WATCH | Thousands of birds flock to Langebaan as humans retreat indoors
Thousands of birds swooped into Langebaan, about 120km north of Cape Town, in numbers never seen before at the weekend — just over a week into the lockdown.
“This is a spectacle, just look at this ... I've never seen anything like this yet," said a person who shot the video at Paradise Beach. The footage went viral on Facebook and Twitter.
“I’ve seen the sardine run many, many times but this is ... unbelievable. Right here on our stoep,” the person said. “It’s amazing, however since this lockdown happened, the birds have been going crazy.”
As humans remain largely indoors under lockdown around the world, animals and birds are reportedly reclaiming some of the empty streets in our concrete jungles and, it appears, are coming closer to shore.
“Look at those birds ... if you look at the far distance in the left, they are still coming ... it looks like they’ve chased the anchovies all the way to the shore.”
Most of the wildlife action reported has been on land, however, with a puma spotted in the centre of Chile’s capital Santiago, coyotes coming into San Francisco, Kashmiri goats in Llandudno in Wales, a wild boar on Barcelona’s streets in Spain and a civet cat in Kozhikode in India.
But fake news reports and memes about wildlife in cities are also common online during the Covid-19 pandemic.