During the course of our 17 day bird tour in South Africa our Red Hill Birding guide Josh created 182 eBird checklists! Josh would religiously record the species seen during each stop along a roadway rather than lumping them together in a four-hour, 40 mile report, and he would create a checklist at a rest stop even if there were just a couple of previously seen species there. After the trip concluded he created an eBird Trip Report. CLICK HERE to view that Trip Report, where you can review all the species identified (seen and heard), and a list of the mammals recorded, what the group voted as their top five birds and mammals were. If you want a sneak peek at some of the GreatBirdPics I’ll be sharing in future posts you can click on the Species with Photos button; the list will continue to grow as I complete post-processing more shots and enter them into eBird (there are some pictures by others in the group, too).
The Trip Report shows that the group saw and heard 410 species of birds. My Life List showed that I had 320 Lifers. Both of those number will go down for me. Why? Because I didn’t see or hear all of the species reported on the checklists. As I said previously, Josh, David and Edward had excellent eyes and ears and included many species they identified but I did not see (and, with very few exceptions, don’t include birds I just hear as a Lifer). I am still going through my shots and as I complete each each day I add pictures to that day’s checklists and delete species I didn’t observe from each checklist.
Since it’s hard to remember the species of a bird I took from a picture taken several weeks ago I write down what species I took pictures of on a small notepad (see more on this in my previous post How To Keep Track of Lifers On a Birding Tour). After completing all my checklist edits I’ll create my own Trip Report and see how many species and Lifers I actually observed.
How many shots did I take? After the first two days on the tour I had just about filled up two 64 gig SIM cards – each one holds about 2200 shots! Even though I had 6 SIM cards with me (four 64 gig and two 128 gig) I was concerned I didn’t have enough space, so I began deleting images from my cards during our longer drives. I estimate I deleted about 1,000 images while in South Africa (see the bottom of This Post about some caveats about deleting images during a trip). I came home with 9,930 shots, and if you include the 1,000 I deleted, I took almost 11,000 shots! As a side note, over half of those 11,000 shots were taken in the four and a half days in Kruger NP! Add a couple hundred more shots I took using my iPhone (people, landscapes, lodging, food) you can see why it’s taking so long to get through my pics!
Here’s a couple more pics of early Lifers that were seen frequently during the tour. First, a Cape Weaver which was building a nest by the front door of the Cinnamon House Guest Lodge in Cape Town.
Here’s shot of a Red-winged Starling feeding on a plant in the parking lot of the Cinnamon House. We saw some of these birds almost every day as well. The red extends across its wings when it flys but I couldn’t get a shot of that.
CLICK HERE to see all the posts about our South Africa Bird Tour. Karen and I have had the opportunity to travel to many interesting places in search of birds. If you would like read about some of our other Bird Tours CLICK HERE.
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