Atlasville, 26 Jan 2007
Paid a visit today to the Suikerbosrand Nature Reserve. Although fairly close to home, some 40 km (45 mins) by road, I had not previously been here. Suikerbosrand straddles the Suikerbosrand hills and the vegetation is typical of such rocky Highveld areas, dominated by the Transvaal Sugarbush (Afrikaans ‘suikerbos’) or Common Protea, a species which can survive the harsh freezing conditions of the Highveld winter.
The bird species are similarly typical of this type of environment, with weavers and widowbirds in abundance – Southern Red Bishop, Yellow-crowned Bishop, Red-billed Quelea, Pin-tailed Whydah, Red-collared Widowbird, Long-tailed Widowbird and White-winged Widowbird. At this time of year too, you can’t miss the plaintive and much-repeated two-note call of the Rufous-naped Lark. Fiscal Flycatcher is another common species here. Among the summer migrant species, Amur Falcon was most prominent, and after seeing my first Montagu’s Harrier just two weeks ago in the Kruger Park I had no problem in identifying a male quartering the grassland here. Other species seen which would be expected in this environment were Cape Rock Thrush, Ant-eating Chat, Familiar Chat, Mountain Chat, Southern Fiscal, Cape Longclaw, Tawny-flanked Prinia, African Pipit, Rattling Cisticola and Sabota Lark.
Best mammal sighting of the visit was this Black Wildebeest, a southern African endemic which was hunted almost to extinction in the 19th century and now is to be found only in nature reserves and on private game farms. I had only seen this one previously at the Faan Meintjies Nature Reserve near Klerksdorp in the mid 1980s.
