The Cape Bird Club

Notes from a Rondebosch Garden by Virginia van der Vliet

Juvenile Cape Bulbuls

I was interested to see in Promerops (Nov 2007) that Peter Steyn mentions first sighting Cape Bulbuls in Claremont about five years ago. I looked up my first sighting in my Rondebosch garden - it dates back to 9 June 1997. They have been around ever since, regularly using a shaded birdbath and taking coir out of my nest material basket.

We have lived in the same house in Rondebosch, opposite Bishops playing fields since 1980 and the ebb and flow of birds over that period has been fascinating. I was sad to leave the Hadedas behind when I left Grahamstown in 1980, delighted when they followed me to Rondebosch a few years later. They now wander into my garden to the delight of my grandchildren.

Other newcomers are a pair of Common Chaffinches, which made a few tentative forays in 2003 and 2004 and are now permanent residents. A once resident Fiscal Shrike left a few years ago, but in the 2 years we have had occasional visits from a single Southern Boubou.

The Burchells Coucal that had lived and bred for many years in the garden, left when a n adjoining neighbour ripped out a tecoma hedge which used to provide shelter but last year a coucal with a white flecked back and a white eye brow (which I tentively ticked as a Whitebrowed Coucal) was seen skulking in the undergrowth a few times.
[Could this perhaps have been a juvenile Buchells which according to the litrature , does not have a streaked mantle, but should not have a white eyebrow? The Whitebrowed Coucal does not occur in our area, although the split from the one species (Whitebrowed) into the two species now recognised only occurred faily recently. Editor]

The Crowned Plovers which I used to see regularly on the Bishops field from my study window, sadly disappeared about 6 years ago, after years of breeding successfully. Two pairs of Spotted Dikkops (okay, I know they are now known as Spotted Thick-knees, but what a horrible name), breed on the fields along the Silwood Road, but often have their nests disturbed by grass mowing or their chicks taken by dogs or Pied Crows.

We have planted a lot of tecoma (Cape Honeysuckle) and now have resident Southern Double Collared Sunbirds and Diedriks Cuckoo visit when the Acraea caterpillars take over our Kiggelaria tree. Cape Canaries have also moved into the garden since 2000, and this year a Spotted Flycatcher arrived. It spent a lot of time hawking fruitflies off the bird table, seemingly oblivious of my gardening activities just meters away.

Juvenile African Goshawk

The African Goshawk which has lived and bred in our garden and the giant Norfolk Pine next door ever since we have lived here, produces young every year. As Gavin Lawson reports in the (Nov 2007) Promerops they seem fearless around people. I have a photo of one sitting on my fishpond perhaps a metre away from me. They usually seem to catch Laughing Doves, though I have seen one take a Rock Dove (Ferel Pigeon). Over the last few years I have also seen them catch very noisy rats and seem nonplused about where to go from there!!

Less happy, I have just seen the first House Crow in our road.