Gotta marvel at evolution! Always something new. Here’s a mantidfly. It’s not a mantid, but it has evolved to look like one. It’s related to the lacewings – the flying adult you see in Zululand that has the antlion as its larva stage. Here’s what they can look like:
And here’s their story:
“Mantidflies belong to the insect order Neuroptera and are related to more familiar insects like lacewings and antlions. Adult mantidflies clearly show convergent evolution with praying mantids, which are members of a completely different insect order. Both kinds of insects are visual predators that use their raptorial forelimbs to grab up insect prey. Mantid fly biology is otherwise very different from praying mantids. These insects have a larval stage, and during this stage they are parasitoids on other insects or spiders. ‘Parasitoid’ is the technically accurate term since they kill their hosts rather than merely encumber them. The larva of this species of mantidfly enters the egg sac of a jumping spider and eats the eggs, all while the female spider is guarding them!”
Here’s a jumping spider thinking she has everything under control:
Photographed and written about by Mark Sturtevant on Matt Young’s Panda’s Thumb blog.
You know what a mantid looks like, so here’s a lacewing I snapped in isiMangaliso Wetland Park, overlooking Lake St Lucia:
And here’s an eyed flower mantis from our garden in Westville; and a nymph. They’re on the roses Aitch and niece Linda the rose farmer snuck into our ‘strictly indigenous’ Westville garden when I wasn’t looking.
‘Just two schoolboys and me,’ I told the lady at the entrance to Albert Falls dam recreation area.
OK, two adults and one pensioner, she said, totting up the fee. And sizing us up at a glance, bitch. Oh well, she was spot-on – they are in matric after all.
They were after bass and I was after birds. They got one and I got many.
A quick one-night trip to Hluhluwe saw very good birding but Jess was disappointed as the animals were in hiding, possibly due to the big fire which burnt the first day and through the night.
She’s spoilt, though, as she still saw twelve species, all good close-up views including an elephant where she immediately said ‘Reverse Dad, we’re too close!’ and a crocodile, a monitor lizard and a grass lizard – seen below on the tar road, trying to escape the fire. They can hardly move if not in grass, with their tiny little legs. I picked it up and placed on grass and it immediately whizzed away, ‘swimming’ in the grass.
Can you spot the leaf caterpillar below who’s trapped in the leaf and is trying to call for help but can’t spell? Except in Caterpillese?
The little Canon camera did its secret video thing, recording in the background while you’re taking snapshots. It’s weird, but I quite like it:
The biggest surprise sighting this trip was probly the sight of me braai’ing. I left catering to Jess and she bought some really weird stuff like charcoal, firelighters, matches and lamb chops. What could I do? I braai’d and whined.
Off to the ‘Berg with the kids. To a hotel! A real hotel! The Cavern in the foothills of the Drakensberg. At last their Dad listened and took them somewhere they didn’t have to cook and clean! (This was back in 2012).
They loved it. Especially once they worked out one of the secrets of the place: If you gave any hotel employee your room number, he or she would give you anything you wanted under the sun. They had discovered the key to endless riches. They loved it. They no longer needed me. All they needed was to quickly invent their first signatures. When I said I was going off on a hike, did anyone want to come along? No! Go! Enjoy yourself Dad, BYE! They watched impatiently as I packed my rucksack with lunch and binocs and books. Go, Dad!
Movies, the pool table, tennis, drinks at the pool – all ‘free’!
With them happy in civilisation it was up to me to enjoy the hills and valleys, wildlife and – especially – birdlife.
This long-tailed grass lizard looks like a snake as he whips through the grass after grasshoppers. But look closely at his body:
– his tiny legs can be seen in the red boxes –
The next day I encouraged a bit more action. With some trepidation these townies went horse-riding.
– and loved it – – Tom tried fishing –
The other secret was mine: a secret rendezvous with a buxom lady I had met many years before.
You need to kick back with Binocs, Beer, Telescope-on-a-Tripod and – lately – also a Camera to do your front porch birding justice. And I have just the chair for it on my porch – a Lazy Boy thingamiebob. Newish . .
