– life – bokdrols of wisdom –
A red-capped Robin-chat, a vervet monkey and a Purple-crested Turaco visit the birdbaths. Then later:
More vervets, Red-eyed Dove, Dark-capped Bulbul and Black-bellied Glossy Starlings. And then no birds, but a nice shadow:
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Random pictures from lockdown in our valley.
I won’t get all the credits right, but for starters, bird pics from Roger Hogg, butterfly, moth and caterpillar – and many other creatures – from Suncana Bradley. And a few butterfliesf and a whip scorpion from me:
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I suddenly realised yesterday that the Yellow-bellied Greenbul was in bright light, as was the Purple-crested Turaco that was the next lady for a shave. It was 8am and the trouble with my birdbath is that it’s in deep shade and the morning light from behind makes photography difficult.
Took me a while to work it out. So this morning I recorded what happened. Watch how the sun is behind the trees, then suddenly appears between the pickup and left of the trees! Then the sunlight moves from left to right till the birdbath is bathed in its glory.
What the heck? I walked out onto the lawn and looked back:
The office building behind us on the crest of the hill has mirrored windows, which reflect the winter morning sun down onto my birdbath! Whatta lucky coincidence! It’ll only last a little while as the sun moves towards winter solstice. I’ll try’n get a good picture while it lasts. This morning was windy and nothing came to the bath while I watched. Not a sausage!
Whattahoot! Just last week I had used a shaving mirror to reflect the sun onto a butterfly in shade. Here it was being done on my birdbath for me by serendipity!
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I know I should work to earn money so I can one day sit on my arse and listen to the birds and photograph butterflies. And see two gory kills within minutes, with two animals dying before my very eyes to satisfy the hungry needs of their predators.
So this morning:
Flies don’t even have to be buttered to be photographed:
A drongo zapped an insect in mid-flight and a sunbird nabbed probably a spider off the mistletoe, killing them mercilessly for food in the great cycle of nature. Someone has to be sitting on his arse to witness these things.
This time I was determined to concentrate. I gazed at my cellphone fiercely for hours. Once I had to change the camera’s battery. This Forest Queen thought he could outwit outplay outlast me!? Huh! I was determined to catch him opening his wings to make sure he was a male. I was occasionally distracted. Had to make coffee, had to reply to some slights on whatsapp, had to take these photos to show the remote setup and my impressive camera (you’ve heard about okes with small willies having to compensate with big cameras, right? Well.). And once I was also – fatally – distracted by Tommy who NEEDED me to transfer cash to his eWallet.
Done. Then back to the app:
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I always have little ‘blues’ on my lawn; small butterflies, some tiny that flit about too small, too fast and too pale for my camera to get a decent shot. They usually look like little pale grey beauties.
But yesterday one was different, bigger, vibrant blue; so I out with the camera and managed to get two pics:
I thought ‘Hairtail;’ iNaturalist got back in seconds and said ‘Hairstreak;’ Now I’m thinking maybe one of the Sapphires? The fascinating thing about identifying creatures is . . names change! Knowledge is constantly being updated. Often the only real way to know what you’re looking at is to ask an expert, as even the most recent books are out of date to different extents. The experts keep up to the minute and usually instantly have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking at, taking image, location, time of year, etc into account.
I’ll update when I find out what this beauty is. And I’ll keep an eye out for a better picture.
Ah! Suncana says its Iolaus silas, the Southern Sapphire! Suncana is our in-house entomologist on our Palmiet Rangers whatsapp group, and I have now joined her Palmiet project on iNaturalist. She sent a better pic – Steve Woodhall’s from biodiversityexplorer.info
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Bonus! Pictures from a Palmiet neighbour who’s a great photographer. Most (all?) taken right here in our valley:
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I’ve learned a bit more about my little pocket Canon camera. Updating the firmware and software and checking all the settings seems to have helped better, quicker focusing.
I’ve taken my first lightbox picture – the nest of a potter wasp who obligingly built it in the neglected lightbox, thank you.
And learned to set the zoom so it’ll focus more easily. It was glitchy. Here’s the bedroom doorknob, zoomed out and zoomed in!
~~oo0oo~~
I got the remote setup working again: Canon on a tripod, targeted on the tap birdbath in the shrubbery, and viewfinder on my cellphone. Then I waited. The same problem I noted before is still evident: my attention span. Eventually, a rare bird strolled by and seemed quite interested.
