Trip 1: April 2010
In April 2010 my family and I did a week of house sitting in Sabie and it enabled us to do some serious birding in the area. One of our highlights was visiting the Nelspruit Nature Reserve (covered in chapter 95 in Birding Gauteng). It does have a questionable security rating, but we enjoyed first exploring the northern side of the reserve and then the southern. The bird life was pretty abundant. We did spend a lot of time either staring into thick bushes or up into trees to find birds that we were hearing but it was rewarding!

Here is a selection of the birds that we saw:

Trip 2: July 2012
On Friday morning the 13th July 2012 we visited the Nelspruit Nature Reserve for the second time. We walked the whole of the reserve in the 5 hours we were there and recorded 50 bird species including a close encounter with African Goshawk, a fly past of a Little Sparrowhawk.

Here are some scenery shots that we took (my wife is crazy about flowers - hence the abundance of flower shots in this group of pics!):

Here are a few bird shots that I took:

One of the highlights was watching a pair of Green Wood-Hoopoe calling while doing some pretty serious gymnastics:

The reserve has 3 entrances, the main one being in Mare street at the Trim Park (Google Earth co-ordinates are 25°29'1.99"S and 30°58'22.96"E). Travelling North on the R40 towards Mbombela you turn right into Sarel Cilliers Street just before you get to the N4 intersection, you then turn right into Mare Street and then right into Andries Pretorious street and the entrance gate is on your right hand side.