The close working relationship between BirdLife South Africa and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) took a particularly hands-on form during August, when RSPB Scotland Area Manager Andrew Bielinski spent part of his sabbatical at Blue Hill Nature Reserve in the Western Cape.
Andrew is based in south-west Scotland in Dumfries and Galloway, covering five counties across the south of Scotland for the RSPB. He also has a long association with volunteer bird monitoring, coordinating several British Trust for Ornithology survey schemes in Kirkcudbright. It was therefore perhaps fitting that, when given the opportunity to spend sabbatical time in South Africa, he elected to immerse himself in some of BirdLife South Africa’s own long-running citizen-science and monitoring projects.
Based at Blue Hill Nature Reserve, Andrew participated in bird ringing, the Southern African Bird Atlas Project 2 (SABAP2) and Coordinated Avifaunal Roadcounts (CAR). Together, these projects illustrate how structured citizen science can generate information ranging from individual birds and their survival and movements through to distributions and changes in bird populations across landscapes.
Bird ringing occupied a central part of the visit. Blue Hill is a long-term ringing site in the fynbos of the Kouga Mountains, and Andrew quickly became part of the operation. In addition to helping prepare and maintain mist-netting lanes, he assisted with processing birds, taking measurements and recording data.
Across six ringing days, we processed 101 birds of 26 species, excluding additional birds handled during a ringing session with colleagues. Orange-breasted Sunbirds were particularly prominent, with 24 individuals captured, alongside 11 Cape Sugarbirds, nine Cape White-eyes and a wide range of other fynbos and thicket species. The sessions also produced some interesting recaptures, adding further information to the long-term dataset being accumulated at Blue Hill.
BirdLife South Africa’s Conservation Division Manager, Dr Hanneline Smit-Robinson, and Human Resources Manager, Isabel Human, also joined us at Blue Hill for part of the visit. Although their trip included a much broader set of BirdLife South Africa discussions and activities, a morning in the ringing operation provided another opportunity to engage directly with the field-based monitoring work underpinning parts of the organisation’s Science and Innovation Programme.
Andrew was also introduced to BirdLasser and the protocols used for SABAP2. He rapidly progressed from learning the system to contributing both a full-protocol atlas card and several ad hoc cards during our travels through the Garden Route and Klein Karoo.
One of these records even resulted in his introduction to another feature familiar to active South African atlasers: the Out-of-Range Form. Near De Rust, we encountered a Common Scimitarbill, part of the species’ continuing westward expansion into the region as Acacia Karoo becomes a more dominating component of the vegetation, ideal habitat for that and other woodland species. Andrew successfully documented and motivated the record for inclusion in SABAP2.
His third citizen-science experience was CAR (Coordinated Avifaunal Roadcount surveys), where he helped complete several winter routes in the Uniondale precinct. The counts took us across the Klein Karoo from De Rust to beyond Willowmore, through landscapes transformed by the exceptional autumn and winter rainfall. Highlights included Karoo and Southern Black korhaans, Kori Bustard and a Martial Eagle, alongside the less glamorous reality of cold fronts, muddy roads and some remarkably quiet stretches of Karoo.
Andrew’s visit provided welcome additional capacity at a busy time, but its value went beyond the number of birds ringed or atlas cards submitted. His decision to use part of an RSPB sabbatical to participate directly in these projects is also a useful endorsement of the value of South Africa’s long-term monitoring programmes.
Citizen science can sometimes sound deceptively simple: count some birds, submit a list, ring a bird and record some measurements. But repeated consistently across many years, sites and observers, these individual contributions become datasets capable of documenting changes in distributions, abundance, movements and survival. They support research, Red List assessments and conservation planning, and provide the evidence needed to measure whether conservation action is working.
The RSPB and BirdLife South Africa work at opposite ends of the African-Eurasian Flyway, but as members of the same global BirdLife Partnership we share many of the same challenges. Andrew’s sabbatical was a small but very tangible example of what that partnership can look like on the ground: sharing experience, contributing data, learning from one another and, most importantly, spending plenty of time actually counting birds.
Our thanks to Andrew for choosing to spend his sabbatical with us, and for throwing himself so enthusiastically into everything from clearing net lanes to CAR counts and Out-of-Range Forms.
I would like to thank the sponsors of my position at BirdLife South Africa who make this work possible, especially The Mapula Trust, Italtile and Ceramic Foundation Trust, AFRIT and the FirstRand Foundation Trust. Special thanks to Chris Lee for catering and sponsorship of the WU02 CAR route.
