Birding in Moremi

Water birds on one side, woodland birds on the other.

The birds people travel for are on the water side. Herons, storks and egrets are on the Xakanaxa lagoons in numbers, wattled crane on the flooded grass, African jacana on the lily pads, and kingfishers of several kinds: malachite and pied on almost every outing, giant and brown-hooded often enough, the woodland kingfisher calling from the trees once the rains have come. Rarer birds are in the papyrus and the wet grass too: slaty egret, among the rarest herons in Africa, coppery-tailed coucal, swamp boubou.

The woodland side is quieter and the birding slower: rollers on the roadside branches, hornbills, the ground hornbill among them on foot, raptors over the mopane with bateleur and martial eagle included, and ducks and waders on the pans once the rains have filled them.

Pel's fishing owl, found by day.

Pel's fishing owl is the bird Moremi is known for among birders, and few places in Africa turn it up as often as the Khwai and Xakanaxa channels. A big owl, rufous, dark-eyed, with hardly any ear tufts, nothing like the eagle-owls of the woodland; it fishes at night from a perch over slow water. By day it sits in the canopy of a big riverside tree, a jackalberry or a sycamore fig, often as a pair, and that is where most people see it: a guide who works the ground knows the roosting trees, and the search is a slow drive or a slow boat along the tree line, looking up.

It is not a bird for every stay. A pair may keep to one stretch of river for years and still go unseen for days when the water is high or the fish have moved; after dark the call, a deep carrying hoot answered by the mate, says it is there without showing it. On the Khwai's concession ground a night drive's spotlight may pick one up on its fishing perch; inside the reserve there is no spotlight, and the roost is the way.

Lagoon, channel and mopane.

For the water birds, base yourself on the water. Xakanaxa is the obvious ground: the lagoon, the Moanachira channels and the heronry at Gcodikwe are reached by boat from the camps at the lagoon's edge, and the same camps drive the Tongue's woodland in the mornings, so both habitats are covered from one bed. The Khwai has the channels and the riverine forest the owl favours, plus its concession side's night drives. Chief's Island's western edge is papyrus and permanent channel: mokoro water, and owl country as well.

The Mopane Tongue on its own is a dry-country drive: hornbills, rollers, the raptors, and less of what a birder came for. Which area suits a trip is a bigger question than the birds, water against woodland, a flight in or a road in, the cost of a night, and it is answered area by area.

The heronry at low water, the migrants in the rains.

Birding here runs on two calendars, and neither is the safari calendar. The first is the water's. From around August the water is at its lowest, the fishing is easy, and the heronry at Gcodikwe is full: yellow-billed and marabou storks, herons, egrets, ibis and cormorants on the nests in their thousands on the lagoon's islands, chicks by October and November, and the boat runs out to it. African skimmers nest on the sandbars that show at the same low water.

The second is the sky's. The migrants come in from September and are all in by December, the woodland kingfisher's call from the trees the sign that summer has arrived, with European bee-eater, the paradise flycatcher, the cuckoos and Abdim's stork on the grass among them, and most stay to about April. The residents breed in the same months, so the country is at full voice, and a birder's best months are the ones most safari calendars mark down.

The dry season has its own reward in the heronry and the residents drawn in to the water, and the choice between them, water against game against heat against price, is made across the reserve, not for the birds alone.

A vehicle, a boat, and on foot where the rules allow.

Inside the reserve you bird from a vehicle or a boat. The reserve's rules are drives in daylight only, on the tracks, with no walking and no spotlight, for every camp inside the line. That suits the water birds, since the best seat for them is a boat idling along the tree line or into the heronry, and a mokoro, in the months the river is high enough, puts a malachite kingfisher a paddle's length away; it suits the owl too, a roost bird by day. Birding on foot, for the calls and the small woodland birds, means a camp on concession ground outside the reserve line: the Khwai side, or the private ground at the reserve's edges where walks are run.

Bring your own binoculars and a field guide to the birds of southern Africa. The camps' guides are good on the birds, and a keen birder does better still with a vehicle and guide of their own for the whole stay, booked through us with the camp at an extra cost, so the outings go where the birds are and stay as long as the birds do. The camps are listed with what each runs, boats, walks, night drives, and the rates.