Each year Birdlife South Africa chooses a Bird of the Year and for 2019 the chosen bird is the very unique Secretary Bird.

To celebrate this, Birdlife SA included a very informative poster in the latest African Birdlife magazine, which I thought I would share here – however the only way to share an A1 size poster in a blog is by chopping it up into smaller, hopefully readable, chunks, which I have attempted to do with my iphone camera.

So, here goes ………

I have not had much success in photographing the Secretarybird over the past few years – not for want of finding them, that’s the relatively easy part, the problem is they immediately stride off in the opposite direction when you try and get closer, so most of my attempts have been at long distance. Here are a couple of my marginally better shots, still nowhere close to what I regard as a decent photo

This one was nesting in a tree some way from the road when we visited Mountain Zebra National Park s few years ago

Secretarybird striding through short grass near Albertinia, southern Cape