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Prose

This entry was entered into two categories: "Stories by Children and Teenagers", and " Prose". It's a great effort and won third place in the "Prose" section, as well as tying for first place in the "Stories by Children and Teenagers" section.

pro19:The Lone Birder

by Seth Musker

“Gemsbok!!!”
“Where?!”
Silence… More silence… Someone looks round, “Oh, come on, not again! Move on!”
“Sorry guys, must have been my imagination.”
We move on, and with a slight smile on his face, another lifer is added to The Lone Birder’s Kgalagadi list.

Being the Lone Birder among non-birders can get seriously frustrating, and indeed, many birders do pale from the prospect. Not me though, I wasn’t going to pass off an opportunity this exciting just because birding would be a bit more difficult. Really, how much can your parents, grandparents, aunt, her eight-year-old daughter, and your seven-year-old sister do to prevent you from seeing birds?

Well, unfortunately the answer to that question is, a surprising amount. The dialogue above displays well one of my techniques to see birds: they had a strange affinity towards gemsbok (I swear we must have stopped for literally every single Gemsbok along the Auob riverbed), and after noticing this I ingeniously came up with a way of exploiting it.

This is how it went: I “see” a Gemsbok, make this known to everyone in the car, and while they look around for the entirely fictional creature, I identify the bird I’ve just spotted. Not bad, eh? But it wasn’t that easy, and as soon as they realised that the gemsbok I was seeing weren’t exactly all gemsbok, they became a lot more wary of me.

The Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park is special because roughly half of it is in South Africa, and the other half is in Botswana, and birding in it was like a dream come true for me. The half we visited was the South African one, which is sandwiched in between Botswana and Namibia, and consists almost entirely of seemingly endless rolling red dunes, with two dry river beds cutting through it. These rivers are called the Auob and Nossob, and together are probably home to more animals than in all the rest of the park.

I’d been looking forward to the trip for more than a year, and I can remember everything about it clearly. Tall acacia trees dot the desolate landscape, every second one burdened with a massive sociable weavers’ nest. Many of these have collapsed under a weight that has simply become too much for them to bear. These nests have been abandoned, no longer safe from the many predators that haunt the freezing desert nights of the Kalahari.

These were my thoughts as we headed out on our first Kgalagadi game drive, before I discovered the woes of being the Lone Birder. Luckily, on this drive, the others had a bit of sympathy for me and my birds, so I was able to get them to stop for a few interesting birds, like the flamboyant little Pygmy Falcon, the majestic Martial Eagle, and the striking Black-chested Snake-eagle.

The problem is, all this matters little if you can’t see anything on any of the other game drives. You see, what nobody but me seemed to understand was that you can’t see every kind of bird in the Kgalagadi in one day, and so I was forced to resort to desperate measures, such as the Fictional Gemsbok tactic, later on in the trip.

On the long drive back to Cape Town I remember feeling quite disappointed, not only with the others for their lack of interest in birds, but also with myself, for not even trying to convert the others into birders. I felt like I was depriving them of something special, something that enriches the soul, and for the next few days of holidays, I felt rather down.

Anyway, the other day something strange happened: I was sitting in the lounge when my seven year-old sister came up to me, and I would have sworn I was dreaming when she said, “Um, Seth… what were all those birds we saw in the Kgalagadi called again?”

Funny, isn’t it?