My family enjoys taking vacations to outdoor destinations. Our holiday cottage in Pearly Beach gets visited frequently for weekends or festive holiday breaks. We also have access to a plot of land in the Kouebokkeveld called Onderboschkloof, which if you ask any member of our family must be a contender for the best place on earth. However, every couple of years we try to get away to a nature reserve or national park. In the past we have done Kruger National Park a handful of times, Etosha in Namibia, and the Kalahari. This year in June we decided on something a little closer to home than those far-flung destinations, although that's all relative considering it was still a 2000 km round trip, without even counting the kilometers done inside the parks on game drives!
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“There! At the edge of the floodlight!” The spotter fought against the stiffness imposed by three layers of down and pointed excitedly to the edge of the ice. Ten people similarly hidden behind their beanies and scarves clambered for their binoculars, and hung themselves precariously off the edge of the ship in the hope of a view. As this was happening, a single ghostly, ethereal form danced in from the darkness on the lightest of wings. Its snow-white feathers glinted with a faint gold in the ship’s lights as it dipped and swayed above the piercing blue ice sheets. After the briefest moment it dissipated back into the darkness once more, leaving the observers in a moment of magical silence, before eruptions of joy and high-fives. They were all aware that they had witnessed something very, very special – the mystical Snow Petrel of the Antarctic. I was recently selected as a member of a team of bird observers to join a 2 week scientific research voyage on the SA Agulhas II to the Antarctic. We would be doing surveys of seabirds all along the ship’s route. The data we were to collect was for the Atlas of Seabirds At Sea (AS@S) project being led by Birdlife South Africa. While not being able to reach the mainland during winter, we aimed to enter the Marginal Ice Zone, characterized by circular ice sheets younger than a year old known as ‘pancake ice’. The vast majority of our trip was to be spent traversing the vast southern Ocean. We would not see land for the entirety of our trip – certainly a novel situation for most of us, but the prospects of birds we would otherwise only ever dream of seeing most certainly outweighed any nerves about our sea legs. The other members of the bird team were Dominic Rollinson, Patrick Cardwell, and Justin Nicolau, all of whom are established names in South African birding, having all significantly exceeded that magical 800-bird mark on their southern African lifelists. I was of course fairly intimidated, having only amassed a relatively meagre 570-odd birds on my list. However, I had plenty pelagic birding experience on my side as a guide for Cape Town Pelagics. I’ve been regularly leading trips off Cape Point to see albatrosses, petrels, shearwaters and the like for around a year, so I felt fairly confident that my seabirding would be up to par. Only Dom had been to sea more than I had in the last year, so in that respect I was well qualified. Of course, there was no competition or second-guessing among the team once on the boat, and as one finds with most birders everyone was very friendly and helpful to one another, and were excited to get another member of the team onto a new bird, even if they themselves had seen it already. |
AuthorI am a birder, biologist, and nature blogger. I post about my trips, informative tidbits, and things I think are interesting. Archives
July 2017
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