TBL Podcast - Season 15 Episode 6 - Inside the King Shaka Bird Radar Project

If you are a birder from KwaZulu Natal, you will probably know Mount Moreland. During summer, an estimated three million Barn Swallows gather there to roost in the reedbeds, creating one of the great birding spectacles in the province. But Mount Moreland is also an important wetland supporting a much wider range of wildlife.

What makes the story even more interesting is that this enormous concentration of birds sits right next to King Shaka International Airport.

That creates an unusual challenge. How do we better understand the movements of millions of birds around a busy airport, protect those birds, and at the same time reduce the risk of bird strikes?

That is where the King Shaka Bird Radar Project comes in.

My guests today are Matthew Wilkinson, an MSc candidate at the University of KwaZulu Natal, and Dr Cameron Cormac, a postdoctoral researcher at UKZN. Together with the wider research team, they are studying how birds use the airspace around the airport and how technology can help us understand those movements in far greater detail.

The radar can detect bird movement, altitude, size categories, whether birds are moving individually or in flocks, and it stores huge amounts of information that researchers can begin to use to understand patterns over time.

So today we are going to talk about Mount Moreland, Barn Swallows, bird strikes, radar, artificial intelligence, infrastructure, and what this technology could eventually mean not only for King Shaka, but potentially for airports and bird conservation much further afield.

Matthew and Cameron, welcome to The Birding Life Podcast.

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Intro and outro music by Tony ZA https://soundcloud.com/tonyofficialza