BIRDS OF SOUTHERN AFRICA

February 2006

Following is a list of birds seen during our trip through Namibia and the Drakensburg Mountains in South Africa. Most of the reliable sightings (~90%) were made in a single morning, walking with bird expert Dave Johnson at Cavern Berg Resort in the Drakesburg.

This list is only about 80% of our total sightings. For the first part of our trip—particularly in Etosha—we couldn't find a bird book to help us. Even when we had one, we had the usual problems with little brown jobbies, weavers, which were too numerous to identify, and raptors, which were often too far off. Birds such as the European Starling I refuse to list but don't want to talk about it.

Photos are limited to those few birds tame enough to approach within the practical zoom of our camera. We are indebted to Arthur Westing for his excellent additional photos, to him and to his wife Carol, and to Dave Johnson in South Africa, without whom several more of our photos could have been identified only as "Definitely not chickens".

Later note: a local site originally provided further photos and info on each bird and I provided a link for each. However, they have since decided to use a service which charges, rendering the links inoperatives, so have removed them.