Birdlife Farewell

BirdLife South Africa has been a welcoming, rewarding professional home for me, and it is therefore very difficult to break the news that I will be ‘leaving the nest’ at the end of April. I feel it is important for me to stress that there is no push factor or sense of unhappiness that I am trying to escape, and, in fact, my very happy years here make it almost unbearable to leave. I have given this decision a great deal of thought and concern, but ultimately the new opportunity is too great to pass up.

I will, after the national election on 29 May, be taking up a seat as a Member of Parliament with the DA (Democratic Alliance). I must also emphasize here that BirdLife South Africa is and will remain an apolitical entity and my personal alignment does not represent that of the organization. The new position and career will no doubt challenge me in ways I have never been tested before, but I am looking forward to the opportunity to contribute to the causes of uplifting both nature and people in a very different forum and at a completely different scale. I am equal parts terrified and excited and feel like the dog that has caught the bus and is unsure what to do with it.

In many ways, my career at BirdLife South Africa has prepared me uniquely for this change. Working for a small NGO has its challenges, but it also allows you to develop much more broadly than in a pigeonholed corporate job. I have been required and encouraged to develop wide-ranging skills including public speaking, fundraising, marketing, communications, writing, events organizing, strategy, legal drafting, leadership, project management, and many other facets that I will draw on in my new career. I have also been empowered to contribute at a high level of the organization, for example through the Marketing Committee and the organizing committees for events such as the African Bird Fair and Flock to Marion. These engagements have grown my confidence in my ability to add value, work in teams, and collaborate effectively with the full scope of the organization, from the intern to the CEO.

It has been an incredibly rich and rewarding journey and I know that I am not divorcing the organization but rather repositioning myself in relation to it. I have already committed to becoming a Conservation League Donor and I am sure that I will continue to work with the team and champion their values and objectives in my new capacity. I want to express my absolute gratitude to everyone I have worked with, whether those are colleagues, funders, collaborators, or supporters. The quality of people that BirdLife South Africa attracts is a testament to the culture and environment that it fosters, and I have reaped the benefits of working with some fantastic and diverse people over the years. To name them all would take too much column space and I would hate to have to leave somebody off, so I will do my acknowledgments personally.

I do want to share some of my highlights, for my own indulgence as well as to showcase some of the amazing work that I have been privileged to contribute to at BirdLife South Africa. Perhaps the most rewarding but also most challenging project that I was involved with is the Community Bird Guide Project. I joined BirdLife South Africa in 2018 in the Seabird Conservation Programme and only later transitioned into the tourism role. In fact, I started the new position a mere three weeks after Level 5 Lockdown was declared in South Africa. Those who lived through it will know that South Africa’s COVID-19 restrictions were some of the most punishing and rigid. To take a job in tourism at that time appeared completely senseless, but I knew that the funding for my position was secure and that there was urgent work to be done under the circumstances. It was eminently clear that lockdown was an indeterminate death knell to much of the tourism industry that relied on travel and visitors. From BirdLife South Africa’s perspective, it was especially concerning that our network of ca. 50 guides was suddenly left without prospect for income. BirdLife South Africa has trained members of local communities to become professional bird guides for over 25 years and they have since become some of the most formidable and loved members of the birding community. However, they often provide for extended families and communities and subsist on a relatively lean budget, and this hurdle was going to prove too much for many of them. My first task, then, as the new (and first-ever) Avitourism Project Manager was to devise a plan to help our guides. With the assistance of senior management and the Board, we were able to establish a Community Bird Guide Relief Fund and appealed to the birding community to support the guides. We raised close to R1 million in a few months and were able to sustain the guides until local travel opened some six months later. This outpouring of charity and love at such a dark time for the tourism industry was a warm light that reached all corners of the county.

Once some of the pandemic restrictions had eased, I was able to convene my first guide training course. In my three years at the helm, we successfully held three courses and graduated 23 guides. Being on the receiving end of the expressions of gratitude upon graduation is a feeling I will carry with me for a long time, and the opportunity to play a life-changing role in the life of someone else is something I will never take for granted. While managing the network of guides, identifying avenues for support and training, and coordinating training courses was at times a monumental challenge, it was by far outstripped by the reward at the end.