Hours later the Underbrush Eagle, who today has been playing a Klaas’ Cuckoo, came for a shower.
Later an Olive Sunbird arrived and then two White-Eyes – both blending too well with the background and too quick for my camera – just blurs and water droplets! That’s another challenge: the delay between my finger firing the button on my phone and the camera firing – I’d guess near a quarter second. So the bird has often flucked or flitted – or at least changed his pose!
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I made a .gif of the pics and – 😉 – froze the lil bird in mid-moon for three frames!
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A gorgeous Aussie!
What a beaut Aussie bee! Snapped in flight in a Brisbane garden by Saffer-Kiwi-Aussie ace photographer Steve Reed.
Solitary bees, they don’t hang around in groups. They nest in tunnels in clay or sandstone – but don’t trust me, do some research.
Which reminds me of one of Aitch – Trish – don’t say Patricia! – ‘s favourite songs:
Excuse me! You with the paintbrush! Camera coming through!
I was posting our wedding pics when I saw one we’d taken of our photographer Keith and his assistant. Being in 1988 there would have been a few other cameras there like the one that took a pic of him holding his large-format Hasselblad-like beauty and his first cold beer on that blistering hot day.
Nowadays you can almost guarantee every guest has a camera and a video camera in their pocket! Quite a challenge for the guy being paid:“Um, please stand aside, I’m trying to get a picture of the bride”. So are we! comes the answer from all the other guests.
Coincidentally wikipedia featured the top pic today, so I got to thinking of the poor portrait painters of yore. Used to being the main man around and very important, here he was probably asked “Won’t you paint a backdrop for me old chap? Any old thing will do. I’m taking portrait daguerrotypes, what!” But, but . .
“That’s all, we won’t be needing you after that.”
I bet the early photographers made people stand way longer than actually needed so they wouldn’t feel short-changed after being used to sit for days for their portrait.
I think paintings often outshine daguerrotypes:
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Feature pic Interior with Portraits by Thomas Le Clear 1865, features siblings posing for a photograph in an artist’s studio. The painting has been read as representing the tension between its medium and the emergent medium of photography.
| Hold still, would you!
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I hardly ever carried a camera back when I was beautiful and had just the one chin. “I’m video’ing it in my head” I would say.
Of course now I’m really grateful other people carried cameras and I could get pics from them. Even in the days when you loaded a roll of film in the dark and wound it on by hand frame-by-frame some people carried cameras. I salute them!
And I admit I would grumble when they said “Stand closer together” “Smile” “Hang on! Just one more!”. Of course some people would think they had put in the roll of film when they hadn’t and all our posing (“poeseer!” remember SanMarie the game ranger’s joke?) was in vain. Yes, I’m thinking of you Taylor. He posed us in various ways on a buffalo carcase and when we eagerly asked for the photies weeks later (they’d had to go off “for development” of course) he had to sheepishly admit he hadn’t had a roll of film in his steam-driven camera. Luckily Trish had been there and took this:
Anyway, my memory of that moment was much better than his pic would have been: I remember a bloody carcase with glistening red meat still on the bone and lion prints around the sandy scene. We were posing looking over our shoulder, worried the lions might chase us off their prey at any minute. When later we did get a pic from someone better organised than Taylor – Trish – the truth was far more mundane. The photo spoilt a good story! Here we were, not one of us looking over a shoulder:
So although I do have some slight regrets I still think I was generally more “in the moment” than many camera-occupied companions over the years – and I saw more birds. Anyway, my memories of what happened are usually far better than boring reality. Usually I play the starring role in them.
Once I met Aitch things changed of course and we had a fulltime photographer in the house. The years from 1986 are well documented. Then the kids arrived and the number of pics went through the roof. Thank goodness for digital! Even now when we drive through a game reserve Jess will say “Mom would have said ‘Stop! Go back!’ and you would have to reverse and she’d take a picture of a flower, remember?”
With cameras as ubiquitous as they now are all this smacks of days gone by. I was prompted to write this post when I read this yesterday: ‘If a millennial goes to a beautiful place but doesn’t get a photo, did they ever really go?’…
To end, some advice for Taylor:
Here’s a graph showing camera sales in 1000’s since 1933:
Found some old pics from Apache Oklahoma back in 1973.