Bought for me by my thoughtful, everloving wife when she realised I do a lot of sitting.
Now: An Argentine-African United Nations veterinarian writes a lovely blog he calls A Bush Snob Out Of Africa. In it he has a feature called Spot The Beast in which he shows a picture of a cryptic or camouflaged creature and invites you to find it. Then he zooms in to reveal an insect on bark, or a mantis, a leaf butterfly, or a moth, a frog, even a cheetah hidden in grass. I love it and I love spotting his ‘hidden’ beasts.
So now: Go back to the picture above and see if you can spot the hidden dragon or crouching dinosaur sharing my chair today. Only then scroll down:
.
.
– a Striped Skink waits for flies to approach –
While I’m at it, I may as well mention some other lizards I have seen . .
A snake?
No, a Legless Skink, on the road in Hluhluwe Game Reserve
A snake?
No, A Grass Lizard – The Cavern, in the Drakensberg Spot three of his tiny legs
A snake? About the size of an earthworm . .
Yes, a Thread Snake at home in Westville. The sharp tip is his tail
Maybe Peters’ Thread Snake Leptotyphlops scutifrons – known to be found in the Durban area.
~~oo0oo~~
Here’s my best birding spot in full operational mode:
The punch bag keeps me in superb condition. Sometimes I even swat it a few times.
Just out of picture on the right: my fridge. It used to be in the kitchen. What good was that?
One sane and sober adult and three girls. Yikes! Man, they were full of nonsense. And rude!? Ha! Ha! We played ‘I Spy’ and you can imagine what they were guessing for B and P and F and all. We laughed till the tears ran. I reminded them of the days we played with Tommy. Whenever A came up he would immediately say ‘anus’ and Aitch would say “Tom!’
The only animal that came close to us in the park caused Jess to burst into tears ‘Dad! Reverse!’ and so we didn’t get what would have been frame-filling shots of a calm, peaceful elephant.
Luckily the camera did its surprise unknown video trick. I’m growing to like it! It records video without you knowing it while you’re focusing on taking stills.
While making lunch the girls spotted this tiny larva moving with his house on his back. The cone-shaped shelter was 10mm long and about 1mm diameter. He was like a hermit crab or a caddisfly larva, but on dry land:
At a pit-stop on the N2 highway on the way there I saw a lovely mushroom trail across the lawn. Is it along a termite track, I wonder?
The ole man’s first visit to South West Africa was by train in 1939. The trip cost six pounds return. His father being a railway man, he probably got a good family-rate deal. He would have ‘entrained’ here. where Oupa worked:
Pietermaritzburg station – Oupa’s workplace
. . crossed all of South Africa to Upington, then passed through Keetmanshoop, Rehoboth and Windhoek:
Keetmanshoop station Rehoboth stationWindhoek station
.. and arrived at his destination station: Okahandja. The last stretch on a narrow gauge line.
Okahandja station
He remembers a lovely wooden dining car, wooden tables, wooden carriage walls. Maybe like this?
His destination was his uncle and aunt’s farms. His aunt Isabel and her husband Theunis van Solms farmed on Engadien or Engadine. They did a lot of hunting.
‘Skiet hom!’
The farms were clustered east of Okahandja – about fifty miles east, he says.
One farm called Nooi Bremen – Was originally owned by a German Count someone – a scion of the Staedtler pencil family and fortune. Or was it the Faber-Castell pencil family? They had more counts.
Daantjie’s farm Uitkyk – original name Onjombojarapati (meant ‘giraffe fell in a hole’)
Sarel’s farm Hartbeesteich – he left his father (or got kicked off the farm?) when he couldn’t stand the abuse any longer. Was sent away with nothing, but rounded up 600 cattle and drove them off to a widow’s farm near the village of Hochveld, 70 miles ENE of Okahandja, where he farmed for her and with her. When she died he bought the farm. Hartbeesteich. ‘teich’ = German for pan.
