To watch/listen to an overview of The Birds of the Waterberg click here.

The list of bird species reliably recorded in the Waterberg is listed below and these can be downloaded as a spreadsheet here. Those that have been photographed in the Waterberg  below  and these can be viewed by clicking on the species name – additions to this photographic collection are welcomed. Waterberg target species (red-listed and/or endemic) are highlighted in red. The list currently (March 2020) numbers 450 but this figure does not have real meaning as it includes many species that may be resident on the surrounding flats but only occasionally stray into the Waterberg, and others such as Spotted Creeper, Grey Cuckooshrike, Green Twinspot and Racket-tailed Roller – all reliably reported here at least once – that are way out of their normal ranges. The list of vagrants such as these continues to grow and they are interesting, of course, and are grist to the mill for dedicated twitchers, but they are incidental to what constitutes the Waterberg’s essential bird fauna.

Strip the hundred or so vagrants and incidentals out and the list of birds that make the Waterberg their home comes to about 340. Eighty percent of these are resident and the remainder are seasonal visitors – several storks, raptors, most cuckoos, some kingfishers, swallows, warblers, flycatchers and the like. The bulk of the avifauna (68%) live in the broad-leafed or mixed woodland savanna that cloaks most of the hills and valleys of the plateau but within their ranks are species that are restricted to specific types of woodland, e.g. some restricted to densely wooded ravines, others to Faurea-dominated woodland or patches of thornveld. Twenty percent are wetland-dependent species, some of these restricted to rivers, others to large dams, marshy seeps, and so on. The remainder live in areas of open grassland, some of these (e.g. Cape Rock Thrush, Buff-streaked Chat, Eastern Clapper Lark, Wing-snapping Cisticola) being confined to the fragments of high-lying montane grassland, and others (e.g. Ant-eating Chat, Capped Wheatear, African Pipit) live in secondary grasslands where woodland has been cleared for agriculture.