South Africa: A loud bird finds a lush niche

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Pest, charming oddity or just background noise, the Hadeda ibis is a feathered phenomenon in suburban South Africa.

Sometimes it swipes dog food meant for pets, splatters parked cars and driveways with droppings and yanks residents from sleep with jarring squawks at first light.

It is not an endangered species and its feathers are a drab gray or brown, so it's not on a bird lover bucket list. But the bird now has a small niche in popular culture. Some lodges and restaurants carry its name, a website offers a ringtone download of its cry and a pair of South African musicians produced a song called: "Harry the hungry Hadeda."

The name hadeda is said to be onomatopoeic, an imitation of its raucous cry. Some call it a "flying vuvuzela," recalling the din of the plastic horn used by stadium fans during the World Cup soccer tournament in South Africa in 2010. Found in sub-Saharan Africa, the Hadeda ibis is a somewhat unruly cousin of the African Sacred Ibis, which was revered in ancient Egypt.

The bird's regional population increased in the last century, but the numbers really took off in the past couple of decades with more irrigation in gardens, golf courses and other green spaces in Johannesburg, Cape Town and some other cities. Many tall trees, ideal for nesting, also reached full height after being planted long ago.

"They have colonized cities more and more," said Res Altwegg, a Swiss citizen and an associate professor of statistics at the University of Cape Town who has used his mountain-climbing experience to reach numerous nests as part of a hadeda research project. "They realize that they can take advantage of urban habitats."

Fortunately, this is not a scenario from "The Birds," the Alfred Hitchcock movie in which birds attack humans. The hadeda prefers to probe and pluck worms and crickets from soft earth with its scythe-like beak. Its vaguely prehistoric features are reminiscent of the illustrations of Edward Gorey, author of "The Osbick Bird" and other quirky tales.

Some ornithologists credit the hadeda's dietary preferences with curbing the population of the "Parktown Prawn," a king cricket named after a Johannesburg suburb that can creep or leap into homes at night, horrifying residents. The hadeda, in turn, has few natural predators in cities, facing instead the lesser peril of flying into windows or getting hit by a car, said Ernst Retief, a regional conservation manager for BirdLife South Africa, a conservation group.

"We've created an ideal habitat for them," Retief said.

The animal demography unit of the University of Cape Town compiled a color-coded map of South Africa that shows hadeda distribution, based on birdwatcher data since 2007, has become more common.

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