Japie’s farm was a dry farm; he drilled eighteen holes but never struck water. Dad can’t remember ithe name of the farm.
Andrew Smith (1797-1872) – British army surgeon, traveler, collector, author, committee man and naturalist. As a boy he was apprenticed part-time to a medical doctor while studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
Sent to the Cape Colony in 1821, he was stationed in Grahamstown until the middle of 1825. During these years he made a study of the natural history of the frontier region and the customs of the Xhosa people. After visiting Smith, Cape governor Lord Charles Somerset created the South African Museum in the building of the South African Library, and appointed Smith as its superintendent. He solicited specimens for the museum and published lists of donations in the Cape Town Gazette and African Advertiser. Soon he also published the first and only installment of A descriptive catalogue of the South African Museum in which he described the mammals on exhibition. A separate pamphlet provided Instructions for preparing and preserving the different objects of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms. In December 1826 the Cape of Good Hope Horticultural Society was formed, with Smith as joint secretary. So, in charge of growing the dagga plants? Kidding! Check today’s date.
In 1828 Smith went to the north-west border of the colony to investigate conflicts among the various groups of people living in the region. The political nature of the mission was disguised by presenting it as a scientific expedition. As always, and as usual not or little acknowledged, he was accompanied by local people who knew where they were going. He reached the Olifants River, the copper deposits of Namaqualand, the Orange River, which he explored to its mouth, and returned to Cape Town.
The first general scientific society in southern Africa, the South African Institution, was then founded in Cape Town. Smith was elected as joint secretary and served as joint vice-president (ha! more joints and vice!). They appointed P. Jules Verreaux and launched the subcontinent’s first scientific journal, The South African Quarterly Journal. Smith wrote on birds, on ‘Observations relative to the origin and history of the Bushmen,’ and on ‘Contributions to the natural history of South Africa, etc.’ He later wrote a series of ten articles under the title ‘An epitome of African zoology’, in an effort to promote the study of natural history in the colony.
In December 1831 Smith was sent on another diplomatic mission combined with a scientific expedition, this time to visit the Zulu chief Dingane and report on the nature of his country. The party went via Port Elizabeth, then to the vicinity of Umtata, then down to the coast near present Port St Johns. They reached Port Natal (now Durban) in March 1832. There Smith met H.F. Fynn, who accompanied him to Dingane’s kraal. He was the first well-known collector to investigate the birdlife of coastal Natal, where he found many new species. In an interview with the Grahamstown Journal upon his return he described the fertility of Natal and its potential for settlement. This praise was noted by men who became the ‘Voortrekkers’ who sarie’d voort (sallied forth) and settled in Natal during 1837-1838.
The Cape of Good Hope Association for Exploring Central Africa was established to organise a scientific expedition into central southern Africa, to be financed by public subscription. Smith was elected joint chairman (kidding! – he was chosen as the leader of the expedition). They went to Lesotho and visited chief Moshoeshoe; then to Kuruman, from where the missionary Robert Moffat accompanied them to the kraal of the Matabele king, Mzilikazi, near Zeerust. On they trekked, eastwards along the southern slopes of the Magaliesberg to Hartebeestpoort, then northwards to the tropic of Capricorn. The expedition returned to Cape Town in February 1836 with a huge collection of natural history specimens and drawings. Smith published his Report of the Expedition for Exploring Central Africa.
Around this time Smith met the young geologist Charles Darwin when the second voyage of the Beagle touched at the Cape. Darwin corresponded with Smith about how the large animals in South Africa lived on sparse vegetation, showing that a lack of luxuriant vegetation did not explain the extinction of the giant creatures whose fossils Darwin had found in South America. Darwin frequently mentioned Dr. Smith in his writings, and sponsored the Doctor to gain membership of the Royal Society in 1857 despite the Doctor fighting with a nurse at the time (see below).
