ON THE EVENING of Wednesday, December 3, about 24 of them were seen; by Sunday, December 7, there were about 300 Amur falcons in the evening sky over Vryheid. Presumably, those seen on Wednesday were the vanguard, and the numbers will continue to swell as more of them arrive for our summer. They are difficult to count but there will probably be a couple of thousand here finally.
They were about a week later in arriving this year compared to last year, but for as long as anyone can remember there has been a colony of these little raptors coming to Vryheid at this time of year.
They will have flown from eastern Asia (Siberia, Mongolia and northern China) where they breed, and these little bundles of energy (they weigh 100-180 grams) will have left their breeding grounds towards the middle of October. It has been established that they travel about 14,500km to get here, and that their route back to South Africa includes a leg of about 3,000km across the Indian Ocean, from the Indian sub-continent to Africa’s east coast.
In addition to all sorts of natural hazards, their migration over Nagaland in north-eastern India has been viewed by the people below as an annual protein windfall. It has been estimated that as many as 145,000 of these birds were netted and killed annually, until an outcry by conservation organisations resulted in the implementation of a strategy to prevent these killings.
The falcons in Vryheid will now spend their days in the fields and vleis around Vryheid hunting “goggas”. You can see often see them perched on the telephone lines alongside the road between Vryheid and Utrecht. They are nature’s pest controllers.
In the evenings they fly into town, gather in their numbers while soaring silently in the evening sky, before settling, just before dark, for the night in the tall plane trees that stand in the municipal swimming pool grounds in High Street. They are best viewed from outside the Moth Hall in High Street.
They will stay here until the end of March or beginning of April next year, and then suddenly disappear to fly again up north, up the length of Africa, across the Middle East and around the Himalayas back to their breeding grounds.
