Flowers Were Yesterday. Waterbirds Today!

There's a water purification wetland in South Africa called Strandfontein Wetlands. It looks a bit utilitarian; square ponds separated by raised dikes, but any concerns about its aesthetic qualities, or lack thereof, are dashed by the spectacular birdlife using the rich wetland habitat thus created. 

Blacksmith lapwings are elegant, yappy and ubiquitous. We were fortunate to see many pairs with young on our trip, none close enough for photography. 

I've found that my camera absolutely loves blacksmith lapwings. It can see blacksmith lapwings. Ergo, it can focus on them. It can't see lilac-breasted rollers. It is really hard to get a sharp photo of a perched roller. When it flies, the high-contrast midnight blue edge on the wing sticks out to the camera's eye, and I can usually get a sharp shot of one in flight. I'll take it.

Back to the lapwing: my lens even caught the little spurs on the bird's wrists (blown up below). This is a feature shared by jacanas, who have fancy yellow ones, horned screamers, who have dangerous ones, and some other species. I believe the spurs originate from the bird's thumb. Hoatzins, those stinky weird hissing swamp birds from South America, have straight up claws on their wrists, that they use for climbing, Archaeopteryx-style. Doin' it old school. Anyway, I never knew blacksmith lapwings had spurs until I saw my photo. I love my Canon 7D and that 70-300 telephoto lens. So much. 

Black-winged stilt takes wing with the lapwing. Beautiful. 

  More high-contrast birds: A black-headed heron strides by a huge arum lily. We call them callas. Look, dahling. The calla lilies are in bloo-um. Those things are EVERYWHERE in South Africa. Coming up in marshes, on dunes, in pastures...man. An abundance of riches.

Black-shouldered kite eyes us from a Casuarina tree.

A black-winged stilt favors its right leg, which has a fish hook in its heel. Damn it. People. If you're going to fish in a sewage treatment plant stuffed with waders, can you please keep track of your tackle? How I wished I had my long-handled net.

Another stilt takes flight.

Quiet reflections from yellow-billed ducks, Cape shovelers, and another black-winged stilt.

There's an odd brown salvia abloom. The sunbirds love it. Must be full of spicy nectar. Quite a looker, once you get used to the flower color!

This mystery butterfly reminded me of our Harvester. It's feeding at a pelargonium!

Members of the Mesembryanthaceae (we call them ice plants) are called "Vygies" locally. It's pronounced Fay-ghees. You have to roll spit around in the back of your mouth to say it the way the Afrikaans folks do. I try but just end up sounding like I'm hockering. I loved this peach colored one!

The dunes were covered with Osteospermums and other composites. So beautiful! Masses and masses and drifts of spring color, everywhere!

I know. I said we were looking at waterbirds today. But...flowers. When I got a load of the botanizing one can do in the Cape region last year, I made sure to emphasize that in the trip description for Holbrook Travel. And we attracted some master gardeners--three to be exact--who were happy as warthogs in a waterhole, hunkered down appreciating these botanical wonders.

Such a great group, the garden mavens gettin' down low and diggin' those posies.

My kind of people.

A Mighty Fancy Turd Tumbler

Any birder will tell you that the best birding is often in the weirdest places: dumps and the like. When I was 12, I spent a summer in the northeast corner of Montana, just south of the Saskatchewan border, where I observed at length my first blue-winged teal, shovelers, American avocets, marbled godwits, and long-billed curlews at the sewage lagoon for an Air Force base in Opheim. I had to be told it was a sewage lagoon, and not to wade in. To me, it was a wonderland. 

I feel the same about Viera Wetlands near Titusville, Florida. Magic. I'd happily spend a whole week there birding and photographing and sketching with zeal. 

Strandfontein "Wetlands" is no different. The birds are so magical you quickly forget that these lagoons have a not-so-beautiful function. 

There are black-winged stilts... (as above)

great white pelicans (different from our American whites)

black-headed herons

blacksmith plovers

Egyptian geese...well, those are everywhere, but still lovely to look at, delightful to hold

and lots of WHAT ARE THOSE?

PINK THINGS

In a SEWAGE LAGOON FOR PETE'S SAKE

Honking like geese and gangling all over the place??

OK. I'm not in Ohio any more. There are GREATER FLAMINGOS in the sewage lagoons here. 

Lots of them.

And one cool thing that happens here happens because the water is so deep. 

Flamingos normally feed in shallow water, not much above their ankles. Shallower than this. Their bills have that distinctive down-bend. That's because when they feed they turn their heads upside down (imagine if these birds simply dropped their heads until their heads were upside down). 

Then they sweep their bills back and forth, rapidly clapping their mandibles and taking up globs of mud. They use their strong tongues to squeeze the mud back out through comblike projections along the bill sides called lamellae, and by so doing strain out small crustaceans, shrimp, amphipods, insect larvae, bivalves--that kind of thing. The carotene in the blue-green algae and crustaceans they take in give them their rich color. And all those little wrigglers I listed, they keep and swallow. I would imagine they have to raise their heads to swallow...

Here, the water's so deep that the flamingos take off like so many swans or mini-sternwheel paddleboats and swim!

It is quite amazing. I like to imagine those long coral legs thrashing under the water.

And this time I got to see them! The flamingos were tipping up like so many mallards, probably to reach the muddy bottom of the lagoon, and all the delicious things living there. What a sight to see.  File all this under: Things I hadn't known flamingos do.

More flamingos anon. I know you love 'em. 

I'm headed back to South Africa, leading a trip for Holbrook Travel, in September 2016. Wanna come along?

Details HERE