Mkhuze Game Reserve 10/15-10/18--WHITE-FACED WHISTLING DUCK, CAPE GRIFFON, TAWNY EAGLE, GREATER PAINTED SNIPE, COMMON SCIMITARBILL, MALACHITE KINGFISHER, RED-BILLED OXPECKER +68 more life birds

CAPE GRIFFONS
This is the scene that really said "Africa" to me.

Photo: Shari Zirlin

We arrived at Mkhuze Game Reserve late in the afternoon of the 15th. While Kruger NP is the most famous of the South African parks, Mkhuze is probably the better spot for pure birding, encompassing savanna, forest, and wetland habitats. It is also huge. And rustic. We stayed 3 nights in an elaborate tent set up. Shari called it "glamping" but there was nothing glamorous about it to me. We had to fortify the tent against the monkeys, baboons and bush babies (a kind of lemur), with computer ties on the zippers of the front and the refrigerator door (outside) lashed shut. When we turned out the light it was the darkest black I ever experienced. Literally could not see my hand in front of my face. Monkeys, squirrels, who knows, we heard climbing on the roof of the tent. Kim said that one year an elephant charged one of the tents and skidded to a halt just short of demolishing it, so I guess we got off lucky. Plus, we heard a SPOTTED EAGLE-OWL early one morning.

You aren't allowed out of the vehicle at Mkhuze either, but there are places to walk and a couple of great blinds ("hides" they call them) at "pans" which are the watering holes you've seen on all those PBS nature programs. Look out one side of the blind (which are spacious) and you see a Cattle Egret sitting atop a hippo. Look on the mud flat in front of you and various sandpipers, swallows, and the maddening cisticolas are before you.

The pan we kept returning to, Nsumi, was fantastic for its waders and shorebirds. The better pan, according to Kim, we couldn't get to because it was closed for renovations. Sorry for the inconvenience. Of course, the birding all depends on the water levels and we were lucky that the pans had water in them at all. Last year was an horrific drought and there wasn't nearly enough water for the birds. At Nsumi Pan the standouts for me were
GREAT PAINTED SNIPE (a bird I somehow over looked when studying the field guide:

Photo: Shari Zirlin

and MALACHITE KINGFISHER,

Photo: Shari Zirlin

along with my fourth life species of whistling duck (goofy birds no matter on what continent you find them, WHITE-FACED WHISTLING DUCKS.

Along the roads we saw all kinds of raptors perched in trees or atop poles. TAWNY EAGLE, I thought was one of the more attractive raptors.

In the odd-beak category we had the COMMON SCIMITARBILL, with its beak drastically curved to get into the crevices of trees and pry out invertebrates.

Photo: Shari Zirlin

However, out of all the birds we saw at Mkhuze, my favorite was the RED-BILLED OXPECKER, related to the starlings, which makes its living riding the back of beasts and doing them the kindness of eating the parasitic insects that have burrowed into their hides. Oddly, the animals don't always appreciate having a tick pulled out of them with a sharp beak. One of the things that kept me somewhat interested in the mammals we saw was that I viewed them as movable habitat for oxpeckers, so anytime someone called out Zebra or Giraffe, if they appended "with oxpeckers" I'd take a more serious look.

After our 3 1/3 days at Mkhuze, we packed up yet again and headed north to the high mountain grasslands of Wakkerstroom.