Blackbird Singing In The Dead Of Night

Photo post time!

Before our late May trip to the United Kingdom, we'd taken just two very short trips in 2026: a long weekend in northern Arizona and a work-from-hotel most-of-a-week in New Orleans. For each of those trips, I pre-blogged an introduction to what I planned to be two incredible, multi-site birdwatching experiences. I was thinking roadrunners, condors and evening grosbeaks in Arizona and painted buntings, roseate spoonbills and pelicans in New Orleans. I even started one of those two posts with a question if every trip from now on needed a birdwatching post.

They didn't happen. Don't get me wrong, we birdwatched on both trips. But for whatever reason (and truth be told one of the reasons was that the main trail in Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge in New Orleans was closed), we didn't have an incredible birding experience in either spot. So no birdwatching post in Arizona and no birdwatching post in New Orleans. Nature doesn't always cooperate.

That had to change in England and Wales. No way was i going birdwatching away from home on three straight trips without having a treasure trove of bird pictures that I could no way, no how get at home. So I adopted a strategy that I thought could not fail: go birdwatching a lot. Like seven birdwatching excursions in a 16 night trip. It worked!!!

Rose-ringed parakeet, near Wormwood Scrubs, London.

Taking time out of a trip to go birdwatching seven times in a single vacation may seem like a lot, but most of these were either early morning walks or nice-to-haves on our agenda. Meaning we would squeeze them in if we could on an already packed day's schedule. Clearly we did some squeezing, although we had to swap out a couple of spots that were more local to our hotel and likely less productive overall. You can't always get what you want, right? 

Having said that, among the days "climbing" mountains, exploring castles, walking sheep and navigating canals in Wales, we did plan one full day dedicated to birdwatching on Skomer Island. This was our intentional birdwatching splurge on this trip requiring a two hour drive each way (including a "required" 30 minute early arrival time) and a boat trip from the mainland to the island itself. 

Let's start our birdwatching narrative with Skomer.

So what's so great about Skomer? Puffins are what's so great about Skomer. Like 52,000 plus puffins. And yes, I know we've been puffin watching in both Maine (not great) and Scotland (awesome!) in 2021 and 2022 but we can't resist a day seeing puffins. There's no way you can take a bad picture of a puffin. It's just not possible. These birds are so tame. They have no fear whatsoever of humans so it's not unusual to have a puffin land inches from where you are standing and head to their burrows. Or even just stand around right next to you. It is a super, super intimate experience. It took us walking like more than half of Skomer island (the perimeter loop on the island is about 6 kilometers) to find the right spots, but once you get there, it's completely worth it.

Skomer, by the way, is a commitment. You get dropped off in the morning and your return boat is five hours later. So don't get bored after about an hour because you are not coming back to the mainland for a while. There's also no food and limited water and bathrooms on the island. Be prepared with Tesco meal deals or whatever else you need to keep yourself going.

Puffins. No bad pictures. It's not possible. I'm telling you. 

Puffin-wise, I'd put Skomer below Lunga Island in Scotland that we visited in 2022. The puffin population on Lunga, while smaller by far, was more concentrated in a single spot which meant you never missed an awesome opportunity. On Skomer, things were a lot more spread out. More puffins total but over a much bigger area. We were also about three or four weeks later on in the year at Lunga when there was far more puffling-feeding going on and meant puffins flying back from the sea with mouthfuls of sea eels. Not so much of that at Skomer. Still, by the few pictures above, clearly we found some good looks at puffins. 

Where there are puffins on an island, there are inevitablly guillemots (what in the United States we call common murre) and razorbills and for sure there were plenty of those on Skomer as there were on Lunga four years ago. But Skomer's much bigger size and geographical diversity separated itself from our time on Lunga in one significant way: more total bird species. We found a treasure trove of other birds on the island, including sedge warblers, northern wheatears, meadow pipits and a white wagtail, along with a pile of various gull species. 

