A Milestone Story
Many years ago, when Jeanie and I were the perfect family with two kids (Thomas and Adam) and a single Golden Retriever (Abby), she started the negotiations about having a third child. She reminded me that in our pre-marriage discussions with our relationship counsellor (yes, we had one of those before we got married), she’d made it clear that she wanted four kids, so I thought a compromise was fair and I happily (sort of) agreed to a third.
Jack came along and, thankfully, I was now done.
What I hadn’t realized was that a compromise in her language was that we do what she wanted, and so, a few years later, we had our fourth when Emma arrived.
Why is this relevant to this birding story?
Well, I guess Jeanie had an argument in suggesting that the more kids we have, the higher the chances that one of them becomes a birding companion. Truthfully, that really wasn’t her reasoning, but it was the way I decided to look at it, now having to deal with little babies for far longer than I had expected.
That seems to have held true in that one of my children as Adam has become a very close birding companion of mine since he was about 10 years old.
Interestingly, I had always thought my oldest son, Tommy, would be my birder. He used to join me on every outing from when he twitched a Golden Pipit with me when he was about eight years old, but that only lasted until he was about 14.
His list grew rapidly and then it ground to a halt when he’d seen just about all the easy birds that he could. The interest waned and he moved onto other interests but, thankfully, for my birding needs, Adam slipped into his place, and he remains as fanatical as I am.
[Aside: Tommy is now back in the birding fold having seen how much fun Adam and I and a bunch of our friends are having on Bindo, and so he is now signed up and logging his birds on the app]
Adam’s passion is very similar to mine. He loves photographing birds, he is an endemic bird nut, and he likes a bit of adventure, where the focus is on finding our own good birds. We will concede that we aren’t completely immune to the thrill of the occasional twitch. With there being two of us, though, the budget for jumping on planes and long-distance drives is limited, and so most of our recent twitches have had a radius limit, restricting us to local rarities.
The last 10 years as birding companions have been very good to us. Adam has given me an excuse to label our time together as “babysitting”, and so my pink tickets to get out have been far more generous than they would have been without him. Our holidays have also been far more birdy than if it was only me casting a destination vote, so Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Botswana have all featured on the agenda. I have even managed to sell a Northern Cape road trip to the family where we ticked Sclater’s and Red Larks in the space of an afternoon where we treaded a very risky line, leaving the non-birders at the car in the baking heat while we traipsed the red Koa Dunes for our Red Lark.
Our time together has meant that Adam’s numbers have steadily accumulated with his first major milestone of 700 sub-region birds being achieved with a Caspian Plover on 14 October 2018 when he was 13 years old.
You would have thought that 800 before the age of 16 was a mere formality, but the laws of diminishing returns holds strong in bird listing, and a very busy high school calendar meant that progress was slow.
There were some great memories in that period where it was not the numbers that mattered but rather the experiences:
The flock of 50 Crab-plovers on the remote beach on the San Sebastian Peninsula
The eventual success of the finding a pair of Olive-headed Weavers in the Panda Woodlands
The Green Tinkerbird that we had never thought we’d see, eventually revealing itself in the Save Woodlands
The post-COVID pelagic trip that yielded a remarkable collection of lifers including Southern Fulmar, Northern and Southern Royal Albatrosses and Grey-headed Albatross
A point-blank Buff-breasted Sandpiper near Muzi Pan in KZN
And we’ll never forget our recent African Pitta trip to Zimbabwe where we enjoyed multiple interactions with a lifetime bird for both of us
We never really thought about the numbers when we shared each of these experiences but we happened to have a recent weekend trip up to Zaagkuilsdrift Road with good birding friends so I could finally put my own River Warbler bogey to rest, when Adam decided to do a quick check of where he was in his approach to an 800 milestone.
We were both very surprised to discover that he was within touching distance. After our Pitta trip and Lesser Yellowlegs success (after at least four painful misses over the years) Adam was in the low 790s. 793 to be precise (more on this below). He needed seven birds on our Zaagies weekend to get him there.
As one always does, we threw together a target list and we had ten potential birds for the trip, with most of them being quite tough. I crossed out Striped Crake (semi-mythical) and I had very low hopes for a Cuckoo-finch (not that easy on Zaagies) and then removing Thrush Nightingale was prudent given how tough they are to see, and so it looked like we needed a virtual full house to get him there, but at least there was hope that it was on.
We rattled through the easier ones early on with Sedge, Icterine and Olive Tree Warbler and Black-winged Pratincole.
Common Whitethroat was a hard slog and a brief view and then after at least six hours of effort, the River Warbler succumbed.
Adam was on 799 and surely an African Crake was a certainty at Zaagies after one of the best seasons that had ever been on Crake Road?
As it turned out the African Crake was beyond our reach and we actually got far closer with a Striped Crake as it called from a flooded bit of grassland and so very nearly got a view, but we would ultimately return to Cape Town with Adam stuck on 799.
