Bird Ringing at Darvill

It’s a peculiar thing that the sewerage works of most cities are bird hotspots.  On my travels, including Cairns and various places around New Zealand there would inevitably be a mandatory visit to the treatment works.  One month in and I find myself at the Pietermaritzburg sewerage works - and loving it!

Darvill is dominated by about 85% of alien vegetation, but despite a paucity of indigenous flora, the accumulation and treatment of human waste enriches the area and the nutrient load produces fantastic diversity.  Plenty of waterfowl and waders on the ponds, and a menagerie of passerines in the shrubs and thickets.  Particularly impressive was the raptor count – 6 over the course of the morning (fish-eagle, black sparrowhawk, peregrine, long-crested eagle, jackal buzzard, and an unidentified hawk which might have been a snake-eagle).

Mark Brown kindly let me read through a presentation that summarised Darvill's achievements as of February 2011.  At that time Darvill has served as a ringing station for 30 years, making it the longest running monthly ringing station in South Africa.  It is also the most productive training centre, with 15 licensed SAFRINGers trained in the last 8 years.  There have been 36,251 birds of 187 species ringed during the 30 years, with 2,410 recaptures.


On Saturday morning, with four sets of mistnets around the place, the team caught 142 birds from approximately 22 species.  Minke is getting close to completing her SAFRING license, and processed the first 26 birds of the morning.  As the day warmed up the capturing and extracting of birds from the nets got hectic, particularly around a stream where bishops were flocking in to drink, and soon there was a backlog.  Mark and Karen had to power through about 100 birds, and then both Lindy and I finished up the last dozen or so between us.

This is an exciting opportunity to train for the SAFRING lisence.  The diversity and difficulty of the little passerines of Africa is turning new ground in my ringing experience.  Paying attention to minute details, of identifying species (particularly challenging will be the migrant warblers come summer), the nuances of moult and other features to age and sex individuals, and the opportunity to ring and measure hundreds of birds. 

The guideline for SAFRING is that one must be supervised and reliably process 500 individuals from 50 species.

Not including the New Zealand Falcons, Mauritius Parakeets, Kenyan raptors, and a handful of Wellington passerines so far.  My South African experience amounts to an afternoon ringing with Dieter in Cape Town in August last year, and the 7 birds from Saturday; the count sits at a mere 12 birds of 6 species.  

A misty dawn turned into a stunning sunny morning.

Mark and Lindy smashing through dozens of birds (in bags to the left of picture)

Yellow Weaver Ploceus subaureus

Golden-tailed Woodpecker Campethera abingoni