I visited Vilanculos as soon as with my household, primarily to do the issues most individuals do when visiting this website – having fun with the coast, consuming nice fish and snorkelling. That the realm was unbelievable for birds nevertheless, and as I had by no means been this far north on the Mozambiquan coast, there have been a number of lifers and different attention-grabbing birds that I bagged right here.
Vilanculos is now very well-known in southern African birding circles due to the specials that flip up on the San Sebastian Peninsula, with Saunders’s Tern being the star, and in keeping with the Patagonia picnic desk impact, specials like Crab Plover, Eurasian Oystercatchers and Damara Terns additionally hanging round. This website grew to become a goal of many a twicher with the invention of the Saunders’s Tern in 2019. I visited Vilanculos just a few years earlier than this and was due to this fact not conscious of this not-to-be-missed website.
Subsequently, a lot of the birding was constrained to the campsite the place we stayed. There have been fairly just a few widespread birds round, together with indigobirds and finches. A while was spent watching an approachable Inexperienced-winged Pytilia. Once I first noticed this species as a fledging birder just a few years earlier, I grew to become very excited. As I had not but come throughout it in my subject information, my “logical” conclusion was that this have to be a uncommon species. Trying again, I’ve seen that I had this assumption far more than could be statistically justified when coming throughout birds I couldn’t ID in my first yr of birding (once I began out with birding, I additionally as soon as misidentified what I now know was a Wooden Sandpiper as a Lesser Yellowlegs). Due to this explicit reminiscence nevertheless, I nonetheless all the time tremendously take pleasure in watching Inexperienced-winged Pytilias (and much more so their orange-winged cousins, which I’ve seen in Zimbabwe).
The time my pleasure was really justified is once I seen that a number of the smaller birds feeding on the campsite lawns have been Lemon-breasted Canaries, a lifer again then and till at the moment this stays my solely sighting of this species. I ultimately additionally discovered their nest in a palm frond.
One other subtropical lowland particular that I got here throughout on the campsite was a Collared Palm-Thrush. This hen is restricted to the north-eastern fringe of the southern African subregion that types the extent of the area of curiosity of most birders (and can be the area lined by most guidebooks). Within the mornings, it sang from the tops of bushes dotted on the small campsite, no higher option to indulge a lifer.
The hinterland revealed my first Olive Bee-eaters, which I had anticipated to see right here. They have been hanging out with some Blue-cheeked Bee-eaters which made for a superb comparability – I believe these species really was once the identical mannequin when somebody determined to color them otherwise, because the giss (common impression of dimension and form) appears precisely the identical, the one distinction being their colouration. I assume that is really pure choice in non-technical phrases, with the “somebody” being numerous selective forces. Then after all the “somebody” would additionally have to have used high-quality paint so it could possibly be handed on from one era to the following… Sadly, I solely managed to discover a photograph of the blue-cheeks in my archive…
The go to made me desirous to discover the numerous wonderful birding spots of Mozambique additional to the north, notably Mt Gorongosa, the Beira grasslands, and the coutadas (looking concessions lined in miombo). Nevertheless, I by no means ended up visiting this area due to ongoing safety considerations within the space. I hope that issues will finally calm down right here – the realm has a lot to supply for guests (particularly birders) and particularly the native individuals deserve extra peaceable circumstances after many years of instability.