Cape Town - Heard about Africa’s Big Five? Sure you have, but you’re not going to see them roaming in the wild along the Garden Route from Cape Town to Port Elizabeth.
You’ve got a brilliant chance, though, of seeing a large and colourful part of the continent’s Small Five Million.
I’ve loved birds ever since a young boy growing up in the Eastern Cape. My father would take me paddling up some of the narrow, overgrown rivers in the home-made family canoe, ducking under road culverts heavy with the muddy nests of swallows and martins, or pulling ourselves stealthily through reeds to get close to an oriole.
Our garden was a paradise for birds and it only took once for the old man nicking me taking out a mousebird in a mulberry tree with my air-rifle for me not to do it again. Never shoot something you’re not going to eat, he said, before handing me a .22 and telling me how and when (never shoot a male during mating season, their meat turns wormy) to take out guinea fowl.
The old man had a serious taste for guinea fowl.
But the family split up. Mom and I moved to Joburg – Hillbrow – and there the love for things avian was sublimated for many years.
Even now where I live in Cape Town, I’m pretty much restricted to crows, hadeda ibis, seagulls, pigeons, red-winged starlings and wagtails. In fact, I can pretty much tick them off my birding list every morning before the kettle’s boiled the first time.
I regularly travel to Simon’s Town, where a friend lives who shares my passion for little feathered creatures. In her garden there are sunbirds (double-collared and malachite), buntings, prinias, robins, white-eyes and bulbuls. She also has a devoted following of guinea fowl (no, I don’t do that anymore) and pigeons that cost her a fortune in feed every month.
Once, maybe twice, a year I get to the Eastern Cape where the species are “foreign” and I’m driven scatty for the first few days trying to identify bird calls that I know I should know. But it’s a trek getting there.
Much nearer, though, is the Garden Route. It’s more accessible, too, in terms of cost because there are several SANParks facilities in the area (from the Wilderness to Nature’s Valley and Storms River/ Tsitsikamma); each a different biome with a diversity of species but collectively known as the Garden Route National Park.
I started a recent road trip with the least-known of the three: turning off the N2 about 30km on the Port Elizabeth side of Plettenberg Bay before heading down the steep and winding Grootrivier Pass into Nature’s Valley.
Unlike other SANParks camps, it’s a strictly self-catering facility and you can forget about nipping out for a steak or ribs at the resident franchise operation.
Accommodation is rustic (keep your windows closed during daylight hours because baboons will enter, even if you’re inside) but the cost-value benefit is great, especially in the early mornings. Mist rises eerily off the waters, a half-collared kingfisher perched just a few metres away, a black-headed oriole not much further…
Not a bad way to enjoy your breakfast and coffee.
There was a young woman staring pensively at the river before turning back with her head down – I could only wonder what was going through her head.
Headed into the village a bit later, I had to brake sharply for two bushbuck (was he amorous, she playing hard to get?) that burst out of the thicket and fled between the houses.
Up the other side of the Grootrivier Pass and back onto the N2 and on to Storms River Mouth, is the second of the three parks. (There is a fourth but for now I’m keeping it to myself.)
In terms of accommodation, internal facilities and overall scenery, this is by far the best of the three. The park staff are also extremely helpful.
Get up early to watch the sun rising over the rocks and waves.
I was lucky enough to have a large kelp gull park off on my balustrade while I wrapped my hands around a mug of fortified coffee. I was later sad to discover that the bridge over the Storms River was closed.
But I sat on the rocks watching a group of paddlers heading into the kloof. They weren’t aware there was a small group of ragged-tooth sharks not far off.
The walk from the campsite to the bridge is an easy one, the boardwalk winding through a milkwood forest that’s packed with small birds like Cape batis and larger ones such as the Knysna turaco (loeries to most people).
Normally one has to sit still and keep very quiet for the birds to approach but the walkways are so steadily busy that they have become fairly habituated to people.
Saving the best for the road home to Cape Town, I hook up with a dear friend – travel-blogger and ardent “twitcher” Rose Bilbrough – and we slope off to the two public bird hides on the Wilderness’s Swartvlei and Rondevlei.
For someone who likes birds, is there any more evocative call than that of the African fish eagle? Any more glorious sight than two territorial males tumbling, with claws locked, to separate above the water at almost impossibly low altitude to power back to a height where they can resume their struggle for dominance?
It’s probably the most glorious wildlife sight you’ll be able to experience along the Garden Route.
Later, Rose and I watch entranced as a notoriously shy African swamphen (gallinule) emerges from the reeds on stilt-like legs, it’s outsize feet stepping daintily in the shallows. The colours virtually mirror those of the malachite kingfisher whose head flicks furiously from side to side as he searches for breakfast.
The first meal of the day has already been served for a diminutive pied kingfisher, whose beak might just be bigger than his gullet. He’s speared a fish that appears almost half his size and this is wriggling furiously while the kingfisher holds on.
Meanwhile, a couple of reed cormorants look on, hoping he’ll make a mistake.
There’s a purple heron that takes wing, a malachite that perches prettily but the moment of photographic magic comes when a red-billed teal beats his wings over the still waters; the resultant picture looks like a poster for a Pixar movie.
Ebb-and-Flow, the Wilderness rest camp section of the Garden Route National Park, is the most urban of the three camps and is on one bank of the Touws River.
I, however, make my way to the opposite bank to the Fairy Knowe Hotel, from which Chris Leggat of Eden Adventures (www.eden.co.za) launches his canoes.
We set off early in the morning and spend a couple of wonderful hours on the water. Yes, there are fish eagles but there are also bitterns, flycatchers, Rameron pigeons and – most frustratingly – a giant kingfisher that just won’t sit still.
The wind comes up as we paddle back downstream.
It gets bitingly cold and we head into the Wilderness village to Pomodoro for coffee and breakfast. Happy as a bleedin’ lark.
Jim Freeman, Saturday Star