Month: February 2018
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27th February 2018 – Camps Bay
This was to be a non “nature” day but there were a couple of things of interest on our walk through Camps Bay this morning. We have only ever seen dassies on the top of Table Mountain so it was interesting to see them on the boulders in Camps Bay at the bottom of Table…
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26th February 2018 – Hout Bay and Boulders Beach
Today we had the best of the weather so far on our trip with lots of sunshine and no cool wind until the evening. We had a walk along the beach in Hout Bay in the early morning and saw our small cormorant (joined by a few others today) and a seal which came zooming…
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25th February 2018 – West Coast National Park Western Cape
A very full day visiting several hides in the West Coast National Park, 120 kilometres up the west coast from Cape Town. We reached the lagoon at high tide and so most of the birds were quite distant but we visited other hides where the birds were much more accessible. I still can’t believe how…
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24th February 2018 – Rondevlei Nature Reserve
This morning we visited the Rondevlei Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Cape Town. We arrived at the same time as a very excited school group and thought that our visit might be a disaster but we had a wonderful time with good sightings of a good number of species. There have been sightings of…
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23rd February 2018 – Camps Bay, Cape Town
Nothing terribly adventurous today – just a walk along the beach in Camps Bay to the next bay at Clifton. Masses of cormorants flying south and a few north – a mixture of Cape cormorants and a back bird with brown wings (probably a red-winged starling), a great black-backed gull, Egyptian geese which are obviously…
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22nd February 2018 – Hout Bay
In the morning we had a very pleasant walk along the beach at Hout Bay where we saw a number of gulls and a very small cormorant-like bird diving in very shallow water and a single swallow (one swallow doesn’t make a summer but it’s definitely summer here). Bird photographer in local camouflage at Hout…
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21st February 2018 – Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens, Cape Town
On our first full day in Cape Town we visited the National Botanical Gardens of Kirstenbosch – surely one of my top ten best places in the world. The gardens were as spectacular as ever and we had a few glimpses of birds on the coast road to Kirstenbosch (mainly cormorants) and at the gardens…
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19th February 2018 – nature reading
I have just finished reading Horatio Clare’s charming little book Orison for a Curlew about the (possibly) extinct slender-billed curlew. It’s a mix of travel and nature writing My photo and plate are taken from the entry about the slender-billed curlew in Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender-billed_curlew I so enjoyed reading this book and thought it would be…
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17th February 2018 – Stoke Park and Eastville Park
Circumstances and dismal weather have limited my sorties recently and so I enjoyed my walk through Stoke Park and Eastville Park this morning, especially as the weather was milder and the birds are beginning to sing (although most of the noise seemed to come from robins which were just about everywhere). In Stoke Park the…
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4th February 2018 – Siston Brook, Willsbridge
I saw a tweet (from Rojobus) about dippers (or the lack of them) in Siston Brook, Willsbridge and realised that the brook led to St. Anne’s Church (now famous for hawfinches and ring-necked parakeets) and thought I would have another go at seeing hawfinches. We had no luck but really enjoyed the stroll up from…
Martin's Bird Blog & Nature Photos 