When I took on the position I inherited a lot of smaller projects alongside the Community Bird Guide Project. There were the Birder Friendly Establishments and Tour Operators (as they were then called), the birding routes launched some ten years prior and then left to stagnate, and the various other birding-related bits and pieces. While managing projects is all well and good, it is just that much more motivating for me to start something you can really call your own and see it through. At the start of my tenure as Avitourism Project Manager, it was suggested that I convene a stakeholder meeting to discuss the strategy and direction of this new project with some experts. It was the middle of COVID-19 so people had time to spare and were still awed by the new virtual meeting technology ‘Zoom’, so people were more than willing to contribute. During the day-long engagement, I casually mentioned that I thought the various elements of this project would work best if they were all tied together into some kind of digital map which put the guides, accommodations, tour operators, and other services into proximity with each other, but that it would take an immense amount of work and a considerable budget to build such a thing. Oom Dawie Chamberlain, a long-time supporter and Board member of BirdLife South Africa, unmuted himself for the first time that day and said “Neef, I agree with you, and I’ll fund it”. That was the day that the GoBirding website was born (www.gobirding.co.za). We devised a plan to contract in out-of-work professional guides to review and improve our birding routes, bringing the information up to an impeccable level of quality and detail. We then designed the page and populated over 600 individual webpages of information relating to birding in South Africa. This resulted in a world-class repository and portal of information that is freely available to the public and will catalyze avitourism in unquantifiable ways. I am particularly proud of this legacy that I can leave to the birding community.

Another COVID-19 challenge was presented to us in the form of the African Bird Fair. Traditionally held at the Walter Sisulu National Botanical Gardens, this popular event was now on the ropes. Julie Bayley, our then Events Manager, and I had not been involved in a bird fair before, but we convinced the organizing committee to let us run with the idea of a virtual fair. The technology was still in its infancy and neither of us fully grasped the enormity of the task we had put our hands up for, but we managed to pull together a passable virtual event in just a couple of months on the back of an inexhaustible supply of coffee and a sequence of all-nighters. The Virtual African Bird Fair (‘virtually the best bird fair in Africa’ was the tagline I proposed) became a workable model for three years before we moved back to a physical location again (but with a hybrid element). These fairs have been an annual highlight for me to work on and I’m grateful for the support and collaboration provided by all of the committees over the years.

The Conservation Conversations webinar series was yet another pandemic product. Our staff are very popular on the bird club talk circuit, but lockdown put paid to that practice. Melissa Whitecross, a dear friend and past colleague, came up with the idea to launch a virtual talk series so that we could connect with the bird clubs remotely. This weekly and then bi-weekly series roared into life like a parched grassland set aflame. Within one or two weeks we had an audience of several hundred people, sometimes pushing past our 500-viewer license cap. I was brought on as a co-host to relieve some of the burden and then a third host was added in Christina Hagen. The series is still going some 160 episodes and 5 years later every second Tuesday at 7 pm.

