We were up before sunrise to get to the Karoo for sunrise and our last full day of birding.  Karoo is low desert scrub.

Aardvark hole

We were looking mostly for LBJs and endemics.  We found 10 new species in the 1st 3 hours.  Pao describes these birds as “special, not beautiful”.  He only likes to take pictures of the beautiful ones, but that didn’t stop him from taking his camera out and setting it up on the tripod at all our frequent stops.

We had a pitstop at a very funky store/restaurant in the middle of nowhere.  They had lots of skulls and horns and other strange decor.  A Familiar Chat had a nest in a dead tractor.

It was very dry out with no sign of Bustards or Coursers which we were also looking for.  We did get some beautiful distant views of a few Pale Chanting Goshawks.  We finally found 3 Karoo Korhaans but we came back through a pass where we looked high and low for Protea Canary and didn’t find it.

I think these are called ice plants.

Coming through the pass

View through the pass

Our wonderful guide Greg

This is looking down at the greater Ceres area.  There are many apple and pear and other fruit orchards here.  In fact the apple juice box we had at breakfast was from here.

Oct.26

We left Ceres this morning at 10:00 am (4:00 am at home) and headed toward the Cape Town airport but we had to make one more stop.  This time we found that Protea Canary. He’s kind of drab but that was one more bird for our list.  I think the group got something like 460 species of birds.  We didn’t see all of these but probably only missed 10 or less.  We haven’t done our totals yet.  We also saw 45 mammals and 15 reptiles.  I’d say we did very well.  It was a fabulous trip even if it was exhausting.  We arrived home the next day at about 3:00 pm safe and sound.