GO SOUTH AFRICA:Birdwatching in South Africa, where biodiversity is not so much a scientific concept as a daily reality, is a joy, not least because you also see birds that turn up on Irish shores, writes Paddy Woodworth
FIRST IMPRESSIONS can be very deceptive, in birding as in everything else. We had spent our first days travelling in South Africa complaining that the Western Cape seemed more European than African. It was not just the fantasy-England suburbs, with names such as Cotswold Mansions. It was the impeccably groomed vineyards, the soft green escarpments, the wide sandy beaches. You might as well, we said to each other, be in Catalonia. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but we had come to find Africa, goddamit, and, though we hardly admitted it to ourselves, that meant we wanted a darker, stranger continent.
Then we got to Knysna and, for a precious hour, thought we had found what we were looking for. This seaside resort at the heart of the Garden Route is almost as European as Cadaqués, but its hinterland features the largest remaining patch of Afromontane rainforest in the region. It was big enough for Knysna's famous elephants to take refuge there from disturbance early in the last century. Big enough, indeed, for no one to be quite certain whether any of that original population remains there today.
We reached the forest edge as the evening light was failing. Ancient trees towered in majestic quiet, trailing hoary screens of creepers. The species list alone was pure poetry: Outeniqua yellow-wood, ironwood, stinkwood, bastard saffron.
Suddenly, the air above us exploded into a sound. It was as though slightly out-of-tune hunting horns were being blown by a gang of drunks: "Haa-ha-HAdedah . . . Haa-ha HAdedah." In the gloom we could barely make out great spectral birds as they flew in to roost in ragged flocks. But it didn't matter. Our skins were tingling. We had found, for a few moments, something of what we expected from the word "Africa".
It was somewhat to my chagrin that I soon discovered the aptly named hadada is as common as a magpie in the very suburbs I disdained. Far from being a bird symbolic of exotic wilderness, the 21st-century hadada can be found on any manicured lawn, complacently extracting fat grubs - brought close to the surface by fertilised sprinklers - with its long curved bill.
At first sight the hadada looks like an overfed, and rather grubby, curlew. But catch it in the right light and its dull plumage will shimmer into emerald and purple iridescence. Peer closely into that reptilian eye and it will reward you with a glimpse of ancient wildness, after all.
And when it joins a roosting flock in the evening, those wild cries are a reminder that another world does indeed lie beyond the electrified perimeter fences of the South African elites.
That said, a suburban garden can be a very good place to start birding in South Africa, a country where biodiversity is not so much a scientific concept as a daily reality. Without making any enormous effort, I have seen more bird species in a few weeks here than I have seen in Ireland in my entire life. I have seen three species of sunbird, sparkling little creatures rather like hummingbirds, on a single bush in my sister's small garden on the Cape coast.
Breakfast on the terrace of a friend's rather larger garden near Pretoria: a kingfisher the size of a small pigeon perches on the branch of a nearby tree. It sports a handsome brown hood, combed with grey, and vivid azure on the wings and tail. But its most striking feature is a thick red dagger of a bill. Like several of the South African kingfishers, the brown-hooded variety has little interest in fish but feeds voraciously on the insects, scorpions, and small lizards and snakes of the forest - and now the garden - floor. It is not above snaffling a sunbird when it gets a chance.
But it is hard to focus on the kingfisher, because a pin-tailed whydah is flirting outrageously through the foliage of the same tree. These whydahs would be dwarfed by sparrows, and look just about as dull - until the male goes into breeding plumage. It is not just the smart black-and-white bodysuit he puts on that is most fetching, nor even the smear of shocking red that appears on his bill. No, his glory is the unlikely addition of a tail perhaps four times the length of his body. Followed by a pair of eager females, he flounces it like a ribbon through the leaves, as showy in his own small way as a bird of paradise.
Few birds rival the Asian birds of paradise for jewelled colours, but one of them, the white-fronted bee-eater, is hawking its favourite insects from a nearby telephone line.
In the next hour a score of species pass through or over the garden, ranging from crowned plovers to emerald-spotted wood doves, from a soaring black-chested snake eagle to tiny blue waxbills scouring the ground for seeds.
There is a healthy animal population, too, in the same half-acre. I thought I saw an owl's eyes peering out from the kingfisher tree one evening, until it suddenly bounded away like a tiny squirrel. It was a bushbaby. "Africa" is always closer than you think . . . but, of course, the call of wilder places will draw most birders away from such easy feasts such as these.
The province of KwaZulu- Natal offers an intense biodiversity that makes my friend's Pretoria garden seem barely populated at all. This is true of nowhere more than Mkuze Game Reserve. More than half of South Africa's 850-plus bird species have been recorded in its relatively small but very varied habitats, ranging from acacia savannah to sand forest.
My guide was Patrick, a Zulu ranger from the nearby White Elephant Lodge, itself a rich haven for birds. His knowledge of the avifauna there was unrivalled, and he could call many of them down from the trees by imitating their calls. Yet he had never been to Mkuze, though his home kraal (a traditional African village of huts) was right beside its boundary. He was as excited as I was about the trip.
He was delighted to find that an old school friend, Jabulani, would be one of our (armed) escorts on the park's famous fig forest walk. Jabulani told me the guns were to protect us from black rhino. When his comrade stayed behind to guard my car, I realised the real threat came from bandits and poachers. Rhino attacks on unattended Ford Mondeos are rather rarer than hen's teeth.
