Mad About Marievale

Stan Madden is 92 and hasn’t slowed down a bit. We meet him at the environmental education centre in Marievale Nature Reserve (renamed from Marievale Bird Sanctuary), ten kilometres from Nigel, east of Johannesburg, where he greets us with a warm handshake. “You’ve been visiting Marievale for ten years and not yet been to see me,” Stan teases.

I join Stan, founder of Marievale Bird Sanctuary, on a drive around his beloved reserve and, as we record the birds and watch photographers, he shares his vast knowledge of the Marievale wetland ecosystem, which lies within the Blesbokspruit Ramsar Wetland of International Importance.

Stan tells me that, by the mid-1940s, the construction of embankments for booming gold-mining