I had a wonderful camera back in 1973 – TechRadar says some consider it a cult classic! The Olympus Trip 35 was a small, lightweight, very portable 35mm film camera, which became a mainstay of many holidays and day trips. Launched in 1968 and discontinued in the 1980s, over ten million were sold, earning this humble point-and-shoot legendary status. The Trip 35 featured a 40mm f/2.8 lens, a light-activated light meter and two shooting modes: Program Automatic and a flash mode with a fixed aperture setting that could be set using the aperture ring.
I loved it!
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Finally got round to making a collage of some of the birds we saw up in Zululand a few years back. Aitch and I went for a breakaway luxury weekend. It was dry – very dry – and the lodge had a water feature running right under the sundeck. Every bird from miles around (as well as all the animals) had to come here to drink.
It was perfect! Aitch was not so strong, so we chose to skip the game drives and ensconced ourselves comfortably on the deck, binocs, camera and telescopes handy. Tea or beer or coffee or gin would arrive at regular intervals. A casual wave would see them added to the bill. For dinner we walked ten metres back into the dining room! Breakfast was back on the deck.
Just past this popular bathing spot a waterfall plops into a pool where animals come to drink, And prance – like reindeer.
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What are you doing for Trish on Friday? asked Feroza, my super-efficient practice manager.
Why? Am I working? I asked.
NO-O, it’s your 20th anniversary!
Oh.
It’s Wednesday already, so my mind starts racing. After 20 centuries it slows down and needs this kind of wake-up call. This jolt of OMG, I better not cock this up!
What is the last thing in the world that I would enjoy? I asked meself (gotta avoid the accusation of giving things for HER, when they’re actually for YOU)? It’s late notice and I’m working on Saturday, so I’m looking for a one-day something somewhere.
I know: The thought of lying around on my tummy in a spa for a few hours in daytime while someone slobbers oil on me sounds like what Beelzebub will probly sentence me to when I go to His Place, so I start looking for day spas and then I get the genius idea (or I spose really, the departure from the purely noble, selfless intentions): What about a spa in a game reserve where I can watch birds and other creatures while Aitch spas! Hmm . . .
Aha! A quick search turns up Thanda Zulu, 20km north of Hluhluwe.
That means just for the day is out, so I impose on Feroza (again) and I’m released from Saturday work. Now I’m booking a night in a game reserve. Um, with a spa. This doesn’t seem so hard anymore.
On the website I go to booking and click on online booking and payment. As the page disappears heading for the one that takes your credit card for melting, I catch sight of two things: R6100pppn and “phone direct for savings deals.”
So instead of committing online, I phone Johannesburg up in the hinterland and the BEAUTIFUL, gorgeous lady on the other end books me at R1950pppn. “Local special – You are South African, right?”. Rrrrraaait, I roll my RR’s and regret there aren’t any R’s in Swaaanepoel.
And so we ended up at a Zululand bushveld game reserve in the middle of a long drought with a water feature below a deck five paces from a pub. Aitch had in the meantime gleefully sold the kids to friends, getting in the spirit of adventure as she always did. So its double gin and tonics for me, erbil tea for her, while watching birds drinking and bathing in clear running shallow water on smooth rocks (OK, artificial rocks, but beautifully done) seated in a deckchair, binocs and camera in hand.
We skipped the game drive that evening in favour of lurking around the deck. Ditto the morning drive. Her spine couldn’t take the bumping. Our VW kombi was of course fine – smooth!
Aitch went off to her “treatments” (which I didn’t think she needed – ahem). And although she loved them, she hurried back whenever they were over and appropriated her camera back from my amateur and forgetful efforts). Because of the cancer, Meme the resident therapist, refused to do the massages Aitch had been looking forward to. “Can’t stir up the lymphatic circulation, darling!” she admonished, peering over her bright pink designer spectacles. So Aitch had more time at the waterhole than she would have – and loved it!
Our stay was a mere 24 hours, but it seemed longer and we saw, up-close and personal, 48 species of birds. In all my years of hanging out at waterholes I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a parade.
~~oo0oo~~
Photogiraffing? It’s hard to photograph giraffe in Ithala Game Reserve when you have a Jack-in-the-Box popping up in the jeep right in front of your lens every time you’re ready to depress the shutter. And then the laughter gives camera shake.