You could hide an entire car easily among the sinuous roots of some of the majestic fig trees that towered over us on our trek. The birds were very numerous but often extremely hard to spot in the dense foliage. Even Patrick was flummoxed by some of them, which never turned up on his neighbouring beat. But he did recognise the distinctive calls of two of the least common residents, the narina trogon and the African broadbill, though they remained invisible behind the forest's veil.
Among the many birds we did see was one formerly known, rather wonderfully, as the green-backed bleating warbler. Its call quite eerily recalls the complaint of a very thirsty Wicklow lamb. Unfortunately, like nearly a third of South Africa's birds, it has been renamed over the past decade by experts with little imaginative flair. It must now be described as the green-backed camaroptera, which will never have quite the same appeal.
Other birds we found (or that found us) included the yellow-breasted apalis, the yellow- bellied bulbul, golden and forest weavers, blue-mantled crested flycatchers and paradise flycatchers.
The most spectacular was probably the large and powerful trumpeter hornbill. Its raucous calls make the hadada sound discreet. Elsewhere in the park we found its nests, holes in trees where the female is walled in with skilfully applied mud until the chicks are fledged.
One little bird, however, had me very puzzled for several minutes, precisely because it seemed very familiar. It was a willow warbler, one of the most familiar birds of Irish summer woodlands but completely out of context on its winter range among the lush greens of the African forest.
One of the great joys, in fact, of being an Irish birder in South Africa is that many of the birds you will see are migrants that turn up on our own shores as rarities. At White Elephant Lodge, for example, I spent happy hours on the Pongola River watching the high- stepping elegance of marsh sandpipers in crystal clear, sunlit waters. I may never be lucky enough to see them here - they are very scarce in Ireland. But if I do I will get a special thrill of recognition, and a sweet stab of nostalgia for Africa, as they move through the drifting mist of an Irish bog.
Birder's bible: how to work out what's what
• Austin Roberts died in 1948, but the book that still bears his name - Roberts Birds of Southern Africa- is not only still going strong but now exists in formats he could never have imagined.
T• he first edition, published in 1940, immediately became established as the indispensable authority on the birds of southern Africa, including Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe - though Roberts might not have recognised some of these countries.
• The seventh edition, from 2005 (John Voelker Bird Book Fund, £110 in UK), weighs more than five kilos, contains 1,300 pages and has a wealth of information on issues ranging from taxonomy to conservation. This is almost five times the weight of its predecessor, and marked a shift from a volume already outsize for a portable field guide to an unabashed definitive textbook.
• Other lightweight guides, such as the excellent one produced by Princeton, and known as Sasol(£19.99 in UK) in South Africa because of its oil-company sponsorship, was superseding Roberts among active birders.
• But Roberts had already produced a superb multimedia guide on CD-rom, with a PDA version. The latter enables you to broadcast any southern African bird call in the field - which often entices the bird to come and check you out. On your PC you can add photos to bird pages and make maps with personalised bird lists.
• Then, in 2007, Roberts issued a slimmed-down field-guide version of its doorstopper, simply called the Roberts Bird Guide(£16.99 in UK). So you are spoiled for choice.
Where to see birds in South Africa
• Kwazulu-Natal is the richest bird region of South Africa, and Mkuze Game Reserve (see main article) is the top spot for non-coastal birds.
• The nearby Ndumo reserve is also first class. White Elephant Lodge (00-27-34- 4132489, www.whiteelephant. co.za) is an excellent base to visit these parks, with very knowledgeable staff and excellent birding at the lodge.
• For coastal birds, try St Lucia Wetland Park and Kosi Bay.
• Botanists list only six floral kingdoms on our entire planet. Yet South Africa's relatively small Cape regions have a kingdom entirely to themselves, the fynbos ("fine-bush") biome, whose star plants include the Protea family.
• Fynbos is not rich in bird species by the standards of KwaZulu-Natal, but it holds a number of attractive endemics - species found nowhere else. These include the Cape sugarbird, the orange-breasted sunbird and the Cape rock-jumper.
• Helderberg Nature Reserve (00-27-21-8514060, www.helderbergnaturereserve.co.za), less than an hour's drive from Cape Town, is a delightful place to find some of these birds in spectacular but easily accessible scenery.
• Watch out for its very approachable (because rehabilitated) spotted eagle owls at dusk.
• If cranes and bustards take your fancy, you could visit the nearby farmlands of the Overberg or the semi-arid region of the Karoo.
• But these suggestions are only a minute selection of what's on offer for birders in South Africa. To get an idea of the scale and scope of what is available, with excellent background information, visit the birding-spots website on www.sabirding.co.za, which duplicates the options on Roberts's multimedia bird guide (see panel, left), as well as listing websites for the above-mentioned parks.
• See also www.eoearth.org/ article/KnysnaAmatole_ montane_forests.
Go there
British Airways (www.ba. com), South African Airways (www.flysaa.com), Lufthansa (www.lufthansa. com) and KLM (www.klm. com) all have connecting services to Cape Town, within a drive of Knysna. To move on to KwaZulu-Natal, White Elephant Lodge and Mkuze, take a local flight from George to Durban.