BIG BIRDING DAY ON UKUWELA

 
 

Follow in the footsteps of Paul Danckwerts, Wild Tomorrow’s new field guide and research coordinator, as he writes about his incredibly busy day in the bush at our Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve in South Africa, competitively spotting birds as part of Bird Life’s annual Big Birding Day. Together, Paul and the “Wild Tomorrow Watchers” team logged confirmed sightings of 222 individual bird species in under 24 hours - witnessing the incredible diversity of bird species at Ukuwela.

 

The mud flats section of our Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve is often thriving with wetland bird species.

Birds are considered an ecological indicator of ecosystem health, their presence and species richness serve as an expression of environmental integrity. Every year, Bird Life South Africa, the only dedicated bird-conservation organisation in South Africa, hosts their annual Big Birding Day (BBD).

The objective of Big Birding Day is to record as many different birds as possible in a twenty-four hour period within a radius of either fifty or six kilometers through visual or audio confirmation. Through the collective effort of birding enthusiasts across South Africa they have compiled sightings data from forty consecutive years. It is an immensely valuable dataset, an electrocardiograph of South Africa’s ornithological pulse.  

In 2024, three hundred and thirty three teams participated in the competition. Each team uploaded their sightings to an App called BirdLasser which displayed the data in a leaderboard format to keep track of the day's progress in real time. Only free-flying birds constituted a sighting and the majority of the team members had to agree on any given sighting or bird call. Teams were encouraged to limit the use of callback (playing a recorded bird call to attract its real life counterpart), preferably avoiding the tactic altogether especially when birding in a nature reserve or national park and/or targeting threatened bird species.

One of our resident Grey Waxbills - often a sought after species and sighting.

Stick a pin anywhere on South Africa’s map and the birdwatcher is likely to encounter a variety of unique and interesting species, so diverse is the country in its natural habitat and variation in elevation.

In both the fifty kilometer and six kilometer radius categories all participating teams in 2024 collectively recorded 44,197 sightings of 670 different birds in a single 24 hour period from midnight on December 6th until midnight on December 7th across South Africa. We decided to name the 2024 team from Wild Tomorrow, comprised of myself, our Reserve Manager Kevin Joliffe and intern Oliver Pritchett, the Wild Tomorrow Watchers. We naturally tried to stay as much as possible within the bounds of The Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve (GUNR) in Northern Zululand. We know from our bird list compiled since 2017 that we have 428 birds that call Ukuwela home, both resident and migratory. Our team ultimately placed 6th in the province and 25th in the country, a testament to the extraordinary species richness of the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve and especially because with the exception of three species logged in a pan off the R22 highway further north, we had actually remained within a radius of six kilometers. The days’ exertions essentially served as a proverbial litmus test on the diversity of bird life protected by a reserve whose ultimate objective is the expansion and preservation of KwaZulu-Natal’s hallowed and highly threatened wild spaces including the critically endangered dry sand forest. 

Wild Tomorrow’s Reserve is a motley collection of land with a varied history of land-use bridging the Isimangaliso Wetland Park to the east, one of Africa’s largest estuarine systems and UNESCO world heritage site, to the Munyawana Conservancy, 30,000 hectares of big five country in the west. Due to its fortuitous geographical location, it encompasses an array of different habitat types; open grassland, savannah, shady Tamboti and Acacia thickets, wooded drainage lines and vleis all grouted together by Fever Tree Acacia and sand forest. The Mzinene River serves as the main water source but both natural and manmade waterholes and dams pepper the bushveld. The sand forest, not to be mistaken with dune forest, occurs only in fragmented strips on the low inland dunes of the Maputaland coastal plain which stretches north into Mozambique. Despite its comparatively small area, its importance to conservation is significant, hosting a variety of rare bird and mammal species, such as the Suni antelope. Due to anthropogenic disturbance such as subsistence agriculture and the ever-increasing demand for traditional medicine, wood and building materials, little sand forest remains outside of protected areas. Not much is known about the ecology of dry sand forest let alone how it relates to birds but through an annual record of bird sightings and vegetation surveys, conservationists at Wild Tomorrow can start to monitor the heartbeat of this unique and irreplaceable plant community albeit on a localised scale. 

The Mzinene river, home to a big population of White Breasted Cormorants that use the trees as roosting sites.

On the tail end of what had up until that point been a very dry summer, reaching two hundred and twenty two different species in twenty four hours was a big accomplishment. We started our Big Birding Day at 03:00 and began by combing some of the more open savannah with spotlights on our way to the wooded banks of the Mzinene River in search of any nocturnal birds such as Water Thick-knees, Owls and Nightjars. We stopped to listen at two dry pans but heard nothing, a foreboding prelude to the long day ahead. We slowly traversed the GUNR eastwards along the river en-route to the floodplains where the Mzinene drains into Lake St Lucia; a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance and one of the most important breeding areas for waterbirds in South Africa. Stopping at intervals we gradually entered the birding fray; the continuous churring of the Square-tailed Nightjar, a White-throated Robin-Chat heralding the onset of dawn, dozens of White-breasted Cormorants preparing for their morning commute to their feeding grounds on the lake to the east. At one point we walked through a tunnel of Phragmites australis towards a pan usually frequented by hippopotamus, unintentionally flushing a flock of Spurwing Geese. In their fright, the big geese woke up the riverine neighbourhood driving a Black Crake, Little Bittern and African Jacana from their hiding places within the reeds. 

