Citrine wagtail

It's wonderful when a rare bird lands so close to home and I get the opportunity to "twitch". Many birders are regarded as twitchers when they are willing to jump on a plane and travel half way across the country to see a rare bird for a few minutes, often at huge expense. I am not one of those. However, when one makes its way to an area real close to home, I'm happy to jump in my car and travel for an hour to see it. The first time I did this was a few years ago when the Little Crake arrived in Clovelly.  Last week the Citrine Wagtail (Motacilla citreola) was discovered at Strandfontein in the False Bay Nature Reserve about 50km from Franschhoek.

My not-so-great pic of the waggie.

This lovely little bird that looks so similar to our Cape Wagtail is regarded as a rare vagrant in South Africa as this is only the fourth sighting of it in this part of the world. It has a grey back and is pale yellow below with a distinctive pale yellowish 'C' extending behind the ear covets to the throat.   Our local wagtail is mostly grey with no yellow wash.   The Citrine breeds from Eastern Europe through to Central Asia.  In the winter it holidays in extreme north east Africa through the to south east Asia but this year, this one turned south and kept on going. This is referred to as reverse migration and happens occasionally to a number of migratory species, the reason for which is not clearly understood. It appears that the GPS in the brain goes a bit hay-wire at times, not dissimilar to our electronic versions, some might say.

A better pic of The Citrine Wagtail.  Photo by Margaret MacIver (c) 

It was found at Strandfontein by a local birder and since the news was announced on our various birding forums, many many birders have been to see it. I arrived at the reserve late on the Freedom Day public holiday, about four days after it was first seen.   I wasn't quite sure where to look for it but the beauty of twitching is that there will always be loads of other birders looking for it and will most likely already have tracked it down so one only has to look out for a whole lot of cars or people gathering in one place, and this what I did.  I had no sooner turned into the area where the pans are when I came across the fleet of birder's cars so it was a safe bet to stop there.  A small group of my fellow birders were gathered at the water's edge intently scanning the reeds and sure enough, there was our little vagrant bird, happily foraging and gleaning insects from the leaves. The wind was blowing quite strongly and I settled down next to a fellow birder whom I knew from various bird pages on Facebook but had not yet met, Margaret MacIver. The birding community is relatively small and you are likely to meet people you know at these sort of gatherings.  

Margaret and I enjoying the waggie. 

A few of the other birders gathering.

We sat and watched and photographed the bird for some time before it decided to fly off across the pan to another area.  It returned some half an hour later, to the delight of new Citrine-seekers who had arrived in the interim and had started to panic that it was gone without them getting any views.  The flight pattern, call and tail-wagging strut of the bird is very similar to our local waggie.  

This species of bird was first seen in South Africa back in 1998 at the Gamtoos River mouth in the Eastern Cape.  It was then recorded again on the 23rd of January 2006 at Cape St. Francis and the only previous record of a bird in the Western Cape was in April 2009 at the Kleinmond Sewerage Works.  

Birders are a strange bunch and non-birders probably find it hard to believe that we can get so excited about a tiny little bird but it gives us such a rush to be able to track it down and spend time viewing it before it realizes it's in the wrong place and heads off home.  We can always say we've seen it and we get to tick it on our life list, never knowing if it will be recorded again in south Africa.  This is what makes our hobby so rewarding. And being the true bird enthusiasts that we are, once we had our fill of our Citrine, we spent the next couple of hours driving around the reserve to see what else was there. A great way to spend a day off.