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Everglades BirdFest

Editor — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 07:59:19 +0000

Attention all bird lovers! An event that you cannot afford to miss! The Everglades BirdFest is a birding and ecology event taking place over three stimulating days at the Everglades National Park every year in January.

The Everglades BirdFest provides its many visitors with guides that have an environmental and biological background. This means that any questions or background information wanted by keen bird watchers and enthusiasts will be well supplied by their informative guides. You can be assured that you will walk away with newly acquired information and the latest facts on all the species of bird found here at the Everglades National Park.

The guided bird watching tour takes you through the Shark and Main Valley parts of the park where you are sure to see the beautiful and colourful birds found in these parts of the country. Apart from the actual tours visitors to the Everglades BirdFest will be given full use of any of the facilities contained within the park. You will also be able to attend informative seminars in the evening, exhibitions and information covering topics like natural history, conservation and habitats of all the birds here.

The Everglades National Park is a well-known park and has in recent years been recognized as a World Heritage Site and Biosphere Reserve renowned for its international importance as a wetland. Here you will be blown away by the beauty and variety of birds and animals contained in this park in the United States.

The whole Everglades BirdFest incorporates two nights at the comfortable Flamingo Lodge where you will be given first class treatment. All your transport needs will be looked after by luxury coaches so there is no need to worry yourself about how to get to all the trails and sites within the Park. All your meals during the BirdFest are well catered for ensuring that there are no rumbles to interrupt the beautiful sounds of the birds around you.

When you have a little spare time you can take advantage of boating, biking, canoeing and kayaking facilities here. If you enjoy fishing there are beautiful places around the park that provide stunning options for fishing. If you are more of a hiking person that is available as well.

Birds Versus Power Lines

Editor — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 13:43:25 +0000

If you travel to South Africa soon, you may well discover that as a developing nation with fast-increasing population, the country is struggling to keep up with the ever-increasing demand for power. Up until this point, however, most power cuts have been the result of limited power supply, excessive power usage and power plant upgrades… or so the general public thought!

Research has revealed that bird excrement is a major cause of transmission line faults in South Africa and it occurs across the country. Of course, this is not the only ‘natural’ cause of transmission line faults but it would appear to be a major factor. In fact, the serious nature of the problem was identified as early as the year 2000 and since then major efforts to curb the effect of bird excrement on power lines have been put in place. These include the fitting of ‘combs’ on top of power pylons as part of efforts to discourage birds from nesting on them or perching on them. South African power company Eskom has implemented these and other measures to try and ensure that power lines are kept as bird-free as possible.

In a meeting wherein a recent number of power outages in the Western Cape Province were being discussed in January 2006, Jacob Maroga – the then acting chief executive of Eskom – noted that ‘Bird excretion can cause shorts and trips on our transmission system’. During the course of the meeting Eskom presented a graph which indicated that some 400 transmission line faults which had occurred during the year 2000 had been caused by birds. Fortunately, recent surveys have shown that this number has decreased significantly since the implementation of several bird deterrents on power lines and pylons. These strategic efforts to discourage birds from nesting in these sights has also been met by bird lovers with much enthusiasm as they provide a non-violent deterrent to birds and so possibly save hundreds or thousands of birds from dying from electric shock and other power line related dangers.

Unfortunately, the problem of birds on power lines is not the only natural cause of power outages in South Africa. It would seem that bush fires, snow, tornadoes, ice and lightning can also be factors. Fortunately most of these are seldom encountered in South Africa.