Tag Archives: listing

Oribi Mom

Oribi Mom: Seven Birds a Week Challenge 2024 – Still Twitching

“Seeing a fantastic golden-breasted bunting two weeks in a row on our farm would normally have been amazing, but I can only log it once!”

Little Oribi bird watcher.

June 13, 2024

For about 20 weeks, I’ve been all self-important because my kind brother-in-law invited me into a very exclusive birding challenge. Me?

A committed non-twitcher who doesn’t really have time to devote to such whimsies right now? I said yes without hesitation because, well, I’m a bit competitive.

Enter the Birding Competition

It’s a WhatsApp group. It started with about 29 people from vastly different backgrounds – another mom, PhD students who live in the Kruger, a certain famous ex-weatherman, someone in Holland, stats enthusiasts, and so on.

All of us started together on January 1, united in one goal – find seven new birds every week that you haven’t seen yet this year. That’s one new bird every day. You can’t list the bird a second time in the year. Also, you have to have actually seen the bird in the week that you submit it.

For example, if you happen to see nine cool birds this week, you can only submit seven of them. To use the other two, you’d have to see them again the following week.

Easy, right?

Doesn’t Oribi Gorge have 250+ bird species listed? That’s at least three-quarters of the year I can stay in this challenge.

Wrong.

Stay Alive By Birding, Birding, Birding

The limit of being able to list only seven birds in a week and having no carry-overs makes this a lot harder to do.

Also, January is in South African summer, when there’s an abundance of birds on hand daily. By April or so, those birds have often migrated over to another country.

The group had submitted manually and tried to police themselves with not repeating birds. The integrity has been impressive.

My bird-loving brother-in-law has also committed time to do this admin every week, so he’s keeping things going in spreadsheets and automated bird lists.

Someone also added a stats site so that we can see cool figures, like the number of unique species logged by the group (750+ already).

I like birds. I like stats. I like travellers. I like competing. It’s fun.

But my time is almost up with not being able to travel out to birding sites. I’m too busy at home. Seeing a fantastic golden-breasted bunting two weeks in a row on our farm would normally have been amazing, but I can only log it once!

How long will I last in the 7 Birds a Week group? Stay tuned.

Still, what a way to spend these last five months. I’ve intentionally looked out of my busy life and noticed what’s out there under my nose – daily. It’s rather beautiful.

Published here.

Oribi Mom

Oribi Mom: Mammal Watching Dreams That Could Come True

“When we came home to South Africa, it was like a warm hug, filled with hadeda and trumpeter hornbill cries, screeching francolins and twittering prinias.”

Mammal watching fun.October 3, 2023

Did you know that mammal watching is now a thing in the world? Not the safari kind we’re so privileged to have as part of growing up in South Africa, but the cousin of bird watching with lists and databases and counts and tours.

I love birds, but I’m not technically a twitcher that’s accumulating species on my life list. I haven’t seen even 1,000 of the 11,000 bird species that we have on the globe. Maybe one day.

But, this mammal watching thing is another exciting discovery for me. There are around 6,000 mammal species on earth. Lots of them are hundreds of different rodents and bats, but many of the big ones are more well-known.

South African Birds and Game Reserves Are Truly Something  Special

I’ve always loved our trips to game reserves. It’s the one thing I sorely missed when we lived in South Korea for a few years.

Aside from the magpies that supposedly eat children’s teeth (apparently, the Tooth Mouse doesn’t know where Korea is), there wasn’t much going on in the way of wildlife in South Korea. Very few birds. One dead snake. A lot fewer insects than I’m used to seeing at home, too. It felt a little sterile at times, and not in a good way.

When we came home to South Africa, it was like a warm hug, filled with hadeda and trumpeter hornbill cries, screeching francolins, twittering prinias, and the boo-boo-boop of the beautiful bou bous that like to wake up my babies in the late afternoon.

I missed our butterflies and our funny-looking grasshoppers. I missed the duikers that graze on the pavements in the cities, and the knobly warthogs that zip around with their tails up through the farms. There’s so much life here.

All We Need To Do Is Start Looking Around

Investigating the mammal watching thing has also made it even more exciting to realise how many animals are right here. South Africa has a ubiquitous striped weasel. It’s everywhere but nobody sees them much because they’re shy. Just imagine what we could find in our slice of the gorge here with some heat sensors and very large camera zooms!

Aside from more large and venomous creatures than we might care to admit, there may just be hundreds of mammals all around us, hiding in plain sight. I’ll try to open my eyes a little more while I’m running or out with the dogs at the waterfall. I’ll listen for the rustling and look up when the puff backs chirp their alarm calls. That’s how they told us about a boomslang the other day.

I could see 6 000 species of mammals and 11 000 species of birds in my lifetime. How amazing! All I need is free time, a boatload of money for travel and equipment, and a bit of luck. But maybe I’ll start with a subscription to National Geographic or something. And some more walks down into the gorge forests below my house.

Published here.