28 Feb – 1 Mar 2019: Migrating South

Somewhere in this there is an inverted equation – one flies longer and further with cheap flight tickets. I arrived at Tangier airport before dawn, just to be told that the flight tickets I had purchased two months earlier were invalid, as the route to Fez, my initial destination, had been cancelled. This meant buying two new flight tickets; from Tangier to Barcelona in Spain, and then halfway back on another flight to Madrid. The third flight of the day was from Madrid to Frankfurt in Germany, where I just made my connecting flight to Addis Ababa in Ethiopia due to a delay in Madrid. Flight number five left Addis Ababa at dawn and reached Johannesburg at lunch-time, allowing me enough time to eat a steak and drink a Castle before flying to Kimberley on flight number six.

The positive aspect of all these flights was that it gave me time to catch up on my blog and consolidate my bird lists. During the week in the Canary Islands I found 27 species, of which 22 were new to my Big Year list. The three weeks in Morocco produced 144 species, of which 101 were new species added to the Big Year list. By the end of February the Big Year list total now stands at 638 species.