Down here, on the Deep South Coast, the pre-holiday panic is on. Supermarkets are full of frantic buyers, local authorities, understandably a little torpid during the rest of the year, are giving a spit and polish to those corners of the Hibiscus Coast that need it.
A traffic island gets newly painted white rocks and an aloe here, those ever-encroaching coastal wild bananas get a trim there, road markings get a touch up here and there. Accommodation facilities up and down the coast are sprucing up and are on standby for the onslaught.
First to come are the students, beating their parents in the lemming-like rush to the sea, sand and sun (not too mention the occasional cold beer), followed by the early tide of people from upcountry and then the final wave of Gautengers. It’s the same every year, they say.
This year, however, it’s been different, very different — they’ve all been beaten to it by the purple alien.
This is no ordinary purple alien, either, this is an American alien — very fashionable. It’s the American purple gallinule. The Oxford Concise describes it as “of the order Gallinae, including domestic poultry, pheasants, partridges etc” or as Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa describes it: “Windblown vagrant from South America …”.
Regardless of where you look up this fellow, however, this is a truly exotic visitor to the South Coast of KwaZulu-Natal. So exotic, in fact, that no more than a dozen specimens have ever been spotted in South Africa and perhaps only one other in the province.
The purple gallinule emerged a few weeks ago on a small, and most attractive, farm dam near the main R61 at Palm Beach.
Curious. Could this “windblown vagrant …” really have been blown all the way across the Atlantic Ocean and the African subcontinent? Global bird migrations continue to hold man in awe, but most of them tend to be longitudinal, between the northern and southern hemisphere continents, and not latitudinal, between the western and eastern ones. Few, if any birds (except the odd purple alien) make it across the South Atlantic, it would seem.
And our alien has been causing quite a stir. Birders have been flying down the R61 from all over the country. It was in fact visitors from the Free State who first spotted it, but since then there has been a constant stream of people from all over the country, but particularly the northern provinces, and again particularly Gauteng.
Andrew Pickles, local bird fundi for the Wildlife and Environment Society, says: “For the average South African twitcher this is a huge tick, a massive lifer. In fact the vast majority of people would only have an opportunity to see this fellow in its home range, and that’s in the Americas.”
For the uninitiated a “twitcher”, is a birdwatcher; a “tick” is the act of ticking a bird off a list; and a “lifer” is the first time in one’s life that one spots a particular bird.
And the twitchers are wasting no time in ticking this lifer. The little farm dam, which is already something of a local attraction with its clear waters, water lilies and pretty little boat moored among the reeds, is attached to a little farm stall, which in turn is attached to a little farm (well, we may be taking liberties there). Anyway, the gravel parking area in front the farm stall, the craft and home industries shop next to it, and the small art and craft gallery next to that, is considered by the locals to be crowded if there are more than two cars in it. Now it looks like Ellis Park during a rugby international.
These days vehicles (many of them upcountry 4x4s, much needed on an expedition like this, you understand) with registration plates featuring many corners of South Africa are packing the place. And overlooking the dam there is a long, constantly changing line of twitchers. And these are serious twitchers, sporting some of the fanciest equipment available — Ziess and Swarovski binoculars and spotter scopes and tripods and cameras. This must be one of the most photographed farm dams in the country.
Basically, though, this is what birding is all about. Whether one is obsessive or simply a happy amateur, it brings enormous pleasure to a great many people — which is one very good way of describing our American visitor.
But bearing in mind that it is only the beginning of the holiday season, Pickles has uttered a serious note of caution: give the bird its space, don’t try to get too close and keep quiet, or you may well spoil it for everyone, including the bird.