There are also about 350,000 breeding pairs (not a typo) of manx shearwaters on ths island. That's more than half the worldwide population of manx shearwaters on a single island off the coast of Wales. So did we see a ton of these birds? No, we did not. In fact, we didn't a see a single live manx shearwater during our time on the island because they are nocturnal and live underground. The island is riddled with burrows requiring a strict stay-on-the-path rule on the island, lest we end up crushing a manx shearwater burrow so we felt their presence because it governed where we could go. No winging it and walking wherever we wanted on Skomer. And unfortunately, we did see a number of dead shearwaters on the island.

Trips like the one we took to Skomer may seem like a slam dunk in terms of birdwatching but we actually got super lucky here. We were told on the boat that this was the only day that whole week that passage to Skomer was even possible. 

Skomer birds (top to bottom): razorbills, sedge warbler, meadow pipit, northern wheatear and white wagtail.

OK, so that takes care of Skomer. What else stood out? I'd say Teifi Marshes Nature Reserve about 25 minutes south of Aberaeron (a good there-and-back early morning trip before breakfast was over at our hotel) in Wales and Hyde Park smack dab in the middle of London. We had not great (meaning Welsh on-and-off rain) weather at Teifi Marshes but the place is set up for success, with a number of excellently placed bird blinds and a good mix between wetlands and non-wetlands environments. We were also effectively alone, seeing (if I'm remembering correctly), just two other people in our time there. Hyde Park was totally different. We had awesome weather on that London morning but we also had a lot of company in tourists and joggers everywhere. Hyde Park, though, is stocked full of interesting birds.

I will say that a lot of the value we got out of both places (and other spots we visited) was in birds that are foreign to us but possibly very common to people who live in England and Wales. At both places we geeked out over blue tits, a bird I know as not in any way rare from my time growing up in England in the 1970s. But we don't have them in the United States and they are gorgeous little blue and yellow birds which are a treat to see. We spent a lot of time tracking them in Teifi Marshes and went way off the beaten path in Hyde Park when we sleuthed out a nest in a cavity of a tree. 

I have a feeling that if I lived in central Wales, I could go back to Teifi Marshes a lot. I feel we just scratched the surface of that spot. We saw some birds (like coots and mallards) that we can see locally here in the United States but I think spending some time in those blinds might reveal more than what we saw before breakfast on the day we visited. There were also a lot of trails that we left unexplored and we were there for over an hour.

Teifi Marshes birds (top to bottom): moorhen, grey heron and bullfinch.

I used to be amazed at the kinds of birds you can find in the centers of cities but not any more. We went birdwatching a few years ago in New York's Central Park and found a surprising amount of birdlife. London's Hyde Park was a similar experience. I guess birds have to live somewhere and while most cities have trees sprinkled all over street corners and small squares and parks dotted all over the urban landscape, really large city parks have a tendency to attract multiple species of birds, especially when there are water features. 

Hyde Park was maybe a 10 minute walk from our London hotel to the edge of the Park and entering the Park didn't immediately get us a lot of birds. But our experience definitely improved when we got to the water. Our walk from the north side to the main portion of The Serpentine (which is the largest body of water by far in the Park) in the south made us start to question our decision to visit the Park. But as soon as we hit the water, we saw ducks, swans, plenty of coots and some great crested grebes, a gorgeous waterbird that we haven't really seen many of up close before. It's a treat to find these in an urban environment on vacation (we also found some later in the week in Cardiff's also urban Bute Park).

But Hyde Park kept going and kept revealing more and more birds, including rose-ringed parakeets that are not native but are now definitely resident all over London parks these days. We saw a few elsewhere in London on this trip (picture above) and spent some time looking at them in St. James's Park on our trip to England in 2024.

Hyde Park birds (top to bottom): marsh warbler, grey wagtail, great crested grebe and blue tit.

