The inconvenient possibility that the Crested Honey Buzzard at Somerset West could be a hybrid throws a spotlight on the tricky identification of this species.
Around lunchtime on Saturday, 30 January 2021, I casually checked the Western Cape General Birding Chat Telegram group. There on my screen was a photograph from Kate Morris taken a few hours earlier in Somerset West near Cape Town and she was requesting identification assistance. I did a double-take: the image was of a Crested Honey Buzzard Pernis ptilorhynchus, never before recorded in southern Africa but a species I have studied in detail because of its potential as a vagrant to South Africa.
But there was a complication. Many of the Crested Honey Buzzards recorded in the Middle East (and thus potential vagrants to Africa) are thought to hybridise with the closely related European Honey Buzzard P. apivorus and some of the features visible in that initial photograph didn’t exclude it being a hybrid. This Asian species is also widely known as the Oriental Honey Buzzard because a significant crest on the head is found only in southern subspecies, which are often split.
Birders rushed into action and the bird was soon relocated by Somerset West twitcher Bryn de Kocks at the now-famous Spanish Farm raptor-watch point. For more than a month the bird taunted and delighted birders, appearing suddenly on random afternoons and disappearing just as quickly. Some birders visited the site on six occasions before seeing it.
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Esta historia es de la edición May/June 2021 de African Birdlife.
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EXPLORING NEW HORIZONS
Keith Barnes, co-author of the new Field Guide to Birds of Greater Southern Africa, chats about the long-neglected birding regions just north of the Kunene and Zambezi, getting back to watching birds and the vulture that changed his life.
footloose IN FYNBOS
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CAPE crusade
The Cape Bird Club/City of Cape Town Birding Big Year Challenge
water & WINGS
WATER IS LIFE. As wildlife photographer Greg du Toit knows better than most.
winter wanderer
as summer becomes a memory in the south, the skies are a little quieter as the migrants have returned to the warming north. But one bird endemic to the southern African region takes its own little winter journey.
when perfect isn't enough
Egg signatures and forgeries in the cuckoo-drongo arms race
Southern SIGHTINGS
The late summer period naturally started quietening down after the midsummer excitement, but there were still some classy rarities on offer for birders all over the subregion. As always, none of the records included here have been adjudicated by any of the subregion's Rarities Committees.
flood impact on wetland birds
One of the features of a warming planet is increasingly erratic rainfall; years of drought followed by devastating floods. Fortunately, many waterbirds are pre-adapted to cope with such extremes, especially in southern Africa where they have evolved to exploit episodic rainfall events in semi-arid and arid regions. But how do waterbirds respond to floods in areas where rainfall - and access to water - is more predictable? Peter Ryan explores the consequences of recent floods on the birds of the Western Cape's Olifants River valley.
a star is born
It’s every producer’s dream to plan a wildlife television series and pick the right characters before filming.
