rara avis

It’s a blustery day at Rondevlei outside Cape Town and a few hardy bird club members have come for the monthly bird outing. Peter Steyn has been birding since before the reserve was founded in 1952, yet he still returns and is as enthusiastic about seeing a Little Bittern skid across the water in front of us as the woman next to me, for whom it is a lifer. Later, as I register an African Spoonbill on my atlas checklist, Peter and I discuss his 1957 record of the first breeding colony of spoonbills in the Western Cape.

- PETER STEYN, IAN-MALCOLM RIJSDIJK

Author, photographer, guide, naturalist, teacher, Peter Steyn is a humble yet immense presence in southern African birding, from his school days at Diocesan College to his years at Falcon College, Zimbabwe, and on to his long association with the Cape Bird Club (CBC). The instinct to share and educate has never diminished for Peter. After a presentation on birds and photography at a local school, the teacher in charge wrote, ‘Steyn had the matrics amazed at his quoting from Hamlet to answer questions.’

Birders today have a wide variety of resources available to them and I often get the sense that I am walking a well-trodden path, putting my eye to a scope set up for me and ticking a bird well laid out in the published guides, with additional flight shots and arrows pointing to key identification features. Peter is one of those whose photographs helped to populate that guide and whose constant observational studies dating back to the journal Bokmakierie in 1951 flesh out the descriptions of nesting habits, prey and general behaviour. Peter’s work is characterised by monk-like patience, sharp observation, and careful notetaking.

You have had a profound influence on ornithology through not only your own observations and books but also through your mentorship and encouragement of others who are now established, ornithologists. At what point did you find your own interest in birds developing into guiding, teaching and mentorship? Is there a particular experience or trip where you saw your own passions influencing the work and ideas of others?