If these three spots were the stars of our trip, there was a great supporting cast. Wormwood Scrubs in London. Cardiff Bay Wetlands Reserve. Bute Park in Cardiff. RSPB Conwy. We visited all with camera, binoculars and the Merlin app in hand. The quality and quantity of bird sightings at each place varied significantly. We definitely visited at least one at the wrong time of the day but if I know anything about visiting any place wild to see wildlife, it's that a place that seems empty on one day can be the best place you have ever been the next. 

If there was a disappointment in our birdwatching in England and Wales, it was the almost complete lack of birds of prey in our birdwatching trips and the lack of kingfishers, particularly considering how much time we spent next to water. On the raptor side of things, we did manage a look at an eastern buzzard while walking our sheep and we saw plenty of red kites in the skies all over Wales but only when we were driving around the various back roads from one place to the next. On the kingfisher sightings (or lack thereof), Merlin heard one at Teifi Marshes and we may have seen a flash of common kingfisher orange and blue in Cardiff. But those common kingfishers were certainly not common for us.

I won't blow-by-blow the complete bird list we came home with from the UK. But bear with me for three small stories that meant something. 

There are species of birds in the United States and elsewhere in the world that share the same name but which look significantly different than they do in the United States. I guess these three quick stories have that issue in common. 

If there's a signature English backyard bird for me, it's the European robin. It's a small sparrow-ish sized bird with an orange-red patch extending from its face to halfway down its breast. Here in the U.S. our American robins are larger with the orange-red color extending over its entire breast but not up to the face. Robins in England are cuter. They just are. But despite my childhood memories of them, they were not super common in the spots we visited.

But we found one in our time at RSPB Conwy that was utterly unconcerned with our presence and decided to hang out on some branches which were about mid-thigh height for me. We got to within less than six feet of this bird and it would not leave where it was sitting which allowed us to get a signature look at the bird I associate most with England (although admittedly, we were in Wales). These five minute or so looks like this that you get every so very rarely are always super intimate experiences. This one was no exception. It was like watching a puffin.

Next bird named similarly on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean? The goldfinch. We have goldfinches in the United States. They are very, very yellow with black on their wings and head. They are without question gold. European goldfinches look like the picture above. We'd never seen one before this trip. We were a bit astonished at the lack of gold.

For our last intentional birdwatching outing of this trip, we visited Cardiff Bay Wetland Reserve. The weather was terrible. It started out OK but it ended up pouring rain for about 20 minutes and we got soaked. The birdwatching was difficult. The wind before the rain clearly was making birds take cover for the coming rains and at one point I told Sophia that I'd be happy just getting a good picture of a goldfinch out of this trip. Nothing else. Just a goldfinch. And Boom! One landed in a tree right in front of us during a break in the weather when it was sort of sunny. Perfect picture pretty much. So fortunate but so much of photographing wildlife is being in the right place at the exact right time. We were.

I still don't get the gold thing. This is an attractive, interesting bird. I love the deep, deep red on the face and I love the flash of gold on the wing. But goldfinch? I don't know. Not what I would have named it. I assume it was named that before people who named all the birds of the world found the American goldfinch.

Birdwatching often comes with a soundtrack. If there was one bird which was sort of the universal background music for all our time in Wales and England (and not just when we were birding) it was the blackbird. Like robins and goldfinches, we also have blackbirds in the United States but ours locally are either red-winged backbirds (tons in the wetlands and swamps) or rusty blackbirds (which are just not that common). They do not live near our house.

If we heard tweeting in the United Kingdom, almost guaranteed (with a bit of an apology to the wrens in London) it was a blackbird. I just heard a bird! Blackbird. What was that song? Blackbird. That birdsong was really loud and clear! Blackbird.

Because they were so common, I didn't really focus on taking pictures of them until the very last day when I thought that I should have something to remember all the serenading they had done for us for the two weeks we were in country. The above picture is the best I got on our very, very last birdwatching excursion in Cardiff's Bute Park. I'm sure I could have done better if I had tried harder earlier in the week. Blackbirds made part of our experience in England and Wales. Including a picture is super appropriate in this post.

