Day 1 Sightings

So I guess we should have started this bloggy thing on the 16th of July 2014. As it stands we started it tonight on the 26th of August.

 isabel. cute puppy (written by my daughter, who is sitting next to me and insisted on getting her chance at writing something!).

The history in short: My wife and I met in Etosha National Park in 2004. She was doing her PhD fieldwork on Giraffe behavioral ecology and I was a Game Ranch Management practical student. We had plenty of time alone in the bush waiting for giraffe to show up, or waiting for giraffe to actually do something other than stand and chew the cud, and that's where it started. We got hooked on birds. Casually at first; a bit more intensively recently.

So this year, for no apparent reason (not quite true, but more about that later), we decided to see how many different bird species we could see in one whole year.

For those of you who are not family or friends (hopefully there are some of you!), we are helping to manage a small guest farm that belongs to our family. We offer daily trips to Etosha and thus have the chance to do a lot of birding AND other more mammalian sightings.

We started on the 16th of July 2014. So even though it is more than a month late, here are our first day's sightings:

1.       Shaft-tailed Wydah (V)

2.       African red-eyed Bul-bul (V)

3.       Cape Turtle dove (V)

4.       Namaqua dove (V)

5.       Namaqua sandgrouse (E)

6.       Black Crow (E)

7.       Yellow-billed hornbill (E)

8.       Secretary bird (E)

9.       Ostrich (E)

10.  Glossy Starling (E)

11.   Acacia-pied Barbet (E)

These are, of course, old familiars. However as I am writing this my wife called ( she was in Etosha today) and told me they had the most amazing sighting of a cheetah mother with two cubs on a kill. What's amazing about it? Etosha=2.1 million hectares. Cheetah population? 80. Like the proverbial needle in a haystack. Jayyy!

In addition to this she had a good sighting of four Lionesses crossing the road in front of her, and a welcome sighting of an old elephant bull-nicknamed Old Wide Tooth- that we met back in 2004. Good to know the old boy is still alive and well. She also saw what she thought was a dark morph of a Wahlberg's eagle which is very possible as they appear in our area during August. We won't write that one down though, cause it was back-lit and thus no positive identification could be made. :(

Well, that's all for now. More from us later.

Regards,

Danie