Rare bird lures enthusiasts to Polokwane Game Reserve

Local birders got their fair share of excitement when a rare Green Sandpiper, a relatively small wading bird, was spotted in the Polokwane Game Reserve.
According to local bird expert, Derek Engelbrecht, the bird was initially identified by his 15-year old son, Daniel on 26 October 2018 who posted the sighting on various social media birding forums. The race was then on for other birders to get to see the bird before it leaves again. The first of the local ‘twitchers’ arrived within an hour of the posting and many more went to see the bird over the weekend and even earlier that week.
“A twitcher is a birding term used for someone who will go to great lengths (financial, distance and time) to see a new species to add to their ‘lifelist’, ‘year list’ or any other kind of list they keep. I know of people who drove from Hoedspruit, Tzaneen and even Gauteng to view this rare sighting,” Derek said.
He explained that the Green Sandpiper is a Palaearctic migrant that breeds in damp, wooded areas in the Taiga forests of the northern hemisphere between 50° and 65° north in Eurasia.
With winter approaching on their breeding grounds, they migrate south to overwinter in the Mediterranean and tropical Africa as far south as the Zambezi River valley. A few individuals will ‘overshoot’ and make it as far south as South Africa, but then they tend to prefer the warmer Lowveld and subtropical areas of KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga. Although the species has been recorded in the Polokwane area on two previous occasions, the last confirmed sighting was in 2012. There are usually fewer than five sightings per year in South Africa and as such it is included in Birdlife South Africa’s National Rarities list.

Story: BARRY VILJOEN
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