Smith was ordered to return to England. He took his private collections and the expedition’s collections with him. After exhibiting the latter in London for a year they were sold and the proceeds paid to the Association that had financed the expedition. In his spare time, he wrote a monumental and authoritative work, Illustrations of the zoology of South Africa, published in five volumes in 1849. It contained descriptions and coloured plates of the mammals, birds, reptiles and fishes by Smith, and the invertebrates, mainly beetles and marine crabs, by S.W. Macleay. Many of their new species have stood the test of time. This established Smith’s reputation as ‘the father of South African zoology’. Among others he described 64 taxa including 24 snakes and 37 lizards, the most by any author of this group, and 79 species of South African birds, again the most by any author.
– Illustrations by Charles Davison Bell & GH Ford –– map, plate , portrait and title page –
In 1843 Smith married his housekeeper Ellen Henderson and that same year was elected a Fellow of the Zoological Society of London. In his career, he became director-general of the Army Medical Department.
Following huge losses of soldiers during the Crimean War (1853-1856) he became involved in a bitter controversy with Florence Nightingale, who had quite rightly criticised the poor treatment soldiers got from military medical men, the horrid lack of cleanliness, never mind sterility, and the generally inadequate medical arrangements for the campaign. Although he was (predictably – it’s the military, after all. The ‘gentlemen officers’ thing, and the ‘How could a lady possibly be right?’ thing!) exonerated from blame, Smith probably realised Nightingale was actually right, as he then persuaded the government to build the first fully adequate military hospital and training school for military medical officers near Southampton; Round about that time, Nightingale also started the Nightingale Training School for nurses and midwives, in London.
Smith, now Sir Andrew Smith KCB, resigned his post in May 1858 and began writing an ambitious work on the ethnography of the whole continent of Africa. He presented thousands of specimens from his personal natural history collection to his alma mater the University of Edinburgh. Then, following the death of his wife towards the end of 1864 he lost interest in his writing project and spent the last years of his life as a recluse.
~~oo0oo~~
The Cape shoveler and Karoo thrush still carry his name.
sarie’d voort – I imagine them sallying forth singing sarie marais
KCB – Knight Commander, Order of the Bath; I wonder if Florence Nightingale organised that he got this – after her accusations of unsanitary conditions under his watch!? Half Kidding! But hey, not inappropriate . .
~~~oo0oo~~~
All the ‘joint’ jokes? Well, when horticulturalists and botanists are growing stuff, and they’re appointed vice chairmen and joint chairmen – AND I’m writing on the 20th April – ?? – Things happen. Viva 420! Here’s hoping SA gets decent drug laws soon (not holding my breath).
Paddock Wood in Kent – Hosted by Pete & Val Excell, old Cape Town friends of Aitch’s
Nearby dam or lake – lots of birders! Standing three deep with binocs n scopes. Looking at a Little Ringed Plover, I think. He says, dubiusly.
Road trip in Pete’s station wagon – a Ford, I think – Cortina? Grenada?
Across Dartmoor to Cornwall. Ponies and a shirt walk on the moor.
In Bodmin, we are generously hosted by Den and Mary Bluett, Mel Spaggiari’s folks, on a beautiful small farm. There’s a stream and pond on their property. We see a newt and a hedgehog
And Yay! Another Dipper! After seeing one in America, we see one here! And he’s even more beautiful. He has a nest under a bridge and is feeding chicks.
Boston, Massachusetts – 13 April Hingham; stay in a motel $39 Cohasset Cape Cod Daniel Webster Inn for supper Stay in Country Acres Motel $33 in Sandwich Wellfleet Bay Orleans – Meadows Motel $35
Then back to Boston; With no time to search in the city, we stayed at the Ramada Inn $89 for the room – So our last night in the USA was our most expensive night in the USA.
~~~oo0oo~~~
Fly Boston / JFK New York / London Heathrow – 18 April 1988
On to the last leg of our honeymoon: England to visit Val & Pete Excell
Aitch took me to Brasil. She had done well as usual in her sales for Scherag and so off we went. First a flight to Manaus in Amazonas province, then a long drive eastward along the Amazon River towards a lake just off the river, then by ferry to a pousada on Silves Island.
Brasil is an immensely big country! To give it scale, here’s a map showing where Amazonas province is and the tiny little portion we drove, which took four hours.
