Depending on which method of classification you use, there are about 11,032 species of bird in the world. And American Peter Kaestner has officially spotted 10,006 of them — giving him the international record for the longest birding list.
That’s a lifelong project involving a lot of money, a lot of travelling, and a heck of a lot of patience.
But if you know what you’re doing and you have enough time, you could, with comparative ease, amass almost 5% of Kaester’s record on the Garden Route alone. The area, with its mix of biomes, is home to about half of South Africa’s 900 or so bird species.
It’s where I find myself tagging along with veteran birdwatcher Andrew de Blocq and a band of wannabe birders. De Blocq is former avitourism project officer for BirdLife South Africa, the umbrella body for bird nerds, birders, listers and everyone in between. He has been promoting the wider Garden Route and Klein Karoo as birding hotspots.
In a rural area towards the Garden Route’s far south, we haul ourselves onto a muddy pasture, lush and fertile and brimming with life, called Voëlvlei. We are alone save for the farm animals and hundreds of birds, huge flocks rooting in the mud, tucking into a ceaseless buffet.
We stand in a row, binoculars poised, mimicking what De Blocq is doing: watching. “It’s birding for purists,” he says. “Kind of like Test cricket.”
De Blocq is searching for a white-rumped sandpiper, a bird that looks like the more common stint. “Only tiny details distinguish them. This one sounds like a rusty, squeaky gate,” he says.
There have been several squeaky-gate birds over several days of birdwatching. I haven’t an inkling about how to distinguish one gate from the next, and the only birds I can identify are the ostriches in the distance, though these aren’t wild and therefore do not qualify for our birding list. The endemic Agulhas long-billed larks, however, make it. As do the bokmakieries, Cape teals and black-headed herons.
While De Blocq scans multitudinous waders, I watch the row of newbie birders, fascinated by their intense concentration. There is such resigned calm and focus, like they’re meditating. Only De Blocq gives off any sense of being challenged a bit by nature. His search is proving futile.
Meanwhile, egrets and ibises taunt us and plovers are everywhere. One huge flock of small birds performs a murmuration ballet just 30cm above the mirror-surface of the water. One moment silver, then white, then ebony, like flying fish skimming through the air. I am in awe.
De Blocq, though, seems vaguely disheartened. “This is called a dip — when we stop specifically to see something but don’t.”
Back in the kombi, we drive to the vlei’s far side and watch mobs of herons and spoonbills feed.
Someone pipes up: “Spoonbills must be quite kak at aerodynamics.” As he says this, the spoonbills take off, flying in a long diagonal line with their necks and legs completely outstretched — another magnificently choreographed sky dance, aerodynamically flawless.
But still no white-rumped sandpiper.
It seems the right time to ask why this one bird is so important. And what is this obsession with “the list”, anyway?
The list
Lists are, for many birders, the whole point of the pursuit. They make lifetime lists, holiday lists, lists focused on specific areas. De Blocq has, among others, a naked list, and two lists for birds spotted while using the loo, one standing, one sitting.
It’s all good fun, but competitive listers will come at you if you cheat. Members of the featherati will question rare sightings, throwing facts and statistics in your face if you make far-fetched or unlikely claims or upset someone whose list is, well, shorter than yours.
In reality, birders are on a spectrum. They range from really gung-ho folks, up at 5am and willing to reach the ends of the earth to pick up one extra sighting, to people who simply enjoy being in nature and are, like me, “birding curious”.
“It’s not an Olympic activity,” De Blocq assures me, though if you were in training for the games, the Garden Route would be a fine place to flex your binoculars.
Together with the adjacent Klein Karoo, the region has more than 90 identified places — reserves, botanical gardens, lodges, hikes, activities and guiding companies — that cater in some way specifically for birders.
At its heart is Knysna, the only town in Southern Africa to have three birds — woodpecker, warbler and turaco — named after it. Those three alone attract the list-chasers, who soon discover that a Knysna turaco is difficult to see. You hear them, calling tauntingly from the canopy, but they’re great hide-and-seekers.
One place we do see one is at Garden of Eden, a section of the Garden Route National Park on the N2 — highly convenient, if noisy, with passing traffic. It has a wonderful boardwalk, which, according to Chris Patton of South African National Parks, “is incredible, because it’s accessible to elderly people and to people in wheelchairs, like me”.
