Neil Gray Birds

30 May 2008 I finally took my Canon to Kitwe!

I stayed for 15 days in the first-floor room of a guesthouse in Kitwe with a magnificent view of the garden from the balcony – at tree-top level - and was able to photograph the post-dawn pre-breakfast (mine!) comings and goings of the local birds.

28 April 2008 Paid a visit to the Marievale Bird Sanctuary to see if there were still any migrant stragglers around. Found a single Common Ringed Plover and three Little Stint that seemed to be all that remained of the large numbers of summer migrants seen there over our southern hemisphere summer months.

26 April 2008    My job now takes me for extended periods to the Zambian and DRC Copperbelt region, where to date I still have not had the luxury of a camera or better than a pair of pocket 10x25 Tasco binos - after all I am there for work and not birding!

2 March 2008 On the 25th January 2008 word hit the birding webpages that a Pacific Golden Plover, a rare vagrant to southern Africa, had been seen at Muzi Pans some 40km north of Hluhluwe in northern Zululand. I kept my fingers firmly crossed that it would still be there when I visited the area to take up a timeshare week at Sobhengu Lodge on the Nibela Peninsula at the northern end of Lake St Lucia from 22-29 February.