There was a further postponement of the big moment with the comedic sequence of the multiple Macaroni Penguin sightings in the Betty’s Bay and Melkbosstrand areas. Several attempts over a period of three weeks were frustrating (for both of us, in fact). The most painful of those, for Adam, was a two-hour drive early in the morning pre-lectures, with Adam dragging multiple Stellies birding mates with him to Hawston (also now birding hard on Bindo), only to slog to the promised spot two kilometres down the beach to find it empty of Macaroni Penguins. The only consolation was a double Peregrine Farmstall breakfast pie for each of the students, lessening the pain but unfortunately not counting towards milestone success.
So it came to pass that we were sitting in George for the long weekend, enjoying time with my parents, when the African Crake in Betty’s Bay was reported on 2nd May.
There was not much we could do about it at that moment, although some twitchers would argue that a five-hour drive was justified for such an auspicious moment. Milestone, or not, that was way beyond our radius limits and so we simply enjoyed the local birds instead.
As a quick aside here, Adam has a lousy history with vagrant African Crakes. There was a bird reported from Strandfontein in May 2017, when Adam was just 11 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, so we both rushed down together to try and find it but several hours of searching yielded nothing and when it was seen again on the Monday, Adam was committed to school attendance and ultimately missed that bird when it disappeared on the following Saturday morning when we were 30 minutes out from getting there after a school rugby match.
There was sadness back then and there was more sadness, even for a mature 19-year-old, when we were stuck in George. Our flight was due to land at 12:35 back from George on Sunday and I committed to Adam that if it was seen on the Sunday morning, we would head straight from the airport and give it a bash. The bird was seen and I kept to my promise.
We met my good mate Stu on the road and Tommy decided the Bindo fun was too much to pass up and we headed to Betty’s.
This is perhaps the moment where things went awry. I have been saddled with all the blame for what happened next, and I guess I have to accept it. Knowing that the bird was mostly showing later in the afternoon, I suggested we stop (on a perfect afternoon I might add) for a quick rockjumper walk in Rooi Els. I put it out there that we should make the most of our afternoon pink ticket (happily granted by Jeanie) and what could be better than an appetizer for a milestone bird than a few cool endemics, not least of which would be the coolest of them all – Cape Rockjumper.
So, the team reluctantly agreed, and we made a stop for a quick 45-minute walk. We nailed the rockjumper, and another endemic in Sentinel Rock Thrush, and we got back in the car for signal as we drove back to Clarence Drive and were horrified to see on the rarity Telegram group that the crake was parading around as we were looking at rockjumpers.
I tried to soften the unhappiness in the car by telling my companions that it was at least great comfort that the bird was still there, but this quickly turned to cold comfort as we arrived in a swirl of screeching tyres, slamming doors, dropped cellphones in the panic and a sprint to get a glimpse of the bird as it was rapidly disappearing into the vegetation.
We had missed it by no more than 20 seconds and suddenly there were a lot of glum faces and, no less, a few daggers directed at me.
A futile wait for 90 minutes yielded more glumness and the only thing that could partially save the day was a wonderful encounter with a Cape Eagle Owl in Pringle Bay on our way home.
The drive was relatively silent aside from the occasional recriminations and then, thankfully, the discussions commenced around the lecture timetable to see when a second attempt would be most suitable.
We settled on Wednesday morning and I moved a few work things around to make sure I could be there in case the milestone happened.
At this point, I also decided to make sure Adam had not made an error with his count as he is particularly useless when it comes to his bird list admin.
He has many birding skills but the behind-the-desk record-keeping is not one of them. There was inevitably further horror to this milestone-approaching moment when my outdated spreadsheet, quickly caught up for a few of the recent birds, tallied to 798.
I suddenly felt better about my rockjumper debacle as it would have been disastrous to report 800 when it was, in fact, only 799, or could it have been even worse at 801 and us having missed the milestone bird altogether?
Once again, it was my error, but this time a well-received one when Adam noticed that I’d omitted the Olive Bee-eater we’d seen in Mozambique.
The milestone moment was back on so we assembled a crew for Wednesday morning with Adam and Tommy and my good friends Pete and Irene, and we made sure we did not get distracted along the way by ensuring we got there before it was even light - there was no risk we would stop for rockjumpers in the dark.
We arrived at the quiet little road above Bass Lake in Betty’s Bay and within five minutes Pete had spotted our special little bird slowly sneaking into view from the roadside vegetation.
Immediate celebrations were suspended as we enjoyed this quiet moment with the bird but once it headed back into the thick bushes the high fives commenced.
I recall the day that I saw my 800th bird (serendipitously also a rallid) which was a week or so after I turned 40 (12 years ago) when I gave myself a birding trip birthday present with two of my good mates and we flushed a Corncrake from a farm road in Zimbabwe.
That moment was accompanied by similar high fives and awkward chest bumps but as special as that was, this moment with Adam and Tommy and two good friends was multiples better than that.
It reaffirmed how lucky I am to be able to share this incredible passion with my own kids and I have also realised that it is not just that one moment, but all the incremental moments that led to it.
It is even better to realise that this is not a full stop but just another comma in many years of birding time that we’ll spend together. I am hoping that Tommy will continue to join us on future missions and maybe one day he’ll also have a chance to get to 800, which, hopefully, I won’t do my best to mess up.