As I mentioned earlier, I moved into the tourism role after starting in the Seabird Conservation Programme. My first job title was Coastal Seabird Conservation Project Officer, which then got upgraded to Project Manager. My chief responsibility was data collection for the non-breeding African Penguin tracking project. Penguins need to replace their feathers, as do all birds. The twist for penguins is that losing feathers compromises their waterproofing and exposes them to hypothermia. So, penguins have counteracted this with what is known, rather dramatically, as ‘catastrophic moult’, which in simple terms means that they lose all of their feathers simultaneously rather than sequentially. Penguins come ashore for three weeks to complete their moult, looking rather ragged and forlorn as they stand waterside, all the while baking in the African sun. During this time, penguins are unable to go to sea which means they must take on sufficient fluids and fuel to last them the full moult period. To this end, penguins spend about six weeks pre-moult attempting to pack on as many pounds as possible, often doubling their bodyweight when food is plentiful. On the other hand, they lose half of their weight while replacing their feathers and must quickly refuel when ocean-ready to replace those lost stores. When food is not so easy to come by, which with the pressure on pelagic fish stocks and the climate change-associated shifts in prey base is not often any more, the penguins are at real risk of not surviving the ordeal of their moult. My job was to fit GPS-trackers on birds in the pre- and post-moult stages to ascertain where their most important foraging areas are, and then to translate that data into advocacy for fishing closures through the relevant government working groups. I enjoyed the data collection immensely, especially the trips to Dassen Island off the west coast. Dassen Island has one permanent inhabitant, the island manager, but is otherwise a nature reserve. The island is a fascinating and sometimes eerie place, especially when my fieldwork required me to be out in the early hours of the morning when penguins were on their nests to retrieve my devices. The call of Leach’s Storm Petrels will forever give me chills (the island is the last breeding outpost and nocturnal roost for this species in South Africa). Being able to explore and work on the island was a true privilege. Unfortunately, where a million pairs of penguins once bred, there is a fraction of fraction left. In fact, the entire population of African Penguins is now estimated at less than 10,000 breeding pairs, and without a change in its trajectory the species could be functionally extinct as soon as 2035. As proficient and productive as I was with data collection, the hard scientific analysis skills were beyond me and I am grateful to colleagues who have taken up that role since my departure for translating that work into meaningful conservation. At the time of writing, BirdLife South Africa and SANCCOB are suing the Minister of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment for not acting strongly enough to protect penguins. I am proud that my few years of data have contributed to the evidence base that is being used to argue for protecting our natural heritage.

Penguins took me all over the Western Cape, but also to a couple of rather unexpected places as well. Two stick out in my memory. The first was the Seventh Session of the Meeting of the Parties to AEWA which is a mouthful on its own before you even spell out the rather odd acronym for the African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds Agreement. This international conference took place in Durban, and I was able to travel with a number of colleagues who became firm friends afterwards. I was rather daunted by the United Nations-styled plenaries and sessions, and I was required to convene a side event on the conservation of the Benguela Ecosystem seabirds featured in the Agreement. I managed to hide my nerves well enough to pull off the event, and this kickstarted an opportunity to convene a working group to draft an International Multi-Species Action Plan (or IMSAP, if you want the alphabet soup version). The working group meeting eventually happened after I had moved to Johannesburg, but that early exposure to international conferencing was an eye-opener and confidence booster, as well as a very enjoyable trip.

The second trip that will go down as a lifetime highlight was the opportunity to participate in the International Penguin Conference in Dunedin, New Zealand. Despite the name, the meeting is not for penguins but rather for researchers, advocates, and conservationists working on the 20 or so species of penguins worldwide (the debate on penguin genetics was a prominent and hitherto unresolved theme of the conference). My aforementioned webinar co-host and fellow penguinologist, Christina Hagen, and I decided to travel early to explore some of New Zealand’s South Island. Some highlights were watching Yellow-eyed Penguins come back from a sea trip and bumble around the atypical forest habitat, gawking at various albatross species at arms-length in Kaikoura, and braving the frigid and frozen conditions of Lake Pukaki to see one of the world’s most endangered birds, the Black Stilt. The conference itself was a fantastic gathering of like-minded individuals and the assortment of South Africans, Australians, New Zealanders, and Chileans got on like a house on fire with the inspiration of a few Speight’s and DBs. After the conference, we travelled with fellow delegates to the stunning Millford Sound on the west coast and finally to Rakiura or Stewart Island in the extreme south. Rakiura is arguably the best place to find kiwis, and it was with great intent that I set out one evening with my headtorch to try and find one. Unfortunately, as is the case on most New Zealand evenings, the heavens opened and my little camping torch was not lighting up any further than my feet through the driving rain. It was about midnight when a car drove past this drenched and muddy South African plodding through the deserted streets and took sympathy on me. In fact, it was the single policeman for the island on his evening patrols. He passed me at first, then slowed and reversed, winding down his window to ask in his thick accent and with a knowing glance, “You looking for kiwis?” He allowed me to ride shotgun and we spent the next hour searching in the car headlights. I think we saw six or seven kiwis in that time – a much better return than my previous empty-handed four hours. I saw him the next day in the local pub, and it’s safe to say he didn’t pay for a drink that night.