That wraps our England and Wales birdwatching story. I'm not sure we are going to get much in the way of blogworthy birding experiences in our last two significant trips of 2026 and the weather in the D.C. area for at least the next month or two is going to make it rough getting out to see birds for the rest of the summer. But rest assured we will keep going. As I finish writing this post I can hear one of the pair of catbirds that have nested in one of our trees in the back yard just furiously cheeping away. I never knew catbirds were such whistlers until we had a pair living right next to our house. Wildlife continues to reveal surprises which is why we will likely continue to chase it until we are no longer able. That day is hopefully a long, long way away.

Penguins

I have three South Africa blog posts left (including this one) from our late October / early November trip to the very bottom of the Dark Continent. Two of the three are either pretty heavy or involve a lot of research or both. Those two may have to wait until 2026. I think it's OK to stretch this thing out a bit. I do, after all, have plenty of time until our next trip (in March). I want to make sure I do those two posts justice.

In the meantime, here's something a bit lighter. Mostly. Although it will end up being pretty heavy too. And quick.

There have been, and there continue to be, in our travels, some creatures that have continued to elude us trip after trip after trip (we see you, flamingos!). We managed to knock one of those species off our "seen" list on this trip when we ran into two packs of painted dogs on the same day in Kruger National Park. After Kruger and Joburg, we headed over to Cape Town and the Atlantic coast of South Africa for five days or so. Time to take swing at knocking another one of those sought after, but so far elusive, species off our list: penguins.

Our unseen penguins story is not as long and tortured as some other species we have looked for in various corners of the world (we see you again, flamingos!!) but we have chased these flightless birds in both South America and Oceania. In the Galápagos Islands of the coast of Ecuador, we were half-promised a swim with those islands' namesake penguins but missed them entirely. Three or so years later, we managed to see fewer than one hand's worth of penguins on and off New Zealand's Stewart Island, including a couple of empty evenings waiting for the little blue penguins to return home for the night. 

We felt better about our chances with the African penguins near Cape Town in South Africa. And as it turns out, with good reason.

Our first African penguins. On Robben Island.

When we started planning our trip to South Africa, and particularly our time in Cape Town, penguins landed pretty near the top of our must-see list very, very quickly. Blame or credit Netflix's Penguin Town series or just our general research when it came to what to do and see in and around Cape Town. If there was a possibility of penguins, we were in.

There is exactly one species of penguin on the continent of Africa, the aptly and totally appropriately named African penguin. I had never necessarily heard of African penguins growing up as a budding but-really-never-a-possibility-as-a-career zookeeper in England because at that time, these birds were known as jackass penguins, a nod to the sound they sometimes make, which sounds a bit like a donkey, I guess. They are not only the only penguins in Africa, they are the only penguins in the old world. All the other species of penguin are either in South America or Oceania.

African penguins are inherently cute, right? I mean how could you not love these birds that stand upright on two feet with two flippers that look like arms and are just so, so easy to anthropomorphize. Squint and ignore the distance and you could almost believe an African penguin is a miniature person. If there was any doubt about this issue, we found a sign on this trip that identified African penguins as "charismatic megafauna" or simply "adorable".

Know what else African penguins are? Endangered. But not just endangered. Critically endangered. It may seem impossible from the abundance of penguins in this post but it's true. Read on. 

Critically endangered species are species which are categorized as facing an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild. At the beginning of the nineteenth century (the year 1800 for those of you challenged by numbered centuries like I am sometimes), there were an estimated four million African penguins on our planet. 

You know what's coming here, right? 

100 years later, those numbers were cut by about 60%. Just 1.5 million at the turn of the twentieth century. By about the year 2000, that number had dropped by about 90% to a total of maybe 150,000 of these birds in the wild. Maybe. That's a population that's spread around the coast of South Africa and Namibia, mostly to be found breeding on islands right off the shore of the continent.

