To watch/listen to an overview of The Birds of the Waterberg click here.
The list of bird species reliably recorded in the Waterberg is listed below and these can be downloaded as a spreadsheet here. Those that have been photographed in the Waterberg are marked below by 
and these can be viewed by clicking on the species name - additions to this photographic collection are welcomed. Waterberg target species (red-listed and/or endemic) are highlighted inred. The list currently (March 2020) numbers 450 but this figure does not have real meaning as it includes many species that may be resident on the surrounding flats but only occasionally stray into the Waterberg, and others such as Spotted Creeper, Grey Cuckooshrike, Green Twinspot and Racket-tailed Roller – all reliably reported here at least once – that are way out of their normal ranges. The list of vagrants such as these continues to grow and they are interesting, of course, and are grist to the mill for dedicated twitchers, but they are incidental to what constitutes the Waterberg's essential bird fauna.
Strip the hundred or so vagrants and incidentals out and the list of birds that make the Waterberg their home comes to about 340. Eighty percent of these are resident and the remainder are seasonal visitors – several storks, raptors, most cuckoos, some kingfishers, swallows, warblers, flycatchers and the like. The bulk of the avifauna (68%) live in the broad-leafed or mixed woodland savanna that cloaks most of the hills and valleys of the plateau but within their ranks are species that are restricted to specific types of woodland, e.g. some restricted to densely wooded ravines, others to Faurea-dominated woodland or patches of thornveld. Twenty percent are wetland-dependent species, some of these restricted to rivers, others to large dams, marshy seeps, and so on. The remainder live in areas of open grassland, some of these (e.g. Cape Rock Thrush, Buff-streaked Chat, Eastern Clapper Lark, Wing-snapping Cisticola) being confined to the fragments of high-lying montane grassland, and others (e.g. Ant-eating Chat, Capped Wheatear, African Pipit) live in secondary grasslands where woodland has been cleared for agriculture.
As part of the Southern African Bird Atlas Project (SABAB2) the distributions of birds in the Waterberg are being mapped on an ongoing basis. The mapping unit is a 'pentad' (a 5' x 5' area, roughly 8 km across) and the aim is to get complete coverage of all 182 pentads in the Waterberg; currently some 40 000 records have been collected from this region. It is these data which are used in the distribution maps here for each species.
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BirdLife South Africa registered the Waterberg as an IBA (see Introduction) on the basis of it supporting significant populations of species at risk, either red-listed or South African endemics that have restricted ranges. These “trigger” species include Secretarybird, Cape Vulture, Martial Eagle, Denham's Bustard and Blue Crane (all globally threatened), White-backed Night Heron, Lanner Falcon, African Finfoot, White-bellied Korhaan, African Grass Owl and Half-collared Kingfisher (all regionally threatened) and Black Stork, Verreaux's Eagle, Meyer's Parrot and several others at risk. For these species the aim is to quantify as accurately as possible the number of birds present in the Waterberg, where they occur and what can be done to secure their future. |
The distribution maps shown for selected bird species below are taken from the data in the SABAP2 and at a glance they show whether the bird is common and widespread or rare and localised in the Waterberg. The dots indicate the pentads in which the species had been recorded as at the end of Dec 2019. Small dots reflect a low reporting rate in the pentad, large dots, a higher reporting rate. Green dots are used for resident species, red dots for non-residents (migrants, erratic visitors or vagrants). Pink dots show records not in the SABAP2 database.
