After another early morning game drive at African Spirit we packed the car and headed south for our next stop which was to be a place a little north of Hluhluwe called Bushwillow.

There was a little bit of debate about the route south, but I am pleased to say that I won the battle and we were able to route through Mkhuze Game Reserve first, before heading south. Mkhuze is certainly high on the list of most birders’ favourite places but we’d been warned off by many, saying that it was desperately dry and all the roads were under construction. Despite the heeding we still pushed forward. As it turned out the warnings were valid. The park is really, really dry and birdlife was quiet (not helped by trundling through at midday) and the roads were also a shambles. We had intended to exit through the Ophansi gate and it was only when we arrived there that we were absolutely certain that it was open, as information from park officials was a bit scant. It was a relief, as a backtrack would have been a bit of a disaster, especially with the “told you so” naysayers in the car.

It seems like almost every road is currently closed except for the main west-east road between the main gate and Ophansi gate and the looping road to the Khumasinga Hide. I guess it is good to see that there is progress being made on the roads but one wonders why they still leave the park open for business when it is so disruptive.

It wasn’t a total bust, though, as we arrived at Khumasinga hide, which has recently been upgraded, and it is definitely one of the best hides I have been to in a long time. It is extremely spacious, it has almost 360 degree views and because the park is so dry it has a constant stream of animals coming down to drink. The birdlife was relatively quiet, but we still had our only view of Pink-throated Twinspots of the whole trip (despite hearing them all over the place at Ndumo).

One of the highlights of the day’s travelling was a short picnic lunch on the bridge as one exits the park at the Ophansi gate. The huge fever trees shed some really decent shade and the seemingly lusher river setting had some good birdlife flitting around. A goat herder was the beneficiary of our three days’ worth of leftovers so it was a good stop all round. It was also the only sighting of Black-throated Wattle-eye for the whole trip, which was a desperately sore point as I wasn’t able to point it out to the boys and so it was a lifer missed for them.

The road that travels on the eastern border of Mkhuze down south past Muzi Pan to Hluhluwe is a terrible one. It is corrugated and potholed, yet it doesn’t stop the huge buses from travelling at a crazy pace, kicking up dust clouds that engulfed us. Even when reaching the tar section it was seriously slow going, as every small village had six enormous speed humps that brought our speed down to less than 20km/h. I am not suggesting for one second that I had a problem with effective traffic calming, as it must save hundreds of lives a year, but don’t expect to whizz along at 120km/h for large sections of that road.

I shouldn’t complain as it wasn’t too long a drive to get to Bushwillow and the travelling travails were well worth it when arriving there. Bushwillow is set in a small reserve with a circumference of around 8kms (I know as we walked the place flat), which is mostly pristine sand forest. The northern edge of the reserve has a little grassland and thornveld but otherwise the forest dominates.

Each of the lodges are isolated from one another and cleverly designed in that the outside decks jut out from every room into the forest. Huge windows further enhanced the design by creating plenty of light, despite the relatively thickly vegetated environment. Sand forests are not the darkest, but these windows made them appear airy and illuminating.

The best thing about the reserve, for me, was the fact that we could do everything on foot. The restriction of the Quantum or game drive vehicles was no longer there and Adam, Tommy and I covered just about every single footpath and road in the reserve looking for birds. Jeanie was also in her happy place as she could run as much as she liked, also having found the Big 5 restrictions style-cramping.

As usual, we atlassed the pentad in which Bushwillow was situated. Over the course of two days we managed to find 84 species. Given the relatively one-dimensional habitat and it being mid-winter it was not a bad pentad total at all. The sand forest was the major focus, although we failed to find birds like African Broadbill, Gorgeous Bush-shrike and Narina Trogon. We did, however, bump into lots of bird parties that were busy with birds like Bearded Scrub-robin, Yellow-breasted and Rudd’s Apalis (the latter being remarkably common), Yellow-bellied and Sombre Greenbul, Square-tailed Drongo, Chinspot Batis, Red-capped and White-throated Robin-chat, Black-bellied Starling, Bearded, Cardinal and Golden-tailed Woodpecker, Klaas’s Cuckoo, Black Cuckooshrike, Black-backed Puffback, Dark-backed Weaver, Blue-mantled Crested-flycatcher, Ashy and Southern Black Flycatcher, Collared, Scarlet-chested, Grey and Purple-banded Sunbird, Green-backed Camaroptera and Long-billed Crombec.

Phew, it is a very long list and far from complete. There just seemed to be birds everywhere, especially when the sun came out in the early morning. I can admit that we were comfortably late for breakfast on both mornings as we found ourselves so far away from the lodge as breakfast time ticked over so it resulted in a route march to make sure all the croissants weren’t already eaten.

In order to boost our pentad card a little we took a short drive around the area just outside the lodge. I had low expectations as I couldn’t imagine the abundance being too much better than what we had on our doorstep. The weather had also turned for the worse with a strong southerly wind pushing up the coastline from a nasty Cape winter cold front. I said to the boys that we should aim for two new trip birds and ten new pentad birds, but was feeling quite pessimistic as we had hardly found anything more than a Three-banded Plover within the first half an hour.

But, then we emerged onto an open field that looked just perfect for lapwings. I had never photographed a Senegal Lapwing, nor had I seen one for about 15 years. The boys had certainly never seen one at all. As we stopped I said to Tommy and Adam that we should look hard for Senegals on the field. I opened my window and immediately heard one calling about 20 metres from the car. We frantically searched for it and as we got our binoculars onto it, it flushed and disappeared about 200m away. We needn’t have stressed too much as the field was absolutely full of them. I reckon there were over 80 individual birds and, to add to that, there were about 10 pairs of African Wattled Lapwings and around 40 or so Crowned Lapwings. At one stage I had all three species in a single binocular view.

As this seal was broken we continued to add species with regularity. We got African Pipit, Yellow-throated Longclaw, Croaking Cisticola (a lifer for both boys), Rufous-naped Lark and Black-chested Snake-eagle, amongst others. We ended up with six new trip birds and around 20 new birds for the pentad. Tommy and Adam each had two lifers for this seemingly hopeful little excursion.

It was not only the birders that needed an excursion. The rest of the family was also anxious to explore a bit wider. We travelled the short distance to Hluhluwe for lunch at the Fig Tree Restaurant, which is about as remote from our Cape Town social circle as you could get, but it still didn’t stop Jeanie from bumping into someone she knew. As it turned out, an old school friend of hers owns the restaurant and she is justified in boasting the best cappuccino in Zululand. While Jeanie caught up on old times, we walked the small property while waiting for our food and amassed 45 species. This was not a sign of the slow service but rather a sign of the abundance of birdlife in this part of the world.

The final excursion for the day was a visit to False Bay, which is the western arm of the St Lucia Wetland Reserve (or iSamangaliso Wetland Park). It was one of the more depressing things I have seen in quite some time. We had been here almost exactly three years ago on another road trip and the water had lapped up against the lakeshore with herons, egrets, terns, gulls and lapwings feeding along the shoreline, but now you literally could not even see the edge of the water. The entire expanse of False Bay was a dry pan. We certainly needn’t have worried about the crocodile warnings. The boys walked about 300m onto the lake and took photos of fish bones that were littered over the parched lake bottom.

It was yet another reminder of the desperate drought that needs some breaking soon.

Our time at Bushwillow had been short but we had crammed in as much as we possibly could. It probably justifies a four or five day stop as there is so much to do in the surrounding areas (including a visit to Hluhluwe and Umfolozi Game Reserves) but we had to move on to our final destination.

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