Halfway through our birding safari in Botswana, my wife, our two sons, and I had somehow identified more than 150 winged species—no small feat for a family that had only recently taken up bird-watching as a hobby. We’d spotted giant kingfishers, pied kingfishers, and woodland kingfishers (the boys are big on kingfishers). We’d seen spindly saddle-billed storks and graceful herons, bee-eaters, sunbirds, and a difficult-to-find Pel’s fishing owl, with its orange feathers and black, marble-like eyes. But one little sucker remained elusive: the violet-eared waxbill.
This diminutive creature sports an amazing paint job, with red eyes, a pink beak, violet cheeks, an orange body, and a striking indigo tail. In the pictures I saw, the bird looked like a figment of the imagination. But it is also really hard to spot. “Private,” even “secretive,” is what the guidebooks say. So one afternoon we made that our mission: violet-eared waxbill or bust. We loaded into our open-sided safari truck, cruised out of our camp in the Okavango Delta, passing herds of red lechwe and kudu nibbling on the grass, and headed to an empty airstrip where someone had allegedly seen a violet-eared waxbill once, several years ago. That’s how desperate we were.
As we rolled along, I was overcome by the sense of space—miles and miles of waist-high grass stretching in every direction, the woody smell of bush sage filling my lungs. There wasn’t another truck in sight, or house on the horizon. Though bigger than France, Botswana has only 2.5 million inhabitants. It’s vast, empty, and gorgeous.
When we arrived at the deserted airstrip, Diphonso Ditshupelo, one of our guides, cut the engine. He and Ian Lombard, a bird specialist who was travelling with our family, raised their binoculars and scanned the thornbushes—a favourite habitat of the violet-eared waxbill.
Ditshupelo, who goes by Dips, sat at the wheel for a quiet moment. He cocked his head, then motioned for us to get out of the truck. As we climbed down, he put a finger to his lips and turned to us with a glint of mischief in his eyes. “I think I hear something,” he whispered.
about bird-watching. It’s one of those activities that seems niche, even boring—until you try it. Then you realise that it opens up a whole other way of interacting with nature. Bird-watching requires you to slow down, clear your mind, and really focus. It’s like the Zen
