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We planned a trip to the north-eastern corner of the Western Cape province concentrating mainly on an area between Beaufort West and Murraysburg with the primary focus of targeting a few new species for our provincial lists. Setting off on 22 April, we made our way through to Beaufort West and spent a few hours in the afternoon in the Karoo National Park managing to catch up with our first target bird, Village Indigobird. We also met up with John and Greta Graham here who would spend the first few days of our trip with us. Early the next morning, we were back in the park and spent a few hours working the area connecting with a number of the other more regular species one might expect (this also helped our challenge list which has now been increased to include the whole Western Cape province...).

By lunch time, we were on the road heading further north-east towards Murraysburg. We eventually arrived at our first destination, Misthoek Guest Farm, where we would be spending the next four nights. We also met up with a local birder here, Stefan Theron, who would be taking us around to some of his local hotspots. This turned out to be an absolute coup as Stefan really knew the area well and turned up some fantastic birds for us! Over the next few days in this area, we connected with a number of new Western Cape birds like Northern Black Korhaan, Pink-billed Lark and mega Kurrichane Button-quail whilst we also had some other great birding as well as good mammals, reptiles and frogs.

Our next 2 nights were spent at the farm Doornbos where we continued to target some other good birds and came up trumps with one of our biggest "wants" for the trip, Drakensberg Rockjumper which meant that we now had both Rockjumpers in our home province. We also turned up a cracking Verreaux's Eagle Owl here as well as other good things like Karoo Flat Gecko and Tandy's Sand Frog, both new species for us.

Our last 2 nights in the Murraysburg area were based at Bloupoort and local birding added Yellow-throated Petronia and Golden-breasted Bunting to our provincial lists whilst Margaret also got African Firefinch for her list. As with the rest of the trip, we also did a few nightdrives and highlights included Cape Porcupine, Aardwolf, Black-backed Jackal and Pygmy Hairy-footed Gerbil.

From here, we eventually made our way back to Cape Town, being very lucky along the way in that we received a call about 2 White-fronted Bee-eaters near Prince Albert which we were able to divert and go and see, another new bird for our Western Cape lists.