Further downstream we stopped in the depths of a Fever-tree Acacia (Vachellia xanthophloea) forest and listened for the fast, ascending, flog-like, purring trill of the Scaly-throated Honeyguide, an inconspicuous bird that will readily fly five kilometers in search of an active beehive. A sizeable section of river frontage on the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve is dominated by the Fever-trees, a habitat often frequented by calling males that have been known to advertise from the same area for over two decades. Later in the day we heard the percussive klinking of the lesser Honeyguide and the bisyllabic whit-purr call of the Greater Honeyguide; a bird shrouded in bush lore due to its habit of guiding humans to bee colonies.  

As first light we enjoyed a coffee in a thick band of mature, unspoiled coastal sand forest to a raucous cacophony of bird song beneath a swaying canopy of Lebombo Wattle (Newtonia hildebrandtii) trees. Like sand through an hourglass, we recorded bird after bird; the querulous call of the Yellow-bellied Greenbul, the bubbling warble of the Eastern Nicator, the loud clapping of the Green-backed Cameroptera. Deciphering individual calls amongst the constant muttering and mimicry required an experienced ear. On a game path through the undergrowth the subtle trills of the Pink-throated Twinspot, the sibilant sip sip of the Neergaards Sunbird and the rapid tok-tok-tok-tok of the Rudd’s Apalis checked three of the areas restricted-range species of the South East African Coast in quick succession. A Pigmy Kingfisher hawking insects over a small pool of still water amongst numerous butterflies soon followed.  

An African Marsh Harrier sits camouflaged in tufts of grass in the wetlands.

The Senegal Lapwing commonly found in dry open savanna, preferring short grass.

 With the sun perched a little higher in the sky we marched across alluvial soils to the melodious whistle of Black-crowned Tchagras, and trudged through knee high grass towards a shiny shimmering sheen of shallow water recording Swallows, Martins, Collared Pratincoles and a lone Marsh Harrier. Met with a feathery white and pink mirage of hundreds of grunting flamingos, mooing pelicans and a moving mass of waders, we settled down with our binoculars and bird books for a lengthy debate. Was the throat lightly steaked or barred? Were the lores dark or pale? Is that a Green Sandpiper or a Common Greenshank? Bird species belonging to the order Charadriiformes, more commonly referred to as waders, can be particularly challenging to differentiate. After identifying what we could, Ruffs, Shovelers, Pied Avocets, Plovers, Sandpipers, Terns, Grebes, Ducks, Herons and Wagtails we moved further inland through golden grasslands in search of Pintailed Whydah, Widowbirds, Waxbills and Pipits. Waves of Red-billed Quelea rolled over the veldt hoovering up grass seeds while Yellow-billed Kites and European Bee-eaters scythed their way through the clear sky in search of food. We also sighted a pair of Broad-billed Rollers atop a stand of dead trees, one of their known nesting sites.  

 

Jacobin Cuckoo, one of the many migratory birds present in our area during the summer months.

By mid afternoon our progress had slowed, and the competing teams were pulling ahead on the leaderboard, so we began to sieve through our collective knowledge in the hope that we hadn’t overlooked any species or habitat. We had yet to see any Hamerkops, Vultures, Dark-backed Weavers, White-necked Storks nor African Broadbills but having unsuccessfully looked in all the likely places we decided to search a specific section of woodland for Woodwards Batis, considered a near endemic species to the area. After some coaxing, admittedly the only time we used the callback approach, a pair of little birds fluttered out of the undergrowth with their repetitive but distinctive who calls. We then checked for Red-breasted Swallows as they busied themselves building their muddy nests within the road culverts before scanning a prominent stand of Southern Lala Palms for a resident population of African Palm Swift. Another area specific bird we managed to log, and the last one for the day, was the rather ominous call of the Buff-spotted Flufftail. A notoriously difficult bird to see due to its preference for dense cover but we heard it by listening near a prominent marshy sea of Phragmites during early evening. 

 

From the loud near constant emphatic whistling of the Gorgeous Bushshrike, one of the most strikingly beautiful birds in Africa, to the iridescent sunbirds positively dripping from the yellow flowers of the Natal mahogany trees, the diversity of birds on the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve is undeniable. Perhaps forty years from now, while looking at the timeline of Big Birding Day data collected on the Greater Ukuwela Nature Reserve, we’ll see an overall increase in avian species richness; a consequence of the soil, forest and habitat restoration efforts of today. 

Words by: Paul Danckwerts
Photos by: Chantelle Melzer

View our full list of sightings for Birding Big Day below:

 
Wild Tomorrow Fund