We need your eyes…

As winter draws on, preparations for another Secretarybird breeding season are under way. Following an exceptionally productive season in 2025–2026, the Secretarybird Project is looking ahead with cautious optimism to what the coming months may bring.

The breeding seasons in 2023 and 2024 were extremely poor, as prolonged drought across much of the Free State and surrounding grassland regions led to dramatically reduced breeding activity. Last season, however, brought a welcome turnaround. Good rainfall conditions supported healthy grassland ecosystems and abundant prey, resulting in one of the busiest and most successful breeding seasons the project has experienced. We monitored numerous active nests, ringed nestlings, collected biological samples and gathered valuable data that will improve our understanding of the species’ breeding ecology.

Looking ahead, there is greater uncertainty. Seasonal climate forecasts suggest that the coming summer could once again be strongly influenced by El Niño conditions, potentially bringing hotter and drier weather to many parts of South Africa. If that materialises, it may affect breeding activity and success. We’re keeping our fingers crossed that conditions remain favourable enough for Secretarybirds to breed successfully once again.

Over the coming months, the Secretarybird Project team will again be searching for nests, monitoring breeding attempts, ringing nestlings and, where possible, deploying additional GPS tracking devices to improve our understanding of adult movements and habitat use.

This work relies heavily on support from the public. If you know of an active Secretarybird nest – or see a pair carrying nesting material, displaying or repeatedly visiting the same location – we would greatly appreciate hearing from you. Even historical nest locations can be extremely valuable, as many pairs re-use breeding territories over multiple years.

If you have any observations to share, please contact me at cassie.carstens@birdlife.org.za.

Every report helps us build a clearer picture of the species’ breeding distribution and contributes directly to its conservation.

CASSIE CARSTENS, SECRETARYBIRD PROJECT MANAGER

Protecting birds at wind farms

South Africa’s wind farms are helping to power our just energy transition, but they also pose an ongoing risk to birds. Unlike other developments that clear land permanently, wind farms leave the surrounding landscape largely intact, and many birds keep flying, breeding and foraging around turbines and power lines. That means collisions remain a persistent risk, especially for priority species like raptors and vultures.

In BirdLife South Africa’s review of wind farm monitoring reports from 2015 to 2023, we found uneven risk between sites, inconsistent impact assessments, vague commitments in Environmental Management Programmes (EMPrs) and poor oversight at operational facilities. To tackle this, BirdLife South Africa and the South African Wind Energy Association (SAWEA) launched an initiative in 2025 to develop clear, sector-wide minimum requirements for bird mitigation at wind energy facilities. The goal is fairness and consistency, so that good bird protection isn’t a competitive disadvantage for responsible operators.

Since then, BirdLife South Africa and SAWEA have run a national webinar and a series of workshops in Cape Town, Gqeberha and Johannesburg, bringing together developers, government, lenders, environmental assessment practitioners and conservation groups. The result was a striking level of agreement. Of 15 key themes discussed, 13 were supported by every single stakeholder group, with no one taking an opposing position on any issue.

Everyone agreed that mitigation outcomes (such as fatality thresholds) should be fixed, measurable and legally binding, while the actions used to achieve them (like shutting down turbines when birds are detected) should stay flexible and adaptable to new technology. There was also strong support for standardised monitoring and data-sharing, adequate funding for adaptive management, and independent auditing to keep everyone accountable.

The next step is to turn this shared vision into a practical framework: a set of minimum information requirements for every wind farm’s environmental management system. Rather than dictating exact numbers or methods, the framework will ensure every site properly addresses monitoring, adaptive management, funding and compliance, tailored to its own specific bird risks.

This exemplifies the value of finding common ground between conservationists, government and industry, and it lays the foundation for wind energy and healthy bird populations to coexist in South Africa.

You can read the full report summarising the outcome of the workshops and progress on this initiative so far at Summary of Bird Monitoring Reports from Operational Wind Energy Facilities in South Africa Minimum Requirements for Avifaunal Mitigation at Wind Energy Facilities Initiative: Summary of Progress to Date.

SAM RALSTON-PATON, BIRDS AND RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECT MANAGER

South African Birds by Name

World Environment Day at Brakwal school

In June, to celebrate World Environment Day, I facilitated an awareness programme with 40 learners of Grades 1 to 7 at Brakwal Primary School. The learners and their teacher actively took part in hands-on activity, using a climate change poster and cards. They were first introduced to climate and weather as well as the human activities that contribute to climate change, then were shown how to play a card game with messages, questions and responses on how to mitigate climate change. The activity also encouraged learners to work and discuss the subject in their respective groups.

World Environment Day, observed every year on 5 June, is one of the world’s most important initiatives for environmental awareness and action. This year, the global focus was on climate action and the urgent signals the earth is sending: rising temperatures, extreme weather, biodiversity loss and pollution. For schools, this day is more than a date on the calendar; it is an opportunity to help learners understand that protecting the environment begins with everyday choices.

