The Cape Bird Club

Memories of Nico Myburgh by  Peter Steyn.
an extract article from Promerops No 286. May 2011

When Nico Myburgh died in Hermanus on 16 January 2011 at the age of 86 it brought to an end a remarkable era in the annals of bird photography in southern Africa.

Nico and his wife Ella go back to the early formative years of the Cape Bird Club and there were regular outings to their farm Klawervlei at Faure. It was here while still a schoolboy that I met Nico and, despite our age difference, we formed a friendship that was to last for 55 years. Some of the regular visitors to the farm were Gerry Broekhuysen, Dirk Uys, Jack Macleod and John Martin, all leading members of the CBC in those days. Nico would find nests for the keen bird photographers and help them with building hides where necessary. After observing their activities for a few years he acquired a camera himself and within a short while he had eclipsed them all.

After selling his farm, Nico took up a post as curator of the Helderberg Nature Reserve where he remained for 18 years. He was popular with visitors and generously shared his knowledge of birds and plants with them. With his ability to think like a bird, he was able to lure elusive Red-chested Flufftails to visit a particular spot in marshy ground which he had baited with mealworms. However, his supreme achievement was to secure just a single picture of a Buff-spotted Flufftail which graces the cover of this issue. It is a long story, but it took him 118 patient hours sitting in hides over many days to achieve his reward.

photograph by Nico Myburgh

Red chested Flufftail.

On his retirement from Helderberg, Nico and Ella moved to KwaZulu-Natal to live on a friend’s farm near Eshowe for seven years before finally settling at Onrus. Within a short while he totally revitalised the local bird club with his enthusiasm and popular slide shows. Those years were incredibly productive and he added a whole range of new species to his already extensive slide collection, including a Palmnut Vulture at its nest from a hide at a vertiginous 25 metres!

During the Eshowe years Nico and Ella made annual visits to their daughter’s farm at Brandvlei in the Northern Cape and I would drive up from Cape Town to join them. There were many highlights, but our favourite bird was the drab Sclater’s Lark, which invariably lays just a single egg, and we published pioneering observations on its breeding biology. Then, in October 1986, Nico found the first nest of a Red Lark ever recorded. Not long before his death we agreed that those halcyon days in Bushmanland were the best of our many shared experiences.

This brief tribute can not begin to do justice to Nico’s memory. His pictures were published in every photographic field guide and he had over 100 in the Complete Book of Southern African Birds. His slide shows with their inimitable commentaries were legendary and delighted audiences at countless bird clubs over many years.

photograph by Peter Steyn

Nico Myburgh in the Helderberg.

On a trip to Botswana in 1970 Nico and I drove past an enormous iconic baobab near the Makgadikgadi pan. Some years later when I passed again it had collapsed and left a void on that long road to Maun. Such a void will be felt by all those who knew this wonderful man.