The next morning I had them up at 05h00 to hit the vulture restaurant at first light and wait for the amazing Bearded Vulture, I figured best to go for the big spectacular things first.
Unfortunately it did not show up and was referred to as the ‘bearded bastard’ for the rest of the trip. Fortunately the failure to find the target bird, did not dampen the excitement of the newly infected birders and I could distract them with sightings of Blue Cranes, Lanner Falcons and Bald Ibis.
The lure of a day trip into foreign country and the opportunity to head up the highest road pass in Southern Africa added to the chance of seeing some cool birds, convinced my fellow travellers to head out early a few mornings later. I have to admit here that for a fair bit of the trip the scenery was so incredible that I actually stopped looking for birds. Yes, it was that amazing!
After crossing the border, a surprisingly easy ten minute affair, we travelled through a typical semi-rural African area, not very inspiring, but with the odd interesting spaza shop or pony with blanket clad rider. Then, suddenly we were in the mountains heading up a steep valley with villages clinging to the sides of unimaginably huge mountains. The terraced slope reminded us of northern Thailand. Any fields that had not been planted this season were a splash of pink and white where Cosmos invaded them.
It was fantastic, every bend we rounded was greeted with gasps and I was reminded of a Douglas Adams description of a landscape in New Zealand that made him want to ‘burst into applause.’ We took a ridiculous amount of pictures that completely disappointed us when we got home, as the truly awesome scenery could not be captured by an A4 picture. It was a complete distraction from birding, but after a while I recovered and started focusing on important things again.
‘Stop’ I shouted to Badger, my brother-in-law who was driving. He did, no small achievement on the winding mountain roads. I had seen a flutter of wings a few meters back, and jumped out to investigate. I tracked the bird down – a Rock Bunting. Nice but not one of the specials I was after. On getting back to the car, my sister said she had seen a bird that ‘looked like it had a red rump’. This was good on many levels, firstly Rockjumpers have red rumps, secondly my sister was using birding terms like ‘rump’ and thirdly I had infected the other passengers in the car to such a degree that they where pointing birds out to me. This was going very well! I went to investigate.
A movement behind a rock, then a flash of red and black, A ROCKJUMPER, I jumped up and down waving frantically to the others still in the car, they where all looking the other way at the view, damn! The bird flew past them and landed on a rock in plain sight! After attracting their attention by charging down the road after the bird, with camera and binoculars at the ready, they all got a look at the star of the show. After getting some great photos, (what a bonus to see a lifer and be able to photograph it) I did a little jig back up the road to the car. My day was made! Could life get any better? A road trip, great scenery, good friends and a spectacular new bird on my list.
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