Schools play a powerful and important role in shaping the attitudes and habits of the youth. Young people growing up often do not learn about taking care of the environment, which is important because the environment provides our ecosystem services. In most instances, learning about it is not even a priority, especially in rural areas where clean water and good nutritional food are not accessible.

When learners are taught to value clean water, healthy soil, wildlife and responsible waste management, they become conscious of environmental issues. They can better understand challenges and what actions can be done locally to contribute to global solutions. Environmental education encourages critical thinking, problem-solving and teamwork, as learners explore practical solutions to challenges in their own communities.

Promoting environmental awareness in schools and to the public is especially important because communities face challenges such as drought, flooding, water scarcity, littering and habitat loss. By understanding these issues, learners are better prepared to make informed decisions and inspire positive change at home and school, and in their neighbourhoods.

Every learner has a part to play in caring for the environment. It all starts with switching off lights, using water wisely, picking up litter, planting trees and respecting animals – these are simple actions that protect the planet. World Environment Day reminds us that everyone can make a difference, no matter their background and social status. The future is not just something we wait for; it is something we help to create through the choices we make today.

STEVEN SEGANG, INGULA CONSERVATION AND EDUCATION OFFICER

The Albatross Task Force – a life changed

On 23 September 2005, I stepped aboard a joint-venture longline fishing vessel (a foreign-owned ship permitted to operate in South African waters) in Cape Town harbour. As I did so, I had a feeling that my life was about to change.

It was my first day as a fishery observer.

After 32 days at sea, I returned with amazing experiences and great birding moments – including sightings of some extremely rare species. But also, unfortunately, with several dead albatrosses and petrels, caught by the baited hooks intended for tuna, a gear that also attracts seabirds as unintended bycatch.

That evening, as I sat recounting my time at sea to Samantha Petersen, who led the first Albatross Task Force team (2003–2010), the dead birds felt like a weight on my shoulders, and it was a subject I desperately wanted to address.

I never imagined then that I would soon become one of the first of two Albatross Task Force (ATF) team members in South Africa. Samantha had recognised my growing love for albatrosses and a couple of months later I began working at BirdLife South Africa’s newly created Albatross Task Force project.

It is almost impossible to summarise the five years I spent with the ATF. My 32 fishing trips and a total of 370 days at sea gave me the tools to understand fishermen’s lives and an invaluable opportunity to observe albatrosses in their element – hours spent watching and marvelling at their majestic way of life.

If anyone needs convincing that seabirds are worth the effort and resources invested in their conservation, they need only spend time at sea with them. Even a day will do.

The ATF project and my relationships with the industry made me, a foreigner in South Africa, feel ‘Proudly South African’ many times. I was fortunate to represent BirdLife South Africa at workshops and conferences, and on one unforgettable occasion I spent half an hour talking to HRH King (then Prince) Charles III at Clarence House in London about the ATF’s work.

Helping set up the Namibian ATF team, researching mitigation measures, including the ‘circle-hook’ and ‘safe-lead’ as well as trialling the bird-scaring line (BSL) were just a few of the many initiatives we pursued. We set up the Ocean View BSL Manufacturing Project, which helped persons with disability earn a living – a project that is still operating today. There was much to do, and this was only the beginning.

For me, our most significant achievement back then was the inclusion of an upper precautionary catch limit of seabirds to the permit conditions for the foreign longline fleet.

In August 2007 I remember returning exhausted and depressed to our office at the University of Cape Town. We had just offloaded bags of dead seabirds from a freezer in the harbour when news came of yet another foreign longline vessel that had killed more than 60 seabirds over a couple of full-moon nights along the Agulhas Bank. The total seabird bycatch over the previous three months had soared past 700. Something had to change.

Samantha saw my despair, turned her chair around, and we started thinking out loud: why not set a limit? Working with Marine and Coastal Management (now the Oceans and Coasts branch of the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment), in 2008 we set a 25-bird limit, which was written into the permit conditions that every foreign longline vessels had to sign and comply with. If the limit was reached, additional mitigation measures were implemented and daily observer reports submitted to government to assess compliance.

Fifteen years have passed since I left the ATF and returned to my country. During a recent visit to the ATF office in Cape Town, I learned how much has been achieved since I left in 2011 – and that the spirit of keeping the sea safe for seabirds remains strong.

Andrea Angel, leader of the South African ATF team, told me how the setting of the upper precautionary catch limit reduced foreign vessels’ seabird bycatch by 85% and how hardly any foreign vessels now operate in South African waters. I wonder how many seabird lives that has saved. (It has been calculated that the 85% reduction translates to at least 3000 fewer seabirds killed annually.)

Working for the ATF set the course for the life I’ve followed ever since and bird conservation is what I do. Working for the albatrosses and being part of the Birdlife South Africa family taught me a great deal about conservation work and provided me with tools I still use today.

Now I work in the desert, a different environment, though with similarities to the Southern Ocean. There is much magic in the desert – but no albatrosses.

MEIDAD GOREN, ALBATROSS TASK FORCE INSTRUCTOR (2006–2011)