Jenny Grice, from the Melville Koppies Nature Reserve and Heritage Site shared a few sentiments on what you could find at the reserve on your well-deserved hike in the big city – here is what she had to say.
Covid-19 has brought uncertainty to our lives. Many of us don’t know if we’ll have a job next week, if our business will recover from lockdown or if we’ll be able to leave Joburg in December on our annual pilgrimage to the coast to enjoy our summer holidays.
Looking up at the sky at Melville Koppies can bring some order and tranquillity back into our lives. It’s October, the beginning of spring on the koppies, the time when migratory birds like the European bee-eater reappear. There are no lockdown restrictions on their passage; just the normal dangers of predators, wind turbine blades, power lines, storms or strong winds that can knock them off course.
Stand on top of the Koppies and listen out for their calls. Often they’re flying with swallows, also recently back in town. They’re easy to distinguish from the swallows by their distinctive flight pattern: several staccato-like flaps of their wings and then a long soar and glide. This flight pattern helps conserve their energy enabling them to fly up to 500kms a day on their journeys south to Melville Koppies for the summer and north again when our winter beckons. If you’re lucky you’ll see them settle so you can admire their sun-yellow throat, turquoise underparts and russet-brown head. It’s likely the one you spot was here last year and will be back here with her life partner and offspring every summer in her six-year life-span.
Bee-eaters need an abundance of insects to sustain them the whole year-round. So they enjoy summer holidays here, soaring, gliding, snatching bees, flying ants and other insects on the wing. They don’t worry about making nests and giving birth. That’s a job that takes place in the other half of the year in burrows in mud-banks north of us in Africa.
Why not head on over and see them for yourself on 18 and 25 October? Just arrive from 8am and self-guide yourself and you’ll be out by 11.30am. There is secure parking at Marks Parks and security on Melville Koppies is provided.