Amazonas province in Brasil
We weren’t married, but I was on my best behaviour and just watched as the bachelors (actual and temporary) in the party would trumpet every night ‘TooDooDoot TooDoo! We’re going fox-hunting!’ they would announce with glee at dinner and troop out with huge grins on their dials.
I stuck to feathered birds like oropendolas, huge toads, caymans and a fresh, beautiful, very sad ocelot skin the lodge staff had proudly recently shot! Aaargh!
– Yacht at Angra dos Reis, Brasil – Ron almost wearing a cozzie – Aitch unmarried –
Then we headed way south to the coast, to Angra dos Reis – the Cove of Kings. A booze yacht trip to the islands and beaches and swimming. One night Aitch felt ill and announced she’d go to bed early, I must go to supper alone. Yes!? I said. Sure, she said. Enjoy yourself. Ha HAAA! I was off – after dressing in my warrior fox-hunting regalia. At supper I tooted the fox-hunting horn with the best of them and announced my newfound freedom. We were off.
We found a bar with a wonderful barman. He gave you anything you wanted and all you had to do was scribble your name! It was first-class. Another round! I’d yell and we’d throw down another marvelous caipirinha and fling the glass over our shoulder. No! No! said the barman, grabbing his broom, rushing out from behind the bar and sweeping up the pieces. MORE BEER! I’d yell, getting into my stride now.
Of course, I can handle my liquor, but some of the guys were less capable. In fact, they dropped me twice on the way back to my chalet. And once there they just propped me up against the door, knocked and ran away. So Aitch found me closely inspecting the door mat and mumbling how I’d have to have a word with them about their service.
She says she dragged me into the shower and ran the cold water full blast and threw me into bed, but of course that could all be rumours – I don’t know – I wasn’t there.
I got up early and made it to breakfast, feeling sprightly. And where were all the culprits? Nowhere to be seen. All indisposed, it was said. Hung Over. That’s what drinking too much will get you. We checked out that day and I was made to pay a bill a metre long with some complete stranger’s signature on all the slips. A signature that got less and less of something until it was just a short downward line with what looked like drool on it. I just paid. Rumours were going around and I didn’t want to cause a scene. I was there as merely a spouse-of, so I had to behave.
Copacabana Beach from our hotel roof
On to Rio! To the Copacabana! I was sure there’d be some licenced premises there too. There were! Aitch turned thirty high up on the roof of our hotel, with her colleagues giving her a huge festive bash. We had a banner made to string above the bar ‘THIRTY! AND UNMARRIED!’ it said.
– the cantagalo favela seen from our hotel roof (wikipedia pic) –
We had a roaring party that had the hotel guests below us wanting us to hush and the favela okes on the hills above us wanting to join in!
~~~oo0oo~~~
pousada – Lodge or Inn
Angra dos Reis – cove – or inlet or creek – of kings
caipirinha – wonderful cold drink; all alcohol with a splash of limes and lemoas; refreshing; then tiptoes around behind you and taps you on the shoulder
favela – informal housing; closely-packed houses and shacks on the steep hill slopes
~~~oo0oo~~~
Another pic of an oropendola, this one by blogger Eduardo Libby.
– chestnut-headed oropendola –
~~~oo0oo~~~
Here’s our great big fat 32-page Brasil photo album (paper version recycled):
A drizzly day, not much to report. I was learning about the new little Canon pocket camera. Haven’t worked it out yet. When we got home I saw it took video all the time we thought we were just focusing for still shots!
Also, I lost my tracker! Jess is normally heads-up, spotting everything and saying ‘What’s that?’ and all I have to do is ID what she’s spotted. Today her head was firmly down, eyes glued to her cellphone. ‘Dad, there’s no signal!’ and ‘Omigod! I got two bars! Oh damn, they’re gone!’
There’s a boyfriend, see.
Bummer. That’s why I made the feature pic an Impala bum.
