SARBN: White-throated Bee-eater information
Trevor Hardaker
Good morning everyone,
Just a little bit of useless information that I thought I would share about just how untwitchable WHITE-THROATED BEE-EATERS are in Southern Africa. I’ve had a quick look back at past records to see what I could make of those…
As I mentioned in last night’s SARBN report, yesterday’s record of 5 birds in Kommetjie was the 25th record for Southern Africa that I’m aware of. Of those, 24 records come from South Africa and only one comes from another of the Southern African countries with a record back in March 2002 from Mana Pools National Park in Zimbabwe. Already, that is of interest in that all of the South African records must have passed through our neighbouring countries to get to South Africa and were never detected.
Within South Africa, the lion’s share of the records comes from the Greater Kruger National Park area which sports 10 of the 24 records. Elsewhere, the Western Cape and Kwazulu Natal have 4 each, the Northern Cape and Eastern Cape have 2 each and the Free State and Mpumalanga (outside of the Greater Kruger) have 1 each.
The group of birds that turned up in January 2020 along the Riet River road near Port Alfred and stayed from Saturday afternoon until about lunchtime on Monday is THE ONLY record of this species in Southern Africa where the birds have stayed put for anything longer than just a few hours and, as such, the only twitchable birds that we have ever had here. All of the remaining records were just very short stayers (a few hours at most) and only those that were already close by when news broke had any chance of catching up with them.
What I found more interesting though, by looking at dates and locations of all previous records, is that there are only perhaps 2 records that could possibly be linked as being the same birds. This was a group of birds seen in March 2017 in Hluhluwe Game Reserve and then possibly the same birds seen in April 2017 in Mkuze Game Reserve. There is no way to say for sure that these were the same birds but, from dates and locations, it does seem like it might be a possibility.
All of the other records are really just complete once-offs … there are no other records prior to them or subsequent to them that could plausibly be the same birds. So, these birds manage to get found in one spot in Southern Africa for a few hours and then disappear again completely never to be seen again. In this day and age where there are so many more birders out in the field armed with all the latest technology, it is incredible that these birds still manage to outplay us every single time and manage to come in and out, sometimes crossing the entire subregion, and only ever get seen once for a few hours.
We’ve not given up just yet on the Kommetjie birds and hope that they do get relocated somewhere, but I just thought it useful to share the pattern of previous occurrences…
Keep well and happy twitching!
Kind regards
Trevor