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A frustrating 5-hour drive with broken-down trucks, road works, choking traffic and getting lost, finally got us to Guland Guesthouse in Rustenburg on Friday afternoon. Having only flown back from Dar-es-Salaam in the morning, I was dead tired and went to bed almost immediately.
My alarm woke us at 04:00 on Saturday morning and after a bite to eat we picked our way through the outskirts of Rustenburg, reaching Pilanesberg's Manyane gate shortly after 05:30. The sky was heavily clouded and as soon as we entered it started spitting. But we still picked up some easy birds like Rufous-naped lark, Diderick cuckoo, Chestnut-vented tit-babbler, Southern yellow-billed and African grey hornbills. Orange-breasted bush-shrike, Red-chested cuckoo, Grey-backed camaroptera and Chinspot batis were calling all over but when it started to rain more heavily we had to close our windows. Eventually it cleared a little and we had excellent views of bushveld birds like Kalahari scrub-robin, Blue waxbill, Arrow-marked babbler, Crimson-breasted shrike, Long-billed crombec and Golden-breasted bunting. Heading steadily west, we spotted our first raptor for the day, a Gabar goshawk, sitting long enough for a positive ID but just too far away for a photo.A few other common birds made it onto our list until we stopped at the shop for a quick break and cold drinks. At Mankwe dam we added a whole bunch of birds: Black-winged stilt, Marsh and Common sandpipers, Little and Great egrets, African darter, African jacana, Reed and White-breasted cormorants, Pied kingfisher, Grey and Goliath herons, African black and White-faced whistling ducks, and both African and Greater painted snipes - the painted snipe was our first for South Africa! Heading further west, the birds started to quite down as we reached a hot noon despite the morning rain. Martial and Brown snake-eagles were the only other raptors we added but a Violet-eared waxbill and Green-backed heron were very obliging for the camera. Around 15:30 we exited the park at Bakubung gate and with heavy thunderstorm clouds building, attempted to locate Yellow-throated sandgrouse at some of the locations pointed out by a local birder, Stuart Groom. Unfortunately it started raining and the light grew so bad that even if there were any sandgrouse close to the road, we probably wouldn't see them anyway. We headed back to Rustenburg, arriving just before 6pm, had dinner and got into bed, happy that we got 114 birds for the day.
A runny tummy kept me up from 1am and when we left the guesthouse shortly after 5am, we went looking for a 24-hour pharmacy at the private hospitals. Disappointed that neither of the two hospitals we visited had an open pharmacy we headed up to Kgaswane Mountain Reserve. It was a clear and cool morning but the birds were calling already and Diderick, Red-chested and Klaas's cuckoos, Rattling and Zitting cisticolas, Yellow-fronted tinkerbird, Rufous-naped and Flappet larks got onto our list quickly. We had great views of Black cuckooshrike before reaching the plateau where a Jackal buzzard waited quietly in a tree. The grasslands produced Desert and Wing-snapping cisticolas, African stonechat, African wattled lapwing and Cape longclaw. At the information centre a pair of Mocking cliff-chats were very entertaining and driving through the marshy bits we thought we heard Red-chested flufftail but couldn't be sure. On our way out we stopped at the big waterfall and picked up Sentinel rock-thrush and Red-winged starling but we had a long way to drive back and started heading east for Pretoria.