Patton has long advocated for greater accessibility in national parks and this, an 800m circuit through a patch of dense indigenous woodland where little sunlight penetrates, is a highlight. The cool, dark forest feels ancient, its tremendous yellowwood trees creating a world of shadows where you need to concentrate to notice all the subtle movements and stirrings
“Forest birding is tough because you don’t typically get an unimpeded view,” says Patton. “It requires more patience. Take your time, move slowly, let the birds come to you. They’re very inquisitive. So if you make squeaky, spishing noises, you can often lure them into the open.”
And that’s when he points out the Kynsna turaco, a fidgety green creature hopping busily between the high branches. And, as we squint, we see several more for the list: a woodland warbler, a southern double-collared sunbird, a black-headed oriole, hoopoes and a forest canary.
What’s the rush?
“It’s a little like a hit of heroin,” says Tim Carr, describing the rush when he hears that a rarity’s been spotted. He is the owner of Reflections, a private eco-reserve at the edge of Rondevlei, about 12km from Wilderness.
“When your phone buzzes and it’s a rare-bird report on a WhatsApp birding group, you get a twitch. All you can think about is how soon you can stop whatever you’re doing and go searching for that bird.”
De Blocq was once lured to Reflections by a geelvlekmossie. “It’s a nondescript little bird with a buzz cut,” says Carr, “but Andrew drove here from Cape Town and spent four hours waiting to see it.”
Other rarities that have shown up at Reflections include greater spotted cuckoos, black flycatchers and white-starred scrub robins.
You can, if you’re very lucky, see grass owls. And, when we listen carefully in the night, we make out yet another rusty gate: a Knysna woodpecker, of which there are two breeding pairs on the reserve.
A bird nerd and former wildlife ranger, Carr — and his wife, Angelique — have since 1996 thrown themselves relentlessly into rewilding Reflections. Wattle and pine “as thick as hell” have been replaced by indigenous species, lots of fynbos and plenty of wild creatures flitting about.
The birds, now so abundant, had to be lured back with a healthy habitat. During his first count, Carr recorded only three bird species on the property; recently he counted 213.
Birders are a key market for Carr’s handful of off-grid wooden cabins. He says about 114 endemic Southern African birds are accessible from the Garden Route, and at Reflections there are little sparrowhawks, black-necked grebes and those elusive Knysna turacos. And, just off the property, there’s a good spot to see Knysna warblers too.
The sun is just up, and Carr takes us walking, our eyes straining to see these birds we’ve heard about. Across the estuarine lake, daybreak casts a golden shimmer as mist rises above the water. Beyond the tall dunes, rising like mountains, I hear waves breaking.
Carr signals for us to listen; somewhere, singing “sex twice weekly, sex twice weekly”, is a Cape bulbul, another South African endemic.
And then, a sudden screech. “Ah! The cheeky little bugger,” Carr says, “a neddicky.” Its common name is a corruption of the Zulu word for any small brown bird — an LBJ, essentially, albeit a nimble little fellow with a fierce expression and a penchant for skewering insects on thorns.
To identify it, Carr says to listen for the sound of a thumb being dragged across the teeth of a comb. Confusingly, it can also sound like an old bicycle pump.
This is all very engaging, but I want to know: why would anyone devote so much time to anything as fleeting as setting eyes on a feathered fluffball?
“Simple,” Carr says. “As adults, we think we need a reason to do nothing. Birdwatching justifies that.”
I get a similar answer from Matt Zylstra, a Sunshine Coast-raised Aussie who heads the Kwendalo Institute, part of a Plettenberg Bay wellness facility where nature and birdwatching are used to restore cognitive health.
Zylstra, whose doctorate from Stellenbosch University’s department of conservation ecology involved interviewing people about “meaningful experiences in nature”, is interested in birding as a way of helping humans to better connect with their internal and external environments.
About 85 species have been seen from Kwendalo’s hide, where we watch for white-backed ducks and purple herons before Zylstra explains how birdwatching “tricks” the brain into stillness, restores attention and reduces mental fatigue.
Because reality is essentially too big for our consciousness and we’re constantly being bombarded by an overload of stimuli, birdwatching is effectively a form of heightened awareness that “increases eudaemonic wellbeing” — our sense of having a worthwhile life.
In other words, birding’s rewards increase with patience and attentiveness, not with the length of your list nor with how rare your latest sighting is. It really is the ultimate excuse to do nothing and bliss out.