As most of you know, AfrikaBurn is a festival that has a reputation for many things, but is not usually synonymous with birding. But, like the age old saying my Dad used to say, ’’where there’s a bird, there’s a way (or at least that’s the way I’ve always heard it).’’
And he was not wrong. The University of Cape Town runs a project called the South African Bird Atlasing Project (SABAP). This is a project whereby they’ve divided the whole of Southern Africa up into 8x8km squares called ‘pentads’. The idea then is that citizen scientists – not so ordinary folk like you and me – try to see as many bird species as you can in a pentad over a period of 2hrs to 5 days. One then submits this data to the bird atlasing project and they then use this data for good e.g. creating distribution maps for the various species, understanding bird migrations, assessing how humans are impacting our avian friends and to aid in conservation decisions going forward amongst other things. Now, given that the festival happens in the middle of nowhere with zero cell phone reception, it was important to do some research of the pentad prior to arrival. The pentad that AfrikaBurn takes place in is Pentad 3230_1955. Prior to me, this pentad had had 4 full protocol (>2hrs birding time) and 2 adhoc (<2hrs birding time) cards submitted with the last full protocol card being in May 2019. The total species count for the pentad from all submissions was 22 species. From the satellite images, there is no evidence of permanent or ephemeral watercourses in the pentad. Basically the satellite images look like they’d been nicked from the Hubble telescope’s photo archive of Mars. Maybe that’s been Elon’s aim all along…to see if Mars has more birds than this pentad.
So armed with a rough idea of the terrain and what species to possibly expect, we made the arduous journey to AfrikaBurn. A puncture or 2 later and enough dust to last a lifetime, we finally made it to the festival site.
On the 3rd May 2025 -our final day at the festival- I woke up early and headed out into the Karoo sunrise armed with my binos and a spotting scope. I left our fellow campers behind (coincidentally we call our camp the ‘Owlcoholics’, which now seems rather aptly named for the purposes of this article.) Now some of them have started becoming enamoured with birding as they’ve hit their mid thirties (classic age to enter the birding fraternity now that everyone our age is doing it and it’s dubbed as ‘cool.’ These are probably the very same people that teased me for my fondness of birding when I was a teenager and birding was seen as decidedly uncool). As happy as I am that my friends are starting to show an interest in birdwatching, I felt that this wasn’t the best place for beginner birdwatchers to be dipping their toes into the proverbial waters of birdwatching. This was hardly Lilac-breasted Roller, Saddle-billed Stork or African Fish Eagle territory. Looking at skittish LBJ’s with low population densities was hard enough for me, let alone newbies. So a solo mission it was.
From the outset, this mission had some head winds. Besides the low bird numbers and their shy nature alluded to earlier, I also had to deal with some ‘doof doof’ happening in the background as some early morning ravers carried on the jol from the night before, making picking up calls challenging. Once I was 1km or 2 away from the festival site though, things weren’t too bad as far as this was concerned. Also not aiding my birding escapades is that – despite mine and others best scrubbing efforts – I still had a purple hue from having done the Naked Spectrum walk the day before. I must’ve stood out like a parrot amongst sparrows in the desolate landscape! It would seem the Karoo birds aren’t acquainted with Barney the Dinosaur and were doing their level best to hide away from me. Or they do recognise him but just take their decommodification zone seriously. Who knows. Anyways, maybe if brown is a colour on the Naked Spectrum next time I’d have better luck at blending in.
I walked a complete circle around the festival site and birded for 2 hours, thus succeeding in doing the minimum requirement for a full protocol submission. The 1st species I identified was some Rosy-faced Lovebirds. Correction. It was just a couple of burners taking a romantic, early morning coffee stroll in the beautiful dawn light. They were rosy-faced though, so I wasn’t too far off the mark! Back to the ‘real’ birding and in my 2hrs birding, 7 species were identified namely: Red-capped Lark, Pied Crow, Tractrac Chat, South African Shelduck, Large-billed Lark, Southern Double-collared Sunbird and Karoo Lark. Out of the 5 full protocol and 2 ad-hoc lists submitted, this was the 2nd most species seen in the pentad since the 1st list submitted in 2011.
Of particular interest were the South African Shelduck and the Southern Double-collared Sunbird sightings as both were new sightings for the pentad. The South African Shelduck sighting was like Tom Cruise buzzing the tower in Top Gun as a male/female pair flew rapidly overhead no doubt searching for somewhere with water, which this pentad lacked. The Southern Double-collared Sunbird was a nice male sitting on a karoo bush with his colours in stark contrast to the drab brown surrounds. I did also see a bird that I was almost certain was a Black-eared Sparrow-Lark which would’ve been a great one for the pentad and a new one for my personal list, but sadly this particular male was as jumpy as a WW1 trench soldier on his 1st night shift. I thus couldn’t get a good look at him (even with the scope) and the sighting could not be 100% confirmed. Overall, a hard but excellent morning of birding in the early Karoo morning light and looking forward to seeing what birds I’ll be able to find next time when at AfrikaBurn.
Written by Ian Stewart (Founder of the Tankwa Town Twitchers)
