Garden Birds in Southern Africa, by Duncan Butchart

Garden Birds in Southern Africa, by Duncan Butchart. Penguin Random House South Africa, Struik Nature. Cape Town, South Africa 2017. ISBN 9781775844747 / ISBN 978-1-77584-474-7

Forword and introduction to Garden Birds in Southern Africa by Duncan Butchart.

Duncan Butchart  

Birds are everywhere - in suburban gardens, in tiny gardens in dense housing estates, and even in downtown concrete jungles. We all awaken to the beautiful sound of calling birds, yet we often forget to appreciate the pleasure it brings to be surrounded by birds. Although granted, the Hadeda Ibises can be a bit irritating! One cannot miss them, whether it is a Cape Robin-chat singing at dawn, a Little Swift flying to its nest below a ledge on an office block, or a Cape Wagtail walking down the sidewalk looking for tasty tidbits. The birds around us are a constant reminder of the Earth's magnificent biodiversity and the resilience of many animals to adapt to a changing world. The birds in one's garden provide opportunities for observation, for education, and even for conservation. Every gardener can be a citizen scientist by documenting interesting behaviour, collecting breeding information, or keeping an atlas card. Birds in one's garden can be used to introduce children to the natural world, and this could be the initial stimulus that ultimately results in them one day becoming famous scientists: our children kept a monthly list of the birds in our garden in Kimberley, and we used this to teach them about migration (in months when migratory birds were absent, they asked why this was so), and about geography (we showed them on a map the places where intra-African migrants and Palearctic migrants spend the austral winter). As the vastness of the Earth's natural world is shrinking, urban environments, including suburban gardens, are becoming increasingly important for the conservation of biodiversity. Whether it be dragonflies at the constructed pond, geckos living under the woodpile, or robin-chats and white-eyes nesting in the shrub thicket, gardens play a small, yet important, role in protecting our heritage. One of the simplest, yet most satisfying, pastimes is to create a bird-friendly garden. Indigenous plants, a bird feeder, a birdbath, and a sisal nesting log are small ways in which we can attract birds to our gardens. Provide these invitations and they will arrive; that's a guarantee! The satisfaction of watching a weaver splashing in the birdbath, finding a nest in the indigenous creeper, observing a hoopoe feeding its recently fledged young, makes gardening for birds greatly worthwhile. Duncan Butchart is to be commended on the production of this immensely informative and beautifully illustrated book. He has been a friend, mainly through our common interest in vultures (not typical garden birds!), for about 25 years. Duncan is a very talented artist, photographer, writer and natural historian. He is extremely well qualified to write this book. It is perhaps fitting that, 50 years after Ken Newman published Garden Birds of South Africa, we have another book on the subject. During this half-century, our knowledge of southern African birds has progressed in leaps and bounds, and this book provides up-to-date information on garden birds and recommendations on how to attract them to gardens. One of my greatest pleasures over the years has been to lie in bed on spring and summer mornings, listening to the dawn chorus. I not only try to identify the singing birds, but also to interpret the contexts in which they are calling. [...]

This is an excerpt from Garden Birds in Southern Africa, by Duncan Butchart.

Title: Garden Birds in Southern Africa
Author: Duncan Butchart
Publisher: Penguin Random House South Africa
Imprint: Struik Nature
Cape Town, South Africa 2017
ISBN 9781775844747 / ISBN 978-1-77584-474-7
Softcover, 18 x 22 cm, 192 pages, throughout colour photographs