Binoculars to be kept ready

Kruger’s feathered friends will be in the spotlight for the next year or so. The South African Bird Atlas 2 (SABAP2) has moved deeper into the Kruger National Park (KNP) than ever. The aim of the project is to map the distribution and relative abundance of birds in southern Africa across South Africa, Lesotho and Swaziland. While the general tourism routes in the renowned Kruger have been duly covered in the past, areas off the beaten track will now be included for the first time.

Launched in July 2007, this survey takes place in collaboration between the Animal Demography Unit at the University of Cape Town, BirdLife South Africa and the South African National Biodiversity Institute.

More than merely a count of the birds in our country, the project is also a way of documenting the changing environment we live in. According to BirdLife South Africa, birds and bird habitats are in a state of unprecedented change, especially as a result of alterations in land use and because of climate change. By monitoring changes, those affecting other kinds of biodiversity can thus also be examined.

The compilation of such a record entails the collection of hordes of data. SABAP organises this by recording the birds seen and heard in a pentad, the unit of recording. A pentad is an area of five minutes longitude by five minutes latitude – roughly translating to squares with nine-kilometre sides. Considering the area that the study covers, it takes thousands of people to collect this data – referred to as citizen scientists, and now for the first time, they have been given special permission to gather this data in remote areas of the KNP. Four members of the BirdLife Lowveld have been given permits to do this monitoring.

The park is seen as vital to the initiative as it is the largest conservation area in South Africa and in order to cover all the pentads in the Kruger efficiently, it has to be atlased a minimum of four times. While areas popularly traversed by tourists are well covered, says Peter Lawson, BirdLife Lowveld founding member and one of the chosen four, there are still some pentads with fewer than four submissions.

Lawson participated in his first Kruger excursion in November 2013 in the Stolsnek and Malelane sections, describing it as wonderful. “We spent an entire day without seeing or hearing another human and I thought I was in heaven,” he reports. Among others, sections in Skukuza, Tshokwane, Mopani, Shingwedzi and Mooiplaas have also been covered. Lawson says he has managed to add a number of good Kruger sightings on his trips, including the steppe eagle, lesser-spotted eagle, pallid harrier, Montagu’s harrier, dusky lark, great spotted cuckoo, desert cisticola and numerous out-of-range lark-like buntings.

But there is still a lot of work to be done, and the team will be kept busy until its permit expires in 2016. If you want to become a citizen scientist and help to document environmental change as part of SABAP2, visit https://sabap2.adu.org.za/

Source: www.birdlife.org.za