The Cape Bird Club

Large Spotted Thick-knee roost by Francois van der Merwe

photograph by Ann Koeslag

Spotted Thick- Knees with chick

The Spotted Thick-knee is sparsely found in the arid Hantam succulent karoo veld around Calvinia. Usually in pairs, they are most often found in or near river courses where there are scattered trees for day time shelter. Dead birds are occassionally found on roads, killed by passing traffic.

Late afternoon on 10 June 2007 I flushed an unusually large group of Spotted Thick-knees from an area newly cleared of presopis trees next to a large dam on the farm Tierhoek close to Calvinia in the Northern Cape. The 40 Thick-knees that I counted had congregated in a relatively small area and were squatting amoungst the cut down presopis trees. They took to the wing and settled, now over a much larger area, in a nearby fallow field.

Thick-knee winter roosts are known and I have once counted 70 birds in such a roost near Stellenbosch (Van der Merwe 1993 Promerops). As the Spotted Thick-knee is less common in the dry western Karoo (Roberts 7), the size of the Hantam roost is noteworthy. I estimate that Thick knee pairs on Tierhoek occupy territories (home ranges) of several hundred hectares each. Over the entire farm of 8000 hectares I only know of about 4 or 5 pairs. But of this larger area at least half would not be suitable for Thick-knees, being too mountainous or otherwise devoid of suitable tree shelter.

If the 40 birds that I encountered comprised 20 pairs, these must have come from a very large area, perhaps several thousand hectares or several square kilometers to join the day time roost.