Bird Lists Completed!

We are so excited to announce that both the Regional and Ingwelala alphabetical bird lists have been completed!

This has taken months to achieve, as we looked at historical Ingwelala bird lists from anyone willing to share them, with those of surrounding properties, and combined that with manually checking the distribution of every species occurring in Southern Africa.

We then completed the final step where we checked any available recorded bird sightings from Members for Ingwelala over the last 40 years and came up with 2 lists:

• Regional birds (any that could occur here according to surrounding records and species distributions)
• Ingwelala birds (birds that have actually been seen at Ingwelala over the years).

 

Screenshots of the species list categories and the red data column abbreviations

 

As mentioned previously, we have included the Red Data column for important conservation statuses of various species and have also included columns at the end to record sightings, if you want to record your sightings across different visits to Ingwelala.

The idea of these lists is that they will constantly be added to and updated as time goes on, because as people become more involved in birding, species will inevitably be noticed and sighted on Ingwelala, and with the changes in climate globally we are expecting bird sightings to change over time.

They are both available on the Downloads page, with the regional bird list totalling 452 and the Ingwelala list totalling 324 species. From these lists, we will be compiling lists that are grouped for easier identification and/or reading, and possibly looking at a pamphlet form that may become available in the shop at a later stage. We are still looking for assistance from any bird artists who may like to get involved for the pamphlet and future projects!

We would like to thank Maureen Kirk, John Llewellyn, Ndlopfu Private Game Reserve and the Conservation team for all their efforts in making this possible - we couldn’t have done it without your assistance and perseverance.

Please, if you see a bird that is not on either one of the lists, let us know! We are hoping that with the addition of more local birding resources, we might spark a birding interest in many and add to the delight of existing Ingwelala twitchers!

by Tess Woollgar, images courtesy of Tess Woollgar and Ingrid Passier