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The Wild Bird Trust have The Cape Parrot Project under their auspices and have offices here on Amorentia Estate. Their organization is involved with Cape Parrot research, in collaboration with local bird enthusiasts. The Cape Parrot is honored to have been nominated as Bird of the Year for 2023. Amorentia is a Cape Parrot Sanctuary.

Lee Anne Hoets and her father Stevie Hoets, together with my grandchildren, are regular visitors to The Clivia Trail and are compiling a list of all bird species identified along the trail.

There are three different climatic biomes along The Clivia Trail, as the forest floor rises by more than 900m in elevation, onto the Eastern escarpment of the Drakensberg range.

There is this deep and until now, inaccessible, high-canopy rainforest in the Mabitsi Valley, through which The Clivia Trail meanders. Here there is an average rainfall of 1600mm per year.

Above the valley, there is the high altitude (1,600m) escarpment location of The Clivia Trail, consisting of a Forest with slightly lower rainfall and humidity; 1000mm per year.

Then there is what could best described as verging on a rain-shadow environment, with a lower rainfall of almost highveld forest and grassland climate zone, with 800mm of rain per year. Each of these climate biomes hosts their own bird communities with some crossovers of species from one to the next.

There can be little that surpasses the ambience created, when one walks and then sits and then walks in the presence of multitudes of birds and the resultant chorus, while you are in a forest. The Clivia Trail along and above the Mabitsi valley, offers the bird enthusiast a mood that floats from one season to the next.

The Dawn-Chorus of the returning migrant birds, as well as birds awakening from their cold winter months, blends a warbling, chirping, cheeping, chirruping, twittering and a trilling, in the creation of a live orchestra of song, with the river gurgling in accompliment, in celebration of their home.

Draw near and share in the avian ambience of the rainforest and ‘forest bird bathe’ for a day on The Clivia Trail.

Come twitch with us.