It gets worse. 

Of course it does!

10 years after the turn of our current century, we were down to just a bit more than 50,000 wild African penguins and they were pegged for extinction in the wild by the year 2026. That's next year!!! Based on our visit this year, I feel pretty confident that there will be some African penguins in the wild beyond next year but I don't really know based on what I've seen. Maybe they make it to the middle of the next calendar decade or maybe a bit beyond based on recent prohibitions on fishing in penguin feeding grounds. But it ain't good.

African penguins have a maximum lifespan of about 14 years. In those 14 years, it takes them about four of those years to get to breeding age. That means they have about 10 years maximum (emphasis on maximum) to crank out as many little penguins as possible so the species can survive. How many eggs does a typical penguin couple lay per year? One or two. That's it. Same mate each year. Same nest site each year. Two chicks maximum. 

What could go wrong with those two chicks reaching maturity? Plenty. Let's start with death of one of the two penguin spouses. That doesn't necessarily threaten the chicks after they are hatched but it for sure might delay or just entirely prevent birth. What about the nest location being destroyed / co-opted for some use by man? I'm sure that slows up things too. Then there's the three months of constant feeding required at the beginning of the chicks' lives. Let's hope mom and dad (one has to watch the nest, after all) survive that process. Then, of course, there are predators intentional (gulls and rodents, anyone?) or unintentional (I'm thinking man here...).

So let's say they make it through mom and dad feeding them for a few months, then they are ready to swim and feed for themselves (young African penguins are called blue penguins) and after a couple of years they will molt and get their adult plumage after that and it's ready for kids of their own after that. 

Assuming they make it, that is.

All that growing up and raising traditionally happened off shore, meaning on those islands around the African continent. We visited one island off the coast of South Africa (Robben Island) where we did see some African penguins. But the majority of the penguins we saw on this trip were on the mainland. And here apparently man has once again intervened, not by threatening the penguins on the islands but killing off a lot of the birds' predators closer to shore making it safe to mate and raise a couple of baby penguins on the mainland.

Man is an equal opportunity killer of wildlife, it seems. Like we didn't already know that.

Our destination to see these penguins? A place called Boulders Beach. Apparently four penguins showed up sometime around 1984 and started a very exclusive colony. Since then, it's grown a bit. Today's estimates on the internet (dangerous, I know) look like anywhere between 1,500 to 4,000 birds. Not bad. But not 4 million either.

Call me scarred by past experiences hunting down penguins and flamingos and things like that but I have to tell you, I was expecting very few penguins at Boulders Beach. The fact that they nest there didn't make any difference to me. I expected a struggle to see any penguins at all.

Then we saw the ticket booth. OK, if they are charging admission, there are pretty much going to be some penguins.

What we found beyond the entrance gates were a lot of penguins completely free and not caged within feet of us. And I do mean feet but in some cases, it was really inches. It felt like an exhibit but it actually isn't. Man didn't make these penguins start nesting here. They just decided to do it one day. And they are still there in great numbers regardless of mankind erecting an entry booth and a souvenir store to profit off the birds' presence.

It felt like there were a lot of penguins on the beach and in the water. Not 1,500 to 4,000 but a lot. Hundreds maybe. Certainly not four figures. They were standing, walking, swimming, exiting the water, shaking water off, lying down and just generally not doing anything much except being penguins in the middle of the day in South Africa.

We also saw the whole lifecycle of the African penguin on that beach. From adults to molting chicks-becoming-adults to blue penguins and even chicks. Although I guess not eggs, so maybe not the whole lifecycle. The two chicks we saw were really honestly within arm's-length of the boardwalk for the humans if were had been silly enough to reach into the bushes lining the sides of that raised wooden path. We didn't reach out. 500 Rand fine AND the "Penguins Will Bite" sign was front and center in my mind if I even had a notion to reach out and touch one of those fluffy chicks.

