Birds and barbed wire

Birds and barbed wire – by Les Underhill

Barbed wire was invented in America in the 1860s, and used to keep cattle inside of camps, or outside of crops.

Within a few decades, farmers in the old Cape Colony had found a new use for barbed wire. In 1892, a civil servant in the Colony’s Department of Agriculture designed a vermin-proof fence that utilized closely strung and interlaced strands of barbed wire. He reasoned that if this were widely adopted, it would make the extermination of jackals and other “vermin” much easier. The farmers lobbied the government, and they were even provided with financial assistance to build jackal-proof fencing. Within the first decades of the 1900s, the “Fencing Movement”, aided and abetted by Parliament through an assortment of “Fencing Acts”, had successfully transformed the natural landscapes of South Africa into a patchwork mosaic of fields and camps.

A century has passed, during which jackals and other vermin have remained as big a problem as they ever were. But the barbed wire fences remain. Some are carefully maintained and others have rotten to rust. But they have undoubted been the catalyst that, over the past century, has altered the way South Africa looks.

Barbed wire along roads takes us back to its original purpose: keeping animals inside the camps. Here, barbed wire fences are both the bird photographer’s curse and the photographer’s blessing. The barbed wire either gets in the way, or it provides a perch out in the open!