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Bird’s eye view (Edition 40) |
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The city centre at ground level, all traffic and concrete, seems an unpromising location for wildlife watching. But look up and you’ll find the skies stage a constant fly-past of birds.
By morning and evening, formations of egrets and ibises commute overhead to and from dams and wetlands on the outskirts of town. Meanwhile noisy, aerobatic parties of little swifts tear through the free space, feasting on a soup of aerial invertebrates. But best of all are the falcons – lanners and sometimes peregrines – that impose a reign of terror on urban pigeons and other avian city slickers. Indeed the peregrine, the world’s fastest bird, has even taken to nesting on the ledges of high-rise buildings in cities such as Nairobi and Harare, adapting to these manmade landscapes as though they were the natural gorges and canyons for which these dashing predators evolved.
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