– Mfolosi day trip Jan 2019 –
Ah! Now I see: I had the camera on Hybrid Auto mode, ‘whereby 2-4 seconds of video is captured before each still image and later combined into a 720p digest movie chronicling your day.’ That’s what I saw and wondered where it came from!
Crispin was concerned. The locquat wasn’t getting any action. It happened since the streetlights murdered the hawk moths. He himself is a man of action, so he sprung or sprang into same.
Every fetish has its paraphenalia. This case it was stepladders and camel hair brushes. Handlangers were rustled up and we went a-fertilising. I was a keen volunteer as I hadn’t had much to do with sexual parts and sperm and ova myself for some time; and even if this was actually pollen and stamens, hey, you take what you can get.
Crispin knew where our targets lived. We crept up to and up them, tickled their upright stigma and style delicately with the soft camel hair brush and bang! pregnant! one shot! The candle flower, Oxyanthus pyriformis, natal locquat didn’t know what hit it. For all it knew it may even have been a hawk moth fondling it with its moustache.
Update from Crispin Hemson xmas 2019. It would appear no pregnancies happened! My thought of bang! pregnant! one shot! was over-optimistic – but he’s bok to try again . .
There are about 6000 species of hoverfly. They disguise themselves as wasps but they’re harmless little buggers and they do a great deal of good pollinating and eating pests like aphids. They love flowers and nectar so they hang around lovely perfume-smelling things:
A rose by any other name on the deck at Mogotlho Lodge
My cellphone pics and videos of the Khwai River hoverfly weren’t great so I didn’t post this until my ex-Saffer-turned-Kiwi, now in Aussie, mate Stephen Charles Reed sent a better picture of a Brisbane hoverfly.
– Steve’s pic you can see the wings – – cropped for a closer view –Stunning Hoverflies
They are amazing hoverers! They can hold dead still in mid-air and then flick to another spot in any direction, zip! just like that. They can do anything mid-air:
. . . even get it on! If that’s the female below, she’s like Ginger Rogers, who could do everything Fred Astaire did, backwards and in high heels!
~~~~~ooo000ooo~~~~~
All this made me go looking and I found a new hero. Fredrik Sjöberg lives on Runmarö Island in Sweden and looks for hoverflies, butterflies, beetles and anything that else that might flit by. He wrote a wonderful book on hoverflies, life the universe and everything which his publishers thought might sell 1600 copies in five years. Well, he sold 30 000 and has since published it in numerous other countries! Then – I told you he’s my hero – he won the IgNobel Prize for Literature in 2016!!
IgNobel LITERATURE PRIZE [SWEDEN] — Fredrik Sjöberg, for his three-volume autobiographical work about the pleasures of collecting flies that are dead, and flies that are not yet dead. REFERENCE: The Fly Trap is the first volume of Fredrik Sjöberg’s autobiographical trilogy, En flugsamlares väg (“The Path of a Fly Collector”), and the first to be published in English. Pantheon Books, 2015, ISBN 978-1101870150.
We humans finally started to learn how to hover in 1907 when the French brothers Breguet flew the Gyroplane No.1 quadcopter about 0.61 m above ground for a minute. Hoverflies all around the world laughed at us.
The recipe: Fifteen glorious people and forty glorious kilometres of wide open sandy beaches of the Zululand or Maputaland coast. Years earlier I had hiked a section of the Wild Coast, far to the south.
Ten of us were walking; two were guiding – Jabulani and DC walking up and down the dunes ahead and behind to keep an eye on us; two drivers for our vehicles to pick us up at the end of the first and third days; and then there was one Shirley Carey: She plotted and arranged, cooked and drove, organised and made it all happen – well done Shirley! It was a great start to what I hope becomes a thriving ‘slackpacking’ enterprise: Introducing people to a magic, less-traveled part of the coast in adventurous, laid-back yet laid-on and comfortable style. Put-Foot-Shirl in her optical blur Toyota sped us around to and from the hike start and end-points, and looked after us in style!
