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Happy Birthday Oystercatchers! - 07:47 am

04 Feb 2010

After yesterday’s grisly scenes, we wanted to focus on something a bit happier. We decided to try and get some shots of African black oystercatchers feeding their chicks.

This is not easy. Oystercatchers are supremely suspicious birds and their eyesight appears to be incredibly good. At the first sign of us they will fly off their nests and if they have chicks, circle us chirping non-stop.

We pretended to be facing the other way – focusing on the gannets…but they were not fooled. At the first chirp from their parents the chicks will scamper under a rock and pretend – very effectively, to be a stone.
We sat in the hot sun all morning and got nothing. Only adult oystercatchers watching us closely.

But then a highly exciting thing happened. On checking some nests where we knew there were eggs, it turned out they were beginning to hatch.
About 5 or 6 different nests’ eggs were all pipping at the same time. Hoorah!

We snuck to a nest for a couple of minutes and returned an hour later. We couldn’t stay long as the parent birds obviously weren’t happy with us being there and we had to avoid gulls coming to see what we were investigating.

But we got that special moment of seeing the tiny egg tooth moving and peeking out of a hole in the shell.

For our last day on Malgas, this was a fantastic way to end the trip. We’ll be heading for a hot shower with actual soap first thing in the morning. Nice. And after a week, I’d say it’s probably essential.