For the love of birds...

They may be called birdwatchers but they are in fact using their ears. As Johan van Zyl discovered on his maiden outing as an "avian tourist" with BirdLife South Africa to find the 450 bird species that live in the Garden Route and Little Karoo.

- Johan van Zyl

The early bird catches the worm; the early birder catches the bird.

Bird pharisees who happen to rise early are the first to notice them: silent zombielike groups armed with binoculars, ears attuned like those of bat-eared foxes, staring at an unremarkable brown shrub. The call of a little brown job (LBJ) has been heard somewhere in the vicinity of the half-dead bush, and each member of the binoculars brigade is now earnestly trying to see it for themselves. Those who are successful ululate quietly on the inside (just as birding etiquette demands) and immediately record the species, date, time and place on their phone or in a notebook.

This silent brigade not only looks like a sect, it sounds and acts like one, too. At the Reflections EcoReserve next to Rondevlei outside Wilderness, Tim Carr confirms with a nod: "Bird nerds are an odd bunch, completely different from mammal spotters... look at that beautiful oxpecker with a rhino under it." He laughs and shrugs his shoulders. "I believe that it takes one to know one."

LONG BEFORE the Covid-19 pandemic, birdwatching was the fastest growing outdoor hobby in the USA and Canada, but it exploded worldwide during the lockdown when people were forced to spend time in their gardens. This is according to Andrew de Blocq, a birder and avitourism project manager with BirdLife South Africa, the biggest bird conservation organisation in the country. In 2014, Andrew started to keep a tally of all the birds that had crossed his path (now well over 770!). "Covid-19 made tens of thousands of people realise that they didn't even know the names of the birds they saw in their yards every day," he says.