The vistas were spectacular, the weather varied from perfect to overcast and a cool stiff following breeze to a constant ‘irrelentless’ steady headwind on the last day. Thanks to a few overnight showers and spring tide the sand was hard and we didn’t get sand-blasted. We also had no scorching hot Zululand temperatures, for which I was grateful and relieved. Anyway, we pushed on irregardless under interesting skies.
Sodwana to Lala Nek – 40km of beautiful beaches and rocky shoresJabulani scouts our route from up high
The recipe also included great meals, snacks and puddings, enough alcohol and plenty ice. Come to think of it, it was quite saintly of us to leave the kitchen and hit the beach – we could easily have lurked in comfort! Another ingredient was laughter; lots of laughter; loud peals of laughter. Some ribald humour too; you wouldn’t expect that from ladies, would you? Nor snorting with laughter! But it was all there. It would be fascinating to know how many laughs-per-kilometer there were. ‘Many’ would be a conservative estimate.
A whiff of sulphur as the breakfast eggs are unveiled leads to gales of laughter
Now one would think if you went to a remote Maputaland beach, sallied forth in a 4X4 then walked fourteen km without seeing another soul on a deserted beach, that Retail Black Friday would have been escaped and no – zero, none – purchases would have been made. But one would be wrong. These ladies set off after a sweet potato and bought a dress! It’s a mysterious and powerful force, retail.
– Shopping Sodwana, complete with photo-bombing shop assistant, plus prêt-à-porter frocks –Panoramas, some with peopleBeach Walk Small Stuff, plus cows, which are larger
I find beaches fierce and exposed; trudge, trudge; I find forests peaceful and protective; peer here, peer there. On the Zululand Beach Waddle you get both: Wide vistas of sand and water with moving clouds, trudge trudge; balanced by the green peace of the forests and all the little things hiding in them; even a Jan’s Shovel-snout, a seldom-seen nocturnal burrowing snake who lives just below the loose sandy surface, eating gecko eggs; he was dead; we wouldn’t have seen him alive, he’s shy like me; and also polite. Unlike some ladies I could mention; who were not only irrelentless irregardless, but also irreverent, christening me ‘Hef’ for the duration! (Geddit? Nine ladies and me, hence ‘hugh hefner’)
Forest small stuff– Fascinating flies at Mabibi Bromophila caffra – read about ’em –
This expedition was supremely relaxing, but there was one very tough part of the trip: Driving out on the last day with four outspoken, astute, well-read and opinionated ladies as ballast in my non-4X4. I made the mistake of telling them we were going to drive on the Most Beautiful Road in Africa. When we finally got onto it and it was a little bit bumpy, swervy, twisty, sandy and their ballast started shifting, they twisted the story to say I had said “The Best Road in Africa”! So with every spin and rock and roll and wobble it was “Oof! So this is the best road in Africa? I’d hate to see the worst!” and other helpful comments.
That Beautiful Road along Lake Sibaya shoreline – pity the lake was so low
There’s Put-Foot-Lizelle in the bottom pic disappearing into the distance in her Landrover which – amazingly – didn’t get stuck. Oh, hang on, it did once. We had to dispatch Musa to find her.
And here’s that demanding committee in my poor Ford Ranger, discussing tactics:
Usually I’d end with a sunset pic, but we were drinking Cactus Jack, Six Dogs Blue Gin, Bubbly, Red, White and Rose wine, genuine Italian-made Limoncello Ramaccio Pace and other stuff by then, so the sun had to set all by its own self. Here’s a rock pool pic instead: Oh! I’ll follow that with a blurry bird pic by Lou. You’d think with my binocs, telescope and bird book that we would have seen more than a few Sanderlings and a handful of Kittlitz’s plovers! – BTW, the pics are from everyone – thanks!
Di Fabricius, Lizelle Ramaccio Calvino, Mal Bell, Michelle Pace, Shirley Vorster, Joni Kirkland, Lou Kelly, Michelle Graven, Koos Swanepoel, Sheila Swanepoel – pic by Shirley CareyAnother Lou pic with internet-borrowed pics of Sanderling and Kittlitz’s plover