WILL bite, not MIGHT bite. WILL.

A few observations here...

First, if it's action you are looking for at Boulders Beach, the water is where you need to be. There's a whole lot of sitting around on land and a whole lot of zooming around in the surf. African penguins can apparently swim 20 kilometers per hour and can dive to a depth of 200 feet when chasing their fish of choice which is usually sardines. You won't get to see much fishing or diving near the Beach but you will see a lot of fast swimming. I'm pleased we got to see this and take pictures of it from the land. We'd seen little blue penguins in New Zealand from a boat and it's way easier to use a camera to photographs penguins on land than on a boat.

Second, the tell-tale feature of a mature Africa penguin is the pink patch above their eyes. And in an amazing I-can't-believe-nature-works-this-way way, this tiny little pink patch allows the penguins to control their body temperature. If the penguin ever gets too warm, the body sends blood to this pink patch to get cooled off. These machines that are living beings are just incredible. No way would a species designer (I realize there is no such thing) would ever add this feature to a two foot high bird that can't fly and spends a ton of time fishing in the ocean. This nature stuff...crazy!

Finally, if these extinction numbers are in any way accurate and if man cannot find a way to preserve and protect and environment for these creatures to survive long-term, what an incredible privilege it was to spend about an hour or so among and around these birds. I especially appreciated the fact that I found a fellow tourist hunched over peering into the undergrowth at one spot which allowed me to find the two chicks that were sheltered within (a picture of one of the two is below). These young penguins are part of the future for this species, if they can make it to breeding age and don't have their environment destroyed by people. I can only hope today that things don't go that way. This experience was amazingly special despite its brevity.

So that's it for me and penguins. I know we found just one species of penguin in South Africa but penguins are off officially off my list of species that have eluded me for the entirety of the travel with purpose phase of my life. Thank you, South Africa. I can only hope that future generations get the chance I got in November of this year.

Now...about those flamingos. 

Lots of penguins; two penguins; a hidden chick; and the entrance gate. 

Kruger Birds

The first three times I visited sub-Saharan Africa, I went with a wish list of creatures to see. For the most part, those lists consisted entirely or mostly of mammals. Maybe there was a reptile in there once or twice and there may have been a bird or two, particularly on the Uganda list. But mostly, it was mammals.

This year, I also made a list. But this year, my list was mostly birds. And by that I mean I had a list of 12 species I wanted to see and only two of them were mammals. This shift in priorities was born of two things: (1) a genuine and blossoming love of birds and birdwatching and (2) we are honestly just running out of exciting new mammals to see in the wild in Africa. I was super excited to spend as much time seeing birds in South Africa in general and Kruger National Park in particular. And Kruger delivered. Not my whole list. But enough plus some things I didn't even know existed and some old favorites.

This year's list of mammals by the way...painted dogs and springboks. That's it. Our great hope for this trip in the wildlife department was that we would finally lay eyes on some African wild dogs and we did that. I figured springboks were a gimme. I mean it's like the national animal of South Africa. Their rugby team is named after that antelope. Didn't see any springboks. Apparently they don't like ticks. And Kruger, I guess, is tick-y. 

Oh well. We still have a reason to go back to Africa, I guess. Our next trip might be springbok focused. Kidding. Possibly. Probably.

Lilac-breasted roller. Kruger day 2. On this year's list.

Unless you manage to book a private safari vehicle (and we have never done that), any safari experience is bound to be a bit of a democracy. And by that I mean that what you search for; what you stop for; and how long you linger at a sighting is likely to be a group decision which at one time or another is bound to be flawed to deeply flawed for some people in the car. 

Safari vehicles are typically packed to capacity. More people per vehicle theoretically means fewer vehicles in the Park and more revenue per car or both (probably the latter is driving that issue). Fewer cars in the Park is a good thing. But more people per vehicle might also mean a little bit of push and pull over what the entire group gets to see. If one person in the car is tired of elephants and the rest of the car keeps asking the guide to stop for elephants, eventually it will come out. Same for any other sort of species. 

