Скачать или смотреть Cape Vulture - Dreaming Wings - Blyde Canyon - South Africa

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We set out early that morning . . . my aim was to climb to a large colony of Cape Vultures nesting high on the cliffs of the Northern Drakensberg … The Dragon Mountains. The name of the mountain on which this colony is located is ‘Motsumi’, which means ‘Woman in Waiting’ in the language of the Swazi people.
It is said that they ruled these mountains a long time ago, and it was then that the mountain was named.

I drove as far as I could into the foothills below the colony, and then started the long walk … three hours through the scorching sun weighed down by heavy equipment and the extremely rough terrain.
By eleven thirty in the morning I had climbed as far as I could on that day … six or seven hundred feet above the distant floor of the low-veld, covered in a haze of heatwaves and distance.

This is one of the three biggest breeding colonies of Cape Vulture on the African continent … about 400 adult breeding pairs. The Cape Vulture is also called ‘Griffin’, but the name Griffin doesn’t really work for me, it somehow seems to make this beautiful bird less impressive … and besides, I have always liked the word ‘vulture’.

Most of the birds had already left …taken to the high thermals and carrying winds in search of carrion and offal, food for their young. But were are still about a hundred birds on the cliff face … sitting … preening … taking wing into the odd thermal and then returning to their nesting platforms.

In flight there is little that compares with a gliding vulture … beautiful wings extended into the wind … one sees the nuance of touch at its most subtle … turning , diving, swooping and then landing, always into the wind and back onto the baking cliff face … a cliff face covered with the white of their excrement on rocks black, red and sometimes yellow.
The whole cliff was softly resonating with the whistling and chirping of a hundred vulture chicks, a beautiful chorus occasionally interspersed with the harsh ‘craak’ of an adult bird.

Mountain fires are one of the hazards that too often come with the crowding and negligence of humanity, from which there is always a negative consequence.

A huge veld-fire during this past Winter ran right up the mountain to just under the nesting cliffs, and this may well have reduced the number of chicks on the nest this year.

But life persists … and so do the vultures … and today I get to watch them … endlessly soaring flying great wings on the dreaming wind.

This video was filmed, edited and narrated by PAUL JOHN MYBURGH while working with Earth Touch in 2007.*