Big Day Birding!

In November, Paul and I hired a bird guide from birding ecotours for a day and went out on a Big Day Birding adventure.

If you don't know what a Big Day is, it is a take off of a Big Year, which is when a birder documents the number of birds she sees or hears, in a defined geographic area (US, Africa, etc.), within a calendar year. We like birding, but not enough to dedicate an entire year to it! So we dedicated a day. And what a great day it was!

We spent the entire day covering a 20km route, about 1.5 hours north of Pretoria.

We saw 101 species of birds, of which 39 were new to us. That brought our life list up to 395 birds! It wasn't just a big day, it was a HUGE day!

European Bee Eater

Southern Masked Weaver (male)

Zitting Cisticola / Red Breasted Swallow / Great Spotted Cuckoo

Blue Cheeked Bee Eater

Lark / Pale Flycatcher / Crimson Breasted Shrike

Red Backed Shrike

White Browed Sparrow Weaver

? / Black Shouldered Kite / Grey Heron

Northern Black Korhan

African Spoonbills, Sacred Ibis, Intermediate Ibis

Levaillant's Cisticola / White Throated Robin-Chat / Red Faced Mousebird

Southern Masked Weaver building his nest

Hadada Ibis