SBA #6: Black-winged Stilt - Pied Elegance
The cache is the 6th of 9 caches placed within this special place - regarded by birders as the one of the best birding sites in the Western Cape. Thanks are due to the Supervisor of the False Bay Nature Reserve for kind permission to places caches here.
The cache, a small, screw-capped, camo-taped, plastic pot, is hidden at the end of a log bridge across a (sometimes dry sometimes flooded) water channel to Pan 3 where several of these distinctive leggy birds were feeding in the shallow brackish water.
To reach the cache location:
a) Use the waypoints for GC846D9 Strandfontein Birding Area #1: Bird Info Centre to reach the multi-junction at the hub of the spokes of tracks leading between the pans.
b) Direct from the Information Centre / Continuing the cache sequence: turn first left here heading south-east between P4 & P5 to the junction @ S 34 05.134 E 18 31.166. Turn right here and continue past the location of GC846E1 SBA#5: Porcky's Portal to the cache location.
The black-winged stilt (Himantopus himantopus) is a widely distributed unmistakeable very long-legged wader in the avocet and stilt family (Recurvirostridae). The sub-species (1 of 2) which appears here is H.h.meridionalis.
Adults are 33–36 cm long with very long reddish-pink legs, a long fine straight black bill and are blackish above and white below, with a white head and neck with a varying amount of black. Males have a black back, often with greenish gloss. Wing-span is 60-70cm, weight 170-200g and life expectancy up to 12 years.
Immature birds are grey instead of black and have a markedly sandy hue on the wings, with light feather fringes appearing as a whitish line in flight.
It has the longest legs in relation to its body of any bird in the world. Plumage is very variable and head markings can differ enormously, but it always has black wings.
Its favoured habitat is marsh, weedy lakes, and flooded fields. Ir breeds around shallow wetlands, especially coastal lagoons, saltpans and estuaries. Some populations are migratory and move to the ocean coasts in winter; those in warmer regions are generally resident or short-range vagrants. It is a social species, usually found in small groups.
They pick up their food from sand or water, mainly eating aquatic insects, molluscs and crustaceans. They 
rarely swim for food, preferring instead to wade in shallow water, and seize prey on or near the surface. Occasionally, they plunge their heads below the surface to catch sub-aquatic prey.
Annual courtship begins with preening and bill-dipping, followed by the female assuming a receptive posture. The male then moves from side to side in a semicircle behind the female several times before mating begins. Breeding pairs are most often found in colonies, typically ranging from between 2-50 pairs.
Nests may be anything from a simple shallow scrape on the ground to a mound of flood debris, driftwood, grass, fine twigs and other vegetation shaped into a bowl or cone up to 15cm high. Nests are spaced widely on the ground, often among grasses and sedges, although some nests are made from well-lined masses of floating water-weeds.
The female usually lays 3-6 eggs (most commonly 4) in a 24-hour interval. Both parents take turns incubating the eggs from 22-26 days, when the downy young hatch. Fledging takes 28-32 days, and the young are independent of their parents nearly 2-4 weeks after fledging.
BWS often nest in small groups, sometimes with avocets. Within these, mated pairs strongly defend their individual territories.
It exhibits extremely unusual (and largely unexplained) behaviour. For example, it often forms small groups of 3-4 and performs a 'parachute display' in which the birds leap high into the air and then parachute downward slowly on outspread wings. This may be a unique form of predator distraction. It also performs a 'butterfly flight' hovering 5-10 m above a spot and then flying off quickly to another site to repeat the procedure.
In the also unexplained 'grouping ceremony' 3-4 stilts gather together and spontaneously display mild aggression in the form of lunging and pecking at each other before dispersing.
See short video here showing a bird calling and here showing typical feeding technique.