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With a long drive ahead of us on Friday afternoon, we didn’t waste any time after work. Despite a heavy downpour south of Carolina on the R33 towards Amsterdam, it was an uneventful drive and we got to a very muggy Wildebeest Ecolodge just outside Hluhluwe at around 19:30. Our double-bed room with en-suite bathroom was quite adequate but unfortunately the freezer in the shared kitchen was not working so we turned the fridge as cold as it’ll go and hoped our meat and other cold stuff will survive until the following night. As we had to get up at 03:30 on Saturday morning, we each took a quick shower and then got into bed (thankfully covered by a mosquito net and fairly decent roof fan moving some of the hot air around).
Saturday morning was reasonably cool as we left the Ecolodge at 4am but it was so ridiculously humid that we struggled constantly to keep the windscreen from fogging up. Things were already starting to brighten up as we hit the tar road towards Sodwana and when we turned off towards Nibela Lake Lodge 20kms later, it was light enough to bird. But we had to meet our guide, Lucky Ngubane and Nibela Lake Lodge’s manager, Sarel van der Westhuizen at 5am, so we ignored all the good-looking birding spots along the way and got to the lodge at 04:45. With introductions over, Lucky led us through the dense forest on the lodge’s property, mainly looking for Neergaard’s sunbird but also whatever else we could find.
It turned out to be a lovely forest to bird in, with well-maintained pathways, and we picked up several of the common forest birds like Yellow-bellied and Sombre greenbuls, Crowned hornbill, Red-chested cuckoo, Orange-breasted bushshrike and Black-bellied starlings. A great nice sighting of a posing Eastern nicator allowed for some photographs but an African goshawk darted off the moment it was spotted. Neergaard’s sunbird eluded us though. Lucky heard it calling several times but the energetic little things never remained still long enough for us to get a look at them. Finally at the end of our forest walk we managed to locate a male in a bush together with some Marico sunbirds, and got a brief glimpse of him as he flitted from branch to branch.
Leaving Nibela Lake Lodge, we drove to the floodplains surrounding the point where the Mkuze river enters Lake St Lucia to look for Rosy-throated longclaw. In some of the dense woodland we drove through, we were delighted to stumble across an African pygmy kingfisher, not a lifer but a seldom seen bird and the first one for the year. On the grassy floodplains, a rather unexpected lifer sat still for great photos: Pale-crowned cisticola – a bird we had searched for several times and always missed. But undoubtedly the show reached it’s climax when we spotted our first Rosy-throated longclaw! Sitting right beside the tracks and obviously not minding our vehicle, we were able to drive to within less than two meters from it and it didn’t budge! Nicola took stunning close-up photos of the male as it seemed to be building a nest. No much further we were stopped by the Mkuze river entering Lake St Lucia and the squelchy wetland here was very productive: Pink-backed pelicans, Great and Little egrets, Greater and Lesser flamingoes, Caspian tern, Hottentot teal, Black-winged stilt, Grey and Goliath herons, Yellow-billed and Saddle-billed storks, Kittlitz’s and White-fronted plovers and huge numbers of Grey-headed gulls. With about 30 species added on the flood plain, we headed off towards Muzi pans, hoping for a Pel’s fishing owl or buttonquail to round off the day.
Lucky and Sarel were both amazed to find Muzi pans pretty much flooded. The reeds surrounding the pans were already sitting in water, and there was no way we would be able to walk across the normally dry edges to reach the dense riparian woodland on the other side to look for Pel’s. However, there was still good birding to be had with lots of waders (mainly Ruffs, Wood and Common sandpipers), Squacco, Purple and Grey herons, White-faced whistling ducks, both pelican species and Spurwing geese. Alas, too flooded to hope for crakes or buttonquails. We dropped off Lucky and Sarel back at Nibela Lake Lodge and stayed for a quick lunch and ice-cold cokes looking out over Lake St Lucia. Nibela Lake Lodge really has a fantastic setting with luxury cabins and reasonable prices (although it’s still in a price range we can only afford once a year) and we’d certainly recommend this place to anyone birding Nibela peninsula and surrounds. But we were booked in at Bonamanzi so left soon after lunch for the drive around to the other side of the lake. It was a very early morning start for us so after checking in at Bonamanzi, we felt we deserved a rest in the air-conditioned tree house. We ended our day with a short drive as the sun was setting and added a single Lemon-breasted canary to bring our day’s count to 119 species. Returning to air conditioned bliss, we cooked dinner and got an early night to recover from the early start.
The day dawned humid but slightly cooler than the afternoon before, so we made use of the early hours to get some birding done before the sun caught up with us. We visited both Leguaan and Lapwing hides and then drove around the entire reserve. It was a quiet morning with rumbling thunder and spots of rain and apart from hearing Scaly-throated honeyguide, the majority of the birds we heard and saw were pretty common forest birds. By 10am things have heated up significantly and we went back at our tree house to hide. The Bonamanzi staff had gone the extra mile and left a bouquet of flowers and a complimentary bottle of iced champagne for Nicola’s birthday! This was a good excuse to have a bit of celebration so while drinking bubbly, Nicola opened her presents – a cooking thermometer and a Kindle Paperwhite! By noon it was ridiculously hot and sticky outside – a shower, aircon and fan helped to keep things reasonable but we dared not venture outside again until 5pm when we had another short drive before dinner at the restaurant. The dinner was nice although over-priced and the lack of aircon in the restaurant soon had its toll. Although we had not had any physical exertion, the humidity was so high we both had rivers of sweat running down our faces, and needed a second shower before going to bed.
An early start to the day saw us packed and ready to leave Bonamanzi by 6am, so that we could bird Muzi pans and Mkuze Game Reserve on the way home. With thick layers of cloud blown in overnight, the morning was still humid but much cooler and it was actually pleasant to be outside. We reached Muzi pans shortly after 7am and were rather shocked to find the water level in Muzi Pans had risen a good half a meter since we were there less than 48 hours ago. The squelchy grassland that held so many waders 2 days before were drowned completely and it seemed most of the birds had moved a little further away to drier patches. But the birds were still there and we watched myriads of Barn swallows hunting insects, joined by the odd Lesser striped and Wire-tailed swallows. Reed cormorants, Great, Little and Cattle egrets hunted fish where a strong current forced them closer to shore, while both Pink-backed and Great white pelicans scooped mouthfuls of water to find breakfast. The bits of remaining “shoreline” were swarming with Wood sandpipers, while White-faced whistling ducks sunned themselves on one of the few remaining islands. Beyond Muzi pans the road worsened somewhat towards the eastern entrance to Mkuze so the slow driving meant we only had about 3 hours inside the reserve. We took the road south to Nsumo pan which was also bursting its banks and had little wader-friendly shoreline to speak of. Adding only a few new birds for the day, we soon had to leave before we could add Senegal lapwing or Black-bellied bustards that were now very easy to miss in the dense grass. An uneventful drive saw us safely home just before 5pm for a few busy days ahead before leaving for Zimbabwe’s Eastern highlands.
