We had another exploratory ringing expedition to the Nuwejaars Wetlands Special Management Area (SMA) from Friday 30 May to Wednesday 4 June. This is the BDI’s sixth ringing visit to this area. The previous ones were in October and in November 2024, and in February, March and April this year. This is our first ringing trip here in early winter, and we wanted to get a feel for what birds we could anticipate ringing at this time of year.
We stayed at our usual accommodation at Hazevlakte. This is what you see when you arrive:
… go through the unit, and this is the view that greets you:
… the units look out over the Nuwejaars River. The lawn is kept short by a flock of multicoloured sheep!
The view upstream (i.e. westward) from the stoep looks towards the floodplains which the Nuwejaars Wetlands SMA has cleared of aliens, and is now an irresistible magnet for waterbirds (and bird ringers).
Looking downstream, the building in the distance across the river, between the two windpumps, is the headquarters of the Nuwejaars Wetlands SMA:
These are the offices of the team that coordinates all the conservation activities across all the farms that have joined the Special Management Area. The most important of these activities is the clearance of alien vegetation. There are excellent insights in this eight-minute video.
That is enough of the context. Now, on to the birds …
On arrival late on Friday afternoon, around sunset, we put up a few mistnets on the werf at Hazevlakte, so we would be ready at dawn on …
… Saturday
On Saturday morning we ringed in and around the Hazevlakte werf. In spite of a stiff breeze and a nip in the air, we caught 25 birds. The very first bird was a retrap. We had ringed this Fiscal Flycatcher here on our third visit on 24 February this year:
On Saturday afternoon, we put mistnets up in the floodplain of the Nuwejaars River at Moddervlei …
Sunday
… and we were back before dawn on Sunday morning:
… and put more nets up …
… and some more …
… so that there were lots of mistnets! But conditions were less than perfect for mistnetting. In spite of this we ringed some impressive birds. For example, first bird was an African Snipe:
… and here is a view of the patterned wing and tail, something that only ringers get to see properly …
During the course of this morning, we caught the-species-of-the-expedition:
Burchell’s Coucals don’t easily get caught in mistnets! Here is a different angle on the same bird:
The next really special bird was Black Crake:
The eyes and legs are red, and the bill is a shade of yellow reminisicient of plastic toys!
Monday
Monday morning was spent at a patch of planted proteas adjacent to some good-quality fynbos.
There were proteas in bloom:
… and, yes, there were Cape Sugarbirds breeding:
This is the wing of a male Cape Sugarbird. Primary 6 has a big notch in it. There are 10 primaries, and the outermost, Primary 10, is small. So Primary 6 is four feathers in from the outside. Primary 7 also has a notch but it is much smaller. Female Cape Sugarbirds also have these notches on their primaries, but they are quite small. It is these features of birds that only ringers really get to see.
Cape Sugarbirds breed during winter. The broodpatch of this female is evidence that she is breeding:
The brood patch is an area of bare skin which birds only have when they are incubating eggs. The skin is in contact with the eggs, transferring warmth to them. Feathers provide excellent insulation, so if birds had to incubate their eggs through their feathers, the job would never get finished.
There were lots of other species in the protea patch, including this Cape Weaver:
This bird is a male. Only male Cape Weavers have this marie-biscuit eye colour. Adult females have brown eyes, and the brown colour contrasts with the black pupil. Very young Cape Weavers have darkish brown eyes, which hardly show any contrast with the pupil. Ageing of birds-in-the-hand is one of the skills you learn when you become a bird ringer.
A species which is now common in the eastern half of the Western Cape, and expanding into the suburbs of Cape Town, is the Fork-tailed Drongo:
There are almost invariably trees in the places where it occurs, and often these are alien eucalyptus trees, such as flowering gums.
The pain threshold of a trainee ringer is being tested here by a Southern Fiscal!
… if the beak of a fiscal gets a good grip on you, it can draw blood. You don’t want to be an insect with its circle of vision!
Tuesday
One of the objectives of this expedition was to explore new ringing sites, so on Tuesday morning our focus moved to a new access point to the floodplain of the Nuwejaars River about halfway between Hazevlakte and Moddervlei. The big discovery was that there are multiple potential ringing sites along a section of the floodplain at least a kilometre in length. So we will never have to go back to the same site more than once on any ringing expedition. Bird-of-the-day for Tuesday was …
… sorry, not was, but were, two African Rails!
We also trapped this Blacksmith Lapwing, which had a spur two-thirds as long as a finger-nail:
With a spur this vicious, this lapwing is almost certainly a male. We also had a …
… couple of Malachite Kingfishers. Spectacular birds in the hand. It is hard to believe that the infestation of alien invasive wattles was cleared out of this part of the floodplain only six years ago:
Wednesday
We had a couple of hours of ringing back at the werf at Hazevlakte, around our accommodation before we packed up and left. Birds-of-the-day were a pair of …
… Cardinal Woodpeckers. Male on the left, female on the right!
Wrap-up
Bird ringers need fuel. So we had some excellent braais:
We turned a generous supply of freshly harvested apples into …
… baked apple.
This table summarizes the ringing effort. The numbers for each species include both newly ringed birds and retraps of birds ringed on the previous five expeditions to the Nuwejaars Wetlands SMA. The number of retraps among the 112 birds was 15. Species underlined and in red have structured species texts on the BDI website; click on the species, and you are linked to the species text.
| Species | Number |
| African Rail | 2 |
| Black Crake | 2 |
| Blacksmith Lapwing | 7 |
| African Snipe | 1 |
| Speckled Mousebird | 1 |
| Malachite Kingfisher | 2 |
| Cardinal Woodpecker | 2 |
| Fork-tailed Drongo | 1 |
| Cape Bulbul | 10 |
| Sombre Greenbul | 1 |
| Capped Wheatear | 1 |
| Lesser Swamp Warbler | 5 |
| Little Rush Warbler | 1 |
| Long-billed Crombec | 1 |
| Bar-throated Apalis | 2 |
| Grey-backed Cisticola | 1 |
| Levaillant’s Cisticola | 3 |
| Fiscal Flycatcher | 3 |
| Cape Batis | 2 |
| Cape Wagtail | 3 |
| Southern Fiscal | 5 |
| Cape Sugarbird | 2 |
| Southern Double-collared Sunbird | 2 |
| Cape Sparrow | 1 |
| Cape Weaver | 26 |
| Southern Masked Weaver | 16 |
| Southern Red Bishop | 6 |
| Yellow Bishop | 1 |
| Cape Bunting | 1 |
| Burchell’s Coucal | 1 |
| Total (30 species) | 112 |
The croplands of the Agulhas Plain in particular, and the Overberg in general, have become home for large numbers of South Africa’s national bird, the Blue Crane. A big flock flew over our accommodation at Hazevlakte early one morning:
Thank you …
Thanks to Karen Neethling for the use of the units at Hazevlakte. Thanks to Con Neethling and Liohan Gilomee for access to their farms for ringing. Thanks to Ross Kettles and Erica Brink at Nuwejaars Wetlands for their help with the planning, and arranging access to the farms. Greatly appreciated.
Thanks to all the photographers.
Video!!
And if you’ve not yet watched the video about the work of the Nuwejaars Wetlands team, here it is again! It is actually only seven minutes and 28 seconds long!
Stunning article, and incredible work being done by the BDI team!!! Well done, and thanks for sharing it with us!