We eventually had an issue on this trip.

My impression of younger, first-time safari goers is that there is a distinct preference among that demographic to see mammals while on safari. The bigger, the better. I guess they are easier to see and watch and remember. Heck, my first safari wish list was all mammals so it's totally understandable. But we (and did some others in our vehicle) wanted to see lots of birds. Not just birds. Birds and mammals. But definitely birds.

Eventually, frustration around too many stops for birds boiled over a bit on day two. Nothing serious. We'd seen it worse in Uganda and it was around the exact same issue. Some people just don't like birds so much.

Southern yellow-billed hornbill. Kruger day 1. On this year's list.

I have to say I don't exactly get people's dismissal of birds in Africa. If we were stopping for doves or sparrows or starlings (although there are actually some gorgeous starlings in Africa) or something like that, I'd get it. Who cares about tiny not-vibrantly-colored birds which move around a lot? But Africa has some seriously impressive birdlife, including some absolutely giant top-of-the-food-chain predator types. You are interested in passing on species like secretary birds or different types of storks or fish eagles or sunbirds and bee-eaters? No way. Not me. I want to spend as much time watching these birds as possible. And that includes the starlings.

So before safari day three in Kruger, some of us approached our lead guide, Celeste, with a request: take the three or so non-birders out of our vehicle and swap in two avid birders from the second car. And despite the paperwork required to be re-filed at the Kruger gate, she made it happen. Day three would have a Tweety Car (for birders) and a Sylvester Car (for the rest of our tour group who would be looking specifically for cats).

And OK, I do care about tiny birds which move around a lot regardless of color.

African fish eagles. Adult (top); Kruger day 1. Juvenile (bottom); Kruger day 2. 

So did our Tweety Car stop for only birds and nothing else? Actually, by no means. I mean, of course not. Why would we do that? We spent a lot of time looking at all sorts of mammals, including all four of the Big Five that we saw in Kruger over the four full days we spent in the Park. And in a twist of irony, the Tweety Car actually got the best leopard sighting of the entire trip for our tour group. Go figure. 

But we did spend a lot of time in the Tweety Car in one spot in particular for about an hour watching a rattling cisticola and then a tawny-flanked prinia with a cameo by a chinspot batis in the middle of all that. Two of these three birds are pretty much brown from head to toe and all three are no bigger than a starling. And really the first two are like wren-sized. If wren-sized doesn't mean that much to you, think about something a little smaller than a house sparrow.  

Why was this so awesome? Because this is what we do when we birdwatch. We don't spend a couple of minutes with one species and then move on to try to find some other type of bird. We stop. We wait for it (or them) to appear and re-appear between hiding in bushes or trees or making trips to a nest or whatever. Birdwatching takes patience and perseverance. Stand or sit and focus and let time slip away. We can spend 30 minutes to an hour trying to see something like a single warbler or a kinglet in a bush or tree on a typical birdwatching outing at home.

Safari is not birdwatching at home. This was really the only time in Africa, we have ever done this sort of thing on safari. We've seen some incredible birdlife on past trips to Africa. But there's always been some sort of urgency to get going to find something different. This wasn't like that. This felt like the right thing to do. And we saw some birds that we never would have seen if this wasn't a bird-focused car. 

By the way, if you had asked me what a batis, a prinia or a cisticola was before we started Kruger Day 3, there's no way I would have even been able to tell you what any of these birds looked like. Or even identify these terms as species of birds even. 

The call of the rattling cisticola is fantastic. Just thought it was important to add that last bit.

Travel. Broadens this mind in all sorts of ways.

Top to bottom: rattling cisticola; tawny-flanked prinia; and chinspot batis. All Kruger day 3. The batis was at a distance.

So being able to stop for whatever birds we wanted for as long as we wanted got us the best look at birds for the whole trip, right? 

