“They’re completely daft. No fish swims that close to the surface.”
I was showing my wife a few of the African Skimmer pictures I had managed to take from the boat on the Chobe River during our last trip. And the way you go about visiting the Chobe, incidentally, makes all the difference to what you actually end up seeing there.
The African Skimmer hunts with the lower half of its bill in the water, scooping out small fish in a fraction of a second.
The Chobe is a heavily visited stretch of water, and on the Kasane side it can feel as though every tourist in southern Africa has turned up at once. We always cross to the Namibian side, where there are only very few lodges. Here I like to call on my friend Peter Visagie, a Katima Mulilo man born and bred, to bring us close to the wildlife on private boat trips.
“You two clearly know each other very well,” Sandra remarked on the last tour, when she caught Peter and me taking each other apart verbally.
The truth is that we have known each other for years, we are the same age, and each of us has his own firm ideas about how a boat trip ought to go. But Peter knows what I want for my guests, and that is why I can say with a clear conscience today: my guests have the very best experience on the Chobe.
Even if Peter now and then lights a cigarette, and that does irritate me. Never mind. Where there is a yin, there is also a yang.
Many years ago Mark Paxton – a well-known conservation officer who later withdrew to his old place on the Okavango, where he runs a small lodge – told me just how foolish skimmers really are.
Skimmers breed in our spring, from August to November, and lay their eggs on the sandbanks along the river. As if it were not enough that the eggs are regularly plundered by Nile monitors and the chicks are all too often picked off by raptors.
No – on top of that, the strong winds frequently blow a great deal of sand over the chicks.
All the chicks would really have to do is stand up for a moment, like a husky in the snow, and give themselves a good shake – and life could simply carry on. But instead they let the sand cover them, and they suffocate.
It doesn’t happen all that often, but still…. What a shame!
An Ovambo worker of mine once said: “If you are stupid, you will suffer”… how right Kamati was.
What is rather wonderful, though, is that throughout the breeding season the skimmers always press their bills to the ground facing into the wind. As the wind whistles over them, it carves the most remarkable patterns, radiating away from the birds.
So there is art in the bird world too, even if nobody meant to make it.
I sometimes have the feeling that there are fewer and fewer skimmers. Skimmer in English – and in Afrikaans an even lovelier word: “Waterploeër”, the water plougher. Wonderfully descriptive names for a bird that flies right along the surface of the water with its much longer lower mandible dipped deep into it.
The moment a fish touches that bill it snaps shut, the head folds down as if on a spring-loaded joint, and the fish is his.
- Hunting as a pair – skimmers often work the surface of the water in loose formation.
- The line in the water shows exactly why Afrikaans speakers call it “Waterploeër” – the water plougher.
- The moment a fish meets the lower mandible, the head snaps down as if on a spring-loaded joint.
What is really rather marvellous is that in 2016, for the first time in 73 years, skimmers bred in South Africa. Which means they are spreading again, a little. Even so, there are probably no more than 10,000 birds of this species left in the world today.
Because skimmers breed on very flat sand islands, sometimes no more than 50 cm above the water line, it takes very little – a large boat, or a boat driven too fast past those islands – for the bow wave to wash over the nests and destroy the brood.
Let this be a warning, a PLEA and an outcry to everyone who takes a boat past these islands: take care!
So anyone with a particular interest in skimmers should book a North-East safari with us, in the months from July to November, because that is where we see this fantastic bird regularly – and where we put the right skipper in the right boat in the right place, someone who also has an eye for our photographers.
Because getting a good picture of a skimmer means being in the right place at the right time, not losing heart, and shooting again and again – panning and firing… with a damned fast shutter speed.
And no, it doesn’t work with a phone.
So anyone who would rather photograph with a phone should enjoy a gin and tonic while we are busy with the skimmers, and watch the elephants, hippos, buffalo and pukus on the bank.
Last Updated on 28. August 2026 by Albert Voigts von Schütz
