Protea Hotel, Johannesburg 10/12--HADADA IBIS, SPECKLED PIGEON, RED-EYED DOVE, LAUGHING DOVE, SPECKLED MOUSEBIRD, KAROO THRUSH, COMMON MYNA, CAPE WAGTAIL, CAPE SPARROW, SOUTHERN MASKED-WEAVER + 8 More Life Birds

LAUGHING DOVE and SPECKLED PIGEON

And that's just the parking lot of the hotel.

Our flight got us into Johannesburg after dark on the 11th, so it wasn't until 5 A.M. the next morning that I got my first life bird. I was standing at the window of the room when I heard what I first thought were crows, but the calls soon resolved to "Ha-Dee-Da, Ha-Dee-Da!" and I saw 4 or 5 of the onomatopoeiacally named HADADA IBISES fly across the lightening sky. The bird's common name is spelled "Hadeda" in my South Africa guidebook. Someone in the AOU (which is the list eBird uses) hears the bird differently. This is a minor example of what would be a chronic problem throughout the trip--conflicting names for the birds between what they're called in South Africa and what they are listed as in eBird's database. 

This was Mike's 4th trip to SA, so he was familiar with the birds around the hotel. We were warned by a couple of hotel employees not to wander too far from the hotel so we spent a couple of hours in the parking lot and in the street just outside the lot. While all the birds we saw are very common, the equivalent of what I'd see just walking around my own neighborhood, they were (aside from the Cattle Egrets, Glossy Ibis (!),Rock Pigeons, and House Sparrows), all lifers for me. 

The first bird I saw when we went down to the parking lot is an introduced species in the country, a COMMON MYNA, which Shari told me were every where and they seemed to be found anywhere there was asphalt. 

COMMON MYNA

There were 2 doves and a pigeon that jumped onto the list, SPECKLED PIGEON, RED-EYED DOVE, and LAUGHING DOVE.

RED-EYED DOVE

Just outside the fence we found my first SPECKLED MOUSEBIRD, my only KAROO THRUSH of the trip, and first of the ubiquitous CAPE SPARROWS (locally called "Mossies"). Mike, of course, was spotting and pointing out these birds to me, but I did manage to find one bird before he saw it, a CAPE WAGTAIL. (Get used to the "Cape" appellation, a lot of birds have it preceding their type.)

SPECKLED MOUSEBIRD

KAROO THRUSH

CAPE SPARROW (above)

CAPE WAGTAIL (below)

Probably the best looking bird we saw that morning was the SOUTHERN MASKED-WEAVER. There are a lot of weaverbirds in South Africa, many looking very similar and many associating with each other in large nesting colonies. If I lived there I would naturally spend the time sorting them all out until I was confident of i.d.'s on my own. But for this sojourn I mostly just asked which one I was looking at. In this case I could identify the bird by the thin red smear on its forehead.

SOUTHERN MASKED-WEAVER

I'm not going to put in lists for every entry (they would just be too long and a pain to compile) but for my first couple of hours on the ground and not moving more than a couple of hundred feet from the hotel, I think I got off to a good start:

Cattle Egret 2
Glossy Ibis 1
HADADA IBIS 8
Rock Pigeon 50
SPECKLED PIGEON 1
RED-EYED DOVE 2
LAUGHING DOVE 1

PIED CROW 1
WHITE-RUMPED SWIFT 1
AFRICAN PALM-SWIFT 2
SPECKLED MOUSEBIRD 3
SOUTHERN FISCAL 1
COMMON BULBUL (DARK-CAPPED) 2
BLACK-FRONTED BULBUL 1
CAPE WHITE-EYE (GREEN) 1
KAROO THRUSH 2
COMMON MYNA 3
CAPE WAGTAIL 1
CAPE CANARY 3
House Sparrow 4
CAPE SPARROW 6
SOUTHERN MASKED-WEAVER 2

In the afternoon we went back to the airport and took a short flight to Durban on Mango Airlines (before we left, I actually looked up the airline on the 'net to make sure such an unlikely named airline existed) where we were met by the rest of the group, including my lovely and much missed wife, Shari.  We also picked up a RED-WINGED STARLING in the parking lot. Starlings in Africa are a lot more interesting than the one that got introduced here from Europe.