The Vaal River is the dome's northern boundary, its lifeline, and for most of the last twenty years its quiet emergency. Mining run-off upstream, sewage spills from under-maintained municipal infrastructure, and the slow creep of invasive water hyacinth have all done their work on it.
So when our annual bird census on the lower Vaal — sixteen volunteers, two boats, four count points, one very cold sunrise on the 11th of July — turned up six species we had not recorded in the same census since 2014, we counted it twice before we said anything publicly.
We have now counted it three times. The numbers are real.
The headline returns: African finfoot (one confirmed sighting at Point 3, photograph attached to the formal report), half-collared kingfisher (two individuals, both at Point 1), goliath heron (one, at Point 4 — almost certainly not breeding here yet, but present), African pygmy goose (a small group of four, at Point 2), saddle-billed stork (one, fly-over only), and white-backed night heron (one, at Point 1, identified by call).
None of these are unheard-of for the area in absolute terms. All of them are species that need clean, slow-moving water with healthy reed-beds and the right invertebrate base. None of them have been recorded in our July census in the last ten years. Their return, in the same season, in numbers that are small but consistent, is not noise.
We are cautious about why. The most likely explanation is the cumulative effect of three things: (1) the partial restoration of the Klipspruit wetland ten kilometres upstream, completed in 2023; (2) two consecutive years of better rainfall and consequently better dilution of upstream pollutants; and (3) the volunteer reed-bed clearing programme that has been running every second weekend since the autumn of 2024. The hyacinth is not gone. It is, for the first time in a long time, no longer winning.
The full report — counts at all four points, weather conditions, observer list, photographs and audio recordings — is being prepared for submission to the South African Bird Atlas Project (SABAP2) and will be available on request from [email protected] once it has been peer-reviewed internally.
A note on the volunteers, because they did the work: thank you to the fourteen members of the Free State chapter and the two visiting birders from KZN who got into a cold boat at four in the morning in winter. We owe you coffee for life.
The next census is scheduled for the second weekend of July 2027. If you'd like to be on the boat, find us at the contact form. We do not require expert-level birding — a steady pair of binoculars and a willingness to keep quiet in a reed-bed for two hours is enough.