This past weekend we had our annual 24 hour ‘Birding Fun Day’ at our Tygerberg Bird Club. This is an event to encourange and teach other not so good birders when and how to find the birds over a 24 hour period and also to have fun doing it.

We all start on a Friday evening at 6pm at a central point and end on the Saturday at the same point. This is done as we are limited to a 75k radius and we need the milages to calculate who saw the most birds per kilometre. The totals are announced at the braai (barbeque) afterwards and the common birds missed on the day were discussed.

We had 5 teams of 4 each this year comprising 2 good birders and 2 novices. The totals achieved were 125, 134, 155, 156 and 170. I had 3 novices with me and we achieved 156 birds and only covered 395k (most birds per kilometre) and came second. The winning team with 170 birds travelled 450k!