Birds of Botswana

My favorite was this
Lilac-Breasted Roller. 

You could hear the fish eagles call to each
other all night.  They mate for life.

We saw both yellow and red-billed hornbills -
 the bird that Zazu is patterned after in Lion King.

The ever present vulture

I kept a list of all the birds that we saw in Botswana.  We ended up seeing 49 new (to us) kinds of birds, out of over 400 birds in the delta alone.



















Our guide Meier in Chobe National Park was phenomenal, because not only could he identify every bird we saw by name, he could quote the page number, and position on the page, where we could find it in his bird book.  For instance, "That's a red-eyed bulbul, page 134, position 5".  He was correct every time!

We saw vultures, bee catchers, a Meyer's parrot, various storks, black-winged stilts, grey louries, Burchell's starlings, black crakes that walk on lily pads, yellow-breasted apalis, etc., etc.

Little facts I found interesting:

Yellow-billed stork

* Hornbills.  The bill of a hornbill is so hard it can crack open the shell of a turtle. It needs that hard beak in part because when baby hornbills are hatched, the male hornbill seals the mother and babies into a hole in the tree to keep them safe.  He then feeds all of them night and day through a tiny hole until the babies are big enough to survive on their own.  Then, he breaks them out.  (If anything were to happen to the male hornbill, the female would use her bill to break out.)

Burchell starling

•  African snipe.  I don't have a picture, but I found them interesting.  When we were camping out in the Okavango, the African snipe would "dive-bomb" our area.  Marking their territory, they sounded exactly like a miniature jet plane each time they would pass.

Maribou Stork