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Saturday
It's been more than a year since we've been to Kruger National Park so on the spur of the moment, we browsed the park's accommodation availability, and decided to pop in for a quick weekend to the south west section of the park between Malelane and Pretoriuskop. We left Middelburg around 4am on Saturday, April fool's day, and arrived at Malelane gate just before 7am. It was already warm and the birds were singing furiously but a nasty surprise awaited us at the gate. A queue of cars extended over the the Crocodile river bridge and the queue of people at the reception office was almost equally long. While I stayed with the car, Nicola went to join the queue with our paperwork. Fifty minutes later she showed up and were we finally able to enter! What a waste of time - SANParks have really dropped the ball over the last 2-3 years (this is the second time we've had to wait an hour to enter the park) - the fact that they have just a single person attending guests first thing on a Saturday morning just shows the lack of management skill. Anyway, it was 8am and we were finally able to bird properly. The park's had a very bad drought for the past two seasons but from October 2016 there has been plenty rain and even floods in the park so the veld at least looked green and fresh. Partly because of this, and partly because of our delayed start, our birding list for the day was not great, only managing to get to 105. We traveled north and north west from Malelane, ending up at Pretoriuskop camp by late afternoon. Nice birds for the day included White-crested helmetshrike, Grey-headed bushshrike, Common buttonquail (calling), Lizzard buzzard, lots of Croaking cisticolas around Pretoriuskop, a very late Amur falcon, African hawk-eagle, Greater and Lesser honeyguides, Red-crested korhaan, Southern white-crowned shrike, Lappet-faced vulture and Long-tailed paradise-whydah. We stayed in a tired hut with en-suite ablutions and also booked a night drive to start at 7pm. Dinner was some leftovers brought from home before we started the night drive. The outing was somewhat spoiled by a group of 20-somethings in the back of the truck who couldn't care less about the rest of the group but it was still a surprisingly good trip. Apart from several mammal sightings, including leopard, there were several Water thick-knees on the road, Fiery-necked nightjars were scared up several times and we've never seen so many Spotted eagle-owls on a single night (more than fifteen). We were back by 10pm and went straight to bed.
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| Woodland kingfisher |
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| European roller |
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| White-crested helmetshrike |
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| Juvenile Dark-chanting goshawk |
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| Dark-chanting goshawk up close |
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| African hoopoe |
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| Adult Dark-chanting goshawk |
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| Little bee-eater |
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| African wattled lapwing |
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| Leopard hiding in the grass |
Sunday
Out of the camp just after the gates opened we explored the hills north of Pretoriuskop before retracing our steps back to Malelane to exit just after lunch. New birds included a cracking African cuckoo-hawk, Mocking cliff-chat, Pearl-spotted owlet and White-winged widowbird, taking our weekend total to 120 species. We were home before dinner.
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| African cuckoo-hawk |
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| Long-billed crombec |
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