Nylsvley Nature reserve, Waterberg, Limpopo

Nylsvley Nature Reserve is located in the Waterberg district of Limpopo in South Africa and this is where our family chose to spend a day of birding!

There are only so many hours you can spend birding with a young boy. After all, we encourage his interest but try to be careful not to over do it, or push him into a specific direction…

We chose to spend Christmas Eve at Nylsvley, a RAMSAR waterfowl site located in the Northern Province of South Africa, called Limpopo. The gates only opened at 06h00 so we left at sunrise and were the first day visitors to enter the Nature reserve.

Our first stop was to a short walking trail that leads to Jacana Hide, Joshua was excited and wanted Pieter to interpret the tracks in the sand along the path, we came across fresh giraffe dung too, this makes birding fun for Joshua – he gets to listen to the call of birds, find tracks and then also see birds!

Jacana Hide was well selected as our first stop – Joshua and I both enjoyed many “lifer’ sightings and of course it helped having our own personal birding guide!!! My brother, Mark was visiting and between Pieter and Mark, they kept calling out birds and showing them to me, for someone starting out, I must say, this is a great place to really get into sighting, identifying and hearing a variety of birds!

We live close enough to take day visits to Nyslvley, but we had such a good time we are considering to stay in one of the accommodation options at Nylsvlei.

Accommodation in and around Naboomspruit