Birding in Johannesburg

 August 3, 2022

24 hours of flying brought us to Johannesburg mid-morning on Wednesday August 3rd, but not early enough to catch the once per day direct flight to Victoria Falls. We learned when we were here in 2018 that if we don’t plan an activity we’ll doze all afternoon and have trouble adjusting to the time zone. So today we took an outing to the Walter Sisulu Botanical Garden, about an hour away from our hotel. This garden shows up as a birding hotspot in ebird, and despite its being a chilly (50s) and drizzly day, we saw 21 species of birds, of which 12 were new to us.  We visited the eastern part of South Africa in 2018, but the high veld around Johannesburg is a different biome, so there are a number of species here that we’d never seen, and that are not to be seen on the rest of this trip. 

When we first got to the garden (mid afternoon by the time we’d checked into the hotel, changed money, found some lunch and a driver) it was raining and we really questioned the whole outing, but having driven that far we persevered. The garden itself is lovely and nestled into a valley below red sandstone cliffs (complete with waterfall).  The weather gradually improved, and about 30 minutes before the park closed, the sun came out and so did the birds... not just additional species, but flocks of them at a time.  Seeing a dozen Speckled Mousebirds was particularly surprising, or perhaps the highlight was two new species of sunbirds and a new kind of kingfisher.  

We were distracted in our bird hunting by the huge number of simply enormous grasshoppers in the trees, many of them at least four inches long and some even larger. That meant that the grasshoppers were larger than some of the birds, and certainly more plentiful. 

Pictured below: White-breasted Sunbird, Brown-hooded Kingfisher.