I also had the chance to travel for other people’s work at times. My travel partner was commonly Melissa Whitecross or Linda van den Heever, or sometimes both. Some of the most memorable were the trips into broader southern Africa. There were two trips into Mozambique for the vulture safe zones project – one to the incredible Maputo National Park and the other to the Zinave and Karingani reserves. Between excessively long days on the road and over-enthusiastic speed cops there were also incredible experiences with species (Pel’s Fishing Owl and Black Coucal stand out) and landscapes (the spinetail-infested baobabs of the north and the sand forest of the south, to highlight just two). One could never ask for better company, either. Another standout trip was the Black Stork survey in northern Kruger National Park. Playing bird-themed boardgames in Punda Maria by headtorch and wading through the shallow (but still crocodile-rich) water of the steep-sided Lanner Gorge are seared into my brain as times when all was at peace in the world.

Perhaps the pinnacle of my travel experiences while at BirdLife South Africa was the Flock to Marion voyage. When I tell people that a small conservation organization chartered a cruise ship I am greeted with incredulity. It is an absurdly ambitious undertaking. When I continue to explain that it has now been done three times and once halfway to Antarctica the incredulity turns to blank disbelief. Being a part of the organizing committee for this cruise was an intensely testing experience, especially given the crunched timelines and extra complications brought about by COVID-19 and the especial havoc it wreaked on the cruise industry. I was in charge of the expert seabird guide contingent, which some may describe as trying to herd 50 extremely intelligent but perennially distracted cats through a multi-storied steel maze. I averaged around three hours of sleep a night on the voyage itself and endured some stressful days and weeks leading up to the trip, but it was all worth it when 1496 birders were gawping open-mouthed at thousands of albatrosses encompassing the vessel with the Prince Edward Islands in silhouette on the horizon. I sincerely hope to be onboard again for the second iteration in January 2025. I hope I will see you there.

Latterly, the Pan African Ornithological Congress in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe at the back end of 2023 was a highlight. Africa’s top ornithologists gathered there, some compatriots of mine from my days at the FitzPatrick Institute and others who I had only corresponded with or knew by reputation. Seeing the beauty of Mosi Oa Tunya (aka Victoria Falls) firsthand was a bucket list item. At the conference, I presented on the pioneering work of the South African Names for South African Birds project – an effort to consolidate lists of South Africa’s birds in its official languages through consultative compilation of existing names and the creation of new names where needed. This is another transformative project that I am very proud to have had a hand in. For the first time, there are now lists of birds in languages other than English and Afrikaans. Zulu was tackled first, and multiple other languages are now underway. Most importantly, a contract was secured to translate a major bird field guide mobile app into Zulu, which will be a first of its kind worldwide and a freely available tool for Zulu-speaking birders and our education work in KwaZulu-Natal. While creating lists of bird names is a small achievement (although a huge amount of legwork), it is a necessary foundational step towards tearing down the barriers that keep birds and birding entrenched as the pursuit of the privileged few in South Africa.

I cannot say enough about the quality of BirdLife South Africa. For a relatively small group of people, their achievements are entirely outsized. South Africa’s (and indeed broader Africa’s) natural environment would be much worse off without their hard work, even if their size and scope can limit their reach. The conservation of birds in the South African context is an extremely heavy burden to bear in terms of the complexity of government, communities, socioeconomic challenges, data scarcity, and an ever-dwindling dearth of funding opportunities. Yet, due to the quality and dedication of their staff, this team fights in a weight class several levels above where they would reasonably be expected to. Their output coupled with impeccable, industry-leading governance and financial administration have placed them at the pinnacle of conservation organizations on the continent.

If you are in any way able to support BirdLife South Africa, whether by becoming a regular member, a regular donor, a Conservation League Donor, a Golden Bird Patron, a volunteer, by leaving them a legacy contribution in your will, or any other kind of contribution, I implore you to consider doing so. From somebody who has been on the inside and been privy to how the organization functions, I can assure you that your investment will be repaid many times over through their work.

And so, I bid farewell to the organization and a chapter of my life that I will always look back fondly on. I am by no means lost to the birding and conservation communities, however, and intend to use my opportunities moving forward to continue to make a positive contribution to this wonderful country and our natural environment. Should you wish to contact me, please do so on my new email address (adeblocq@parliament.gov.za) or via social media. I will always be happy to talk birds and birding with anyone!