely.
The smallest bird is the bronze mannikin which weighs only 7 to 12 grammes. The heaviest flying bird is a Kori bustard which can be up to 40 kgs. They walk about in savannah areas, eating snakes, lizards, etc. and tend not to fly unless pushed but can take off vertically. The most numerous birds are the red-billed Quelea who continually fly around and never seem to sit still.
Raptors are eagles, hawks, vultures and any meat-eating birds. Richard showed lots of beautiful photographs of these birds which had all been taken in the wild by them. He showed an amazing photo taken in the Kalahari Desert of a tawny eagle sitting on a dead Kori bustard which it had killed which was 5 to 10 times its own weight. He showed a photo of a short tailed bateleur eagle - known as a snake eagle because it doesn't have feathers right down his legs.
Richard showed magnificent photographs and gave many anecdotes of kites, hawks, pale chanting goshawks (known as the Kalahari chicken because they are so common), honey buzzards, falcons, vultures, eagles, owls, storks, herons, spoonbills, plover/lapwings, crowned cranes (the national bird of Uganda), hamerkops, weavers, kingfishers, firefinch, shrikes, sunbirds, warblers, hornbills, hoopoes, korhaans, parrots and more.
Lots of long distant migrant birds arrive in Southern Africa from as far away as the steppes in Russia, from Europe and even curlews from Norfolk! Swifts and swallows migrate there in the wet season.
Richard played some typical African music and singing and ended the talk by showing a video clip of Carol sitting on the sand in Botswana with ten meerkats sitting and scrambling all over her which caused lots of laughter. The cutest one was standing on her head being the look out! The members thoroughly enjoyed the talk and the beautiful photographs and several questions were asked of Richard about the birds and his cameras.
Diane Stoner: Speaker Coordinator.