Nope. Not exactly. But yes, in the sense that I've never seen a cisticola before. Nature doesn't work that way. Birds and other creatures in the Park don't pose or come close to vehicles when requested by tourists. There are no cages or enclosures (thank God!!!) and you can't go off the road to chase stuff. So the quality of wildlife sightings you will get as a safari tourist will involve a lot of luck. 

Wildlife sightings are also heavily weather-dependent which can affect the activity of the animals (particularly birds since some don't like to fly much in the rain) and lighting a ton. Our Tweety Car day was quite possibly the worst weather we experienced in the Park, with a good amount of rain and grey skies. 

From a quality standpoint, I actually thought the first day was our best bird photography day. I love the bird head photographs I got on that day and I've posted a few here. I am in love with African fish eagles (my favorite eagle seen in the wild so far) and I also love hornbills so I was super excited to find a southern yellow-billed hornbill close to the car in the early hours of that day. But quite possibly some of my favorite pictures of the whole trip are those that I took of a hooded vulture (it's the cover picture of this post but there's another below). I'd never seen one of those before and the lighting on its head and feathers was about as perfect as it could have been. I'm not sure if this bird is completely ugly or supremely beautiful. The feathers are gorgeous.

Hooded vulture. Kruger day 1.

I'm not sure how many birds we saw in Kruger or South Africa as a whole. I'm still plugging them into ebird almost a month after we got home. My guess would be about 80 to 90 total species with maybe half to two thirds of that number in Kruger. For the purposes of this post, it doesn't particularly matter. This post is not supposed to be a complete record of every avian species we laid eyes on over four days.

Of the ten birds on my South Africa list, I saw nine, although admittedly the only Goliath heron I saw was on a live video feed at a lunch spot and I couldn't really figure out well enough where the camera was pointed to go have a look for myself. I got seven of the nine at Kruger, including the Goliath heron on TV. The only species I missed entirely in South Africa was a golden-breasted bunting. I think that's pretty good, particularly because I was pleasantly surprised by some birds that were not on my list, notably that hooded vulture. 

The rest of this post is a photo dump highlighting my most favorite bird photos I took in Kruger which haven't been posted earlier in this post. I'm separating the photos by day. Every day we spent birding in Kruger was special. The Tweety Car day will stick out in my memory as super-special because we spent it with kindred spirits from Australia and Oregon who enhanced our appreciation of birds. These moments on vacations can be memorable and this one certainly was. 

Kruger Day One

Top to bottom: Brown snake-eagle; white-headed vulture (left) and white-backed vulture (right). The brown snake-eagle was the first bird we saw in Kruger proper just after 6 o'clock in the morning. Early starts are essential on safari. But lighting sometimes is not great at that time of day.

Kruger Day Two

Top to bottom: Yellow-billed oxpecker; southern red-billed hornbill; crested barbet; Burchell's starling (two pics); common myna; southern ground-hornbill; southern white-faced owl; white-backed vulture. Told you there were some awesome starlings in Africa. We will forever refer to these birds as virtual starlings, by the way, based on us mis-hearing the initial identification from one of our traveling companions.

Kruger Day Three (Tweety Car Day)

Top to bottom: Tawny eagle; blacksmith lapwing.

Kruger Day Four

Top to Bottom: saddle-billed stork; southern masked-weaver; purple-crested turaco. 

Two comments here. First, I love weavers (like LOVE!!!). We saw southern masked-weavers, grosbeak weavers and cape weavers on this trip and every time I find the nest engineering by these birds just fascinating, maybe because it's completely out in the open. 

Second, the turacos were Kruger's parting gift to us. We saw six to eight of these birds in the treetops right before we exited the Park on our last day. Under normal circumstances, I would have passed on including this photograph based on the lighting but turacos are incredible-looking birds and I totally didn't expect to see them in South Africa. For what it's worth, both times I have seen Turacos (we saw some great blue turacos in Uganda), the lighting has been awful.