It was both an opportunity and a privilege when the Boland Region of the SANParks Honorary Rangers invited me to join them at their annual event at the Tankwa Karoo National Park. I had to sing for my supper, in the form of presenting an after-dinner talk without the usual crutches of a data-projector and powerpoint!
The Tankwa Karoo National Park was proclaimed in 1986, and consisted then of nine farms totalling 27,000 ha. In the subsequent 38 years, farms have gradually been bought, and the area now totals about 160,000 ha, and the SANParks Management Plan says that they are aiming to increase the area. It is the 5th largest national park in South Africa. The Kruger, Richtersveld, Kalahari Gemsbok and Addo Elephant National Parks have larger areas within South Africa.
The SANParks Honorary Rangers is an organisation which contributes to conservation in the national parks in a remarkable variety of ways. In the Tankwa Karoo National Park, Honorary Rangers has helped to establish and maintain hiking trails, published local interest booklets, erected eco-friendly ablutions at camp sites, and undertaken education camps for local schools.
Oudebaaskraal Dam, water feature of the Tankwa Karoo National Park
One of the features of the national park is the Oudebaaskraal Dam. Building started in 1964 and finished in 1968. It dams up the Tankwa River. When full, and in a semi-desert environment, this is a rare event, it holds as much water as Steenbras Dam, which was big enough to meet Cape Town’s water needs until the 1950s. It was originally built as an irrigation dam. But farming was a failure, and the area was incorporated into the national park in 2009. One of the things that SANParks normally does wherever it takes over land to become a national park is to try to rehabilitate the landscape to its original condition. This includes removing fences, demolishing buildings, cutting down alien vegetation, and restoring agricultural lands to their original state. Following that strategy, the first thing that SANParks ought to have done with the Oudebaaskraal Dam was to have used a truckload of dynamite and removed this blot from the landscape.
That is a tough conundrum, and the dam remains, with a shoreline totally about 15 km when full. As a result, a substantial proportion of the park’s birdlist consists of waterbirds which really ought not to be here!
Probably, none of these species would be present in the Tankwa Karoo National Park if SANParks applied its standard management doctrine! But wetlands are in short supply across South Africa, and so many have been destroyed that, on balance, it is a good thing that the Oudebaaskraal Dam was not blasted out of existence. Perhaps the trick that has been missed is to use the old irrigation system to create some artificial wetlands with ever changing water levels to provide really attractive waterbird habitats.
Big birds of the Tankwa Karoo National Park
It is hard to demonstrate, in a way that satisfies the editors of scientific journals, that big birds need large reserves. But it is kind of obvious. Big birds need large continuous territories, and lots of space for young birds to make a living until their are mature enough to hold territories of their own. So the Tankwa Karoo National Park is a good place to go to see big birds.
The biggest is Common Ostrich …
Secretarybird and Ludwig’s Bustard are certainly species that have occurred here for a long long time. The first sighting of the Booted Eagle in the Western Cape was made near Piketberg in 1963, and the first nest in the southern hemisphere was found by Rob Martin in 1972. Before that, all the birds in South Africa (in Africa, really) were assumed to be visiting migrants which bred in Eurasia. Over the next couple of decades, diligent searching showed that there were lots of breeding pairs in the Western Cape. Given that they were so seldom even observed during decades of fieldwork before breeding was proven, it seems likely that breeding started here in the 1960s, and that the number of breeding pairs increased quite rapidly.
Whereas the occurrence of the Booted Eagle is a translation between hemispheres, the Hadada is far less dramatic. It is an example of distribution creep. In the past half century, Hadadas moved westward from the Garden Route, becoming an everyday bird on the Cape Peninsula in the 1980s. It then turned northward towards Namaqualand but at the time of the first bird atlas, fieldwork 1987-91, the Hadada distribution map shows that it was still uncommon along the West Coast and adjacent interior. Now it is common here as far north as the Olifants River valley at Lutzville and as far west as Niewoudtville. Currently, it is spreading back eastwards across the central Karoo, using the farm dams as stepping stones. The Oudebaaskraal Dam must be a headquarters for this expansion.
From the perspective a moult enthusiast, the Hadada photo above is intriguing. There is a gap in the wing. This bird looks like it is moulting an outer primary of the right wing. But, alas, the photo below (and others) show that the left wing is intact:
Given that September is peak breeding season for Hadadas, it would be a surprise to find one moulting (because birds by-and-large avoid moulting and breeding simultaneously; they are both energy-demanding activities and are generally kept apart). Remarkably little is known about the moult of Hadadas, and photography of birds in flight is going to be the method of choice for collecting data. Alas, this record was a false alarm.
Pied Crows are bad news. In pristine times, in treeless areas, such as that of the Tankwa Karoo National Park, the only nest site for a pair of Pied Crows would have been a ledge on a rocky krantz. Telephone lines to farms and scattered windpumps provided huge numbers of potential nest sites, and this new resource became widely exploited. There is no doubt that Pied Crow numbers across the treeless Karoo have increased by orders of magnitude. They must be putting a huge amount of exploitation pressure on the environment. A handful of pairs have become tortoise-hunting specialists. There seem to be far fewer Pied Crows inside the Tankwa Karoo National Park than outside it. This number could probably be reduced further by removing the last remaining telephone poles and windpumps. Most of them are now redundant.
Little birds
For now, anything smaller than about a dove belongs here!
The bottom line is that birding in the Tankwa Karoo National Park is rewarding! The Honorary Rangers, working in seven teams, saw a total of 124 species. 29 of these were recorded by all seven teams, and 69 species were recorded by four or more teams. 23 species were seen by only one team! The numbers of species seen by the teams ranged from 63 to 85; that gives a pretty good idea of what you can expect a day’s birding in the Tankwa Karoo National Park to deliver.
Predicted bird for the Tankwa Karoo National Park
Sooner or later these palm trees near the Tanqua Guest House will host a colony of Palm Swifts. The distribution map for this species in the Second Southern African Bird Atlas Project shows that it is has reached little groves of palms over large distances. The nearest Palm Swift records are at Calvinia, Vanrhynsdorp, Tulbagh, Laingsburg and Fraserberg.
Non-birds
Biodiversity is more than birds!
This is not the national park to choose to visit if your primary interest is large mammals!
The larger mammals were mostly quite distant, and started moving on the approach of a vehicle.
… and, finally, a sneak peek ahead into the future …
On the drive out to Tankwa, I had a glimpse into the future of driving …
Thank you
I appreciated the opportunity to join the SANParks Honorary Rangers on their annual weekend to the Tankwa Karoo National Park. Special thanks go to Jacqui Badenhorst, secretary of their Boland Region, who did the formidable logistics for the weekend. Michiel Moll answered lots of questions. Richard Jackson shared his photos of the Booted Eagle, Secretarybird, Ludwigs Bustard and the whistling rat .
