TomKal foto

South Africa 2 - Introductory text Livingstone's Turaco
Less than three years ago, in the text that I put while making changes in the puffins’ gallery, after I had returned from Iceland I wrote that being in Iceland and not seeing the puffin is like being in Africa and not seeing the elephant. And it turns out that it happens... I was in Africa and I did not see an elephant. Although it was especially an ornithological trip, my first one like this to Africa, but so characteristic and so worldwide recognizable animals like an elephant or a lion cannot be missed in my gallery of nature. Well, not this time and not in South Africa. To see such a typical African landscapes, endless plains where large herds of herbivores are grazing, I would rather go to Tanzania or Kenya. This is what say my fellow-travelers, who had travelled to Africa many times. I send my regards to Piotr, Tadeusz, Krzysztof and Artur-our expert at the subject of the African species of birds. In South Africa we were in a few parks where we could potentially meet these animals. The word “park” has a slightly different meaning in Africa than in Europe. Entering the enclosed area of the park by car one can find direction indicators in which the distances are in kilometers, and sometimes several dozens of kilometers. Practically such a spacious park related to our Polish realities in terms of size is rather like a district in which wild animals live instead of people. Driving sometimes up to 100 kilometers daily, one have to be fortunate to see an elephant, a buffalo, a giraffe or a lion. Of course getting out of the car is not reasonable in this place and if it happens it is always at your own risk. Outside of the parks the landscape looked like African neither. More and more developed areas, order of agriculture and forestry management. All fields separated one from another by fences or barbed wires, it is a view more like the south of Europe (except barbed wires) than Africa. What else surprised me in this place was the skittishness of the birds. Very often when we tried to get out of the car the birds flew away. I have seen many beautiful photos of birds from Africa, also taken by my travelling companions, which showed that the birds were photographed close and were not skittish. It was very difficult to take such photos in South Africa. In several places we visited hides which, unfortunately, were arranged for birdwatchers rather than photographers. They were often located over water reservoirs, high above the water surface and too far from the shore of the reservoir. Quite uninteresting perspective and needed work with converters, so the circumstances enough for observation to confirm the fact rather than to take good pictures, according to my nomenclature – for the gallery marked 4 stars, or as my colleagues from the expedition say – on "the wall." But in the end it was not so bad, since I was able to photograph 150 species of birds, and I managed to add a few interesting galleries of mammals. In the evenings we were identifying photographed species and according to the list meticulously recorded by Arthur we all together have observed and/or photographed nearly 300 species of birds during our two week stay. This was probably a record trip in terms of number of bird sounds I recorded, because there were more than 20 recordings. Contact with new species is always an extraordinary experience, for it is really fascinating watching a long-tailed widowbird in flight in the plumage that the males flaunt during the breeding season, or watching two new species of crane, turacos... During this trip ultimately I managed to capture, with varying degree of success,  enough new species of birds to say that every tenth bird species living on Earth has its own photo-gallery on my website. It is a pity that some of them are only of documentary value, but as I always say, it has to be something to start with. The gallery of European roller or common buzzard that was created sometime ago, after this trip was radically reconstructed. Ornithological Ethiopian region had been most modestly represented on my website, and after returning from South Africa considerable changes took place here and several new galleries were created, which, because of the pictures, the story of their creation or the soundtrack, I will often come back to.
As usually, each of the newly created gallery has its introductory information attached with a list of species that have been photographed. Next to the species name in brackets there is a letter (T) when the gallery has its description  - text  or (G) when is accompanied by the voice recording. Classification and preparation the photos from the trip to South Africa for the galleries for the first time is carried out by using all technical possibilities of the new version of my website. All photos were fitted in the correct format. List of species of the gallery is at the same time a collection of links to the galleries. So you can move from one gallery to another and do not have to use a search engine and type the names of birds. All reports and records of previous trips will be reorganized this way but it will require time to implement these changes. So far less than half of my 1 100 galleries have been updated.  The bird galleries marked as a 4-star - very good have already been all adjusted, and the work on 3-stars galleries is now coming to a close end.

Back to the topic to the trip to South Africa. The introductory text is a description of the livingstone's turaco’s gallery, as it is a unique and a beautiful bird and photos that I managed to take are quite good as well. There were a few places where we could hear the turacos’ voices. The plural is used to refer not just to the number of individuals, but also to number of turacos’ species. We heard livingstone's turacos, purple-crested turacos and grey go-away-birds. Unluckily purple-crested turacos and grey go-away-birds which could be observed always occurred in the crowns of tall trees, and it was impossible to avoid the white sky background in the presented photos. Livingstone's turacos liked much smaller trees – a few meters high, but it was impossible to see them in the thick foliage of the crowns of the trees. Turacos flew between the trees and disappeared among the leaves. But once we were able to watch the turaco which was interested in "cooperation" and then the most interesting pictures of this bird were taken. The pictures show only half the charm of this bird. When it is in flight beside the intense blue and green color can still be seen the juicy red color on the wings of the bird. Spectacular view of brilliantly colored bird. Of course, taking pictures of the livingstone's turaco in flight is no mean feat and everyone of us failed to do this, even though we had a few occasions to observe 2-3 second flight of the bird. They were very quick in passing between the trees. I also managed to record the voices for two galleries of turaco.