LATE SUMMER 2025

Well, the soft absorbing rain sure did arrive! The above photo was taken looking south towards Mount Anderson from the extreme north-eastern part of the estate, well beyond Pebble Creek (Unit 25). This lovely misty, cloudy and wet picture has been Finsbury since my last publication!

So, since the beginning of February till the end of March, a total of fifty-nine days, we have enjoyed twenty-six days of precipitation, dropping an average of 235mm of water on the estate. This is certainly not abnormal since the average monthly total for these two months since 2010 is 230mm. It just appeared rainier because it was overcast almost every day for those two months. Also, the rainfall arrived late this season so, although it appears it has rained a lot, which it has over much of the east of the country, the total average rainfall figure for the season is 752mm for the estate, well below the seasonal average of 920mm.

So, although it appears as if we have had a lot of rain, we are actually experiencing a drier than normal season, unless we get more rain before the dry season begins. I did read an article very recently saying that we should expect a wet winter here while the Western Cape should expect a dry winter (very bad for them) so, maybe there is still some rain to come.

As usual, regarding rainy days on the estate, there is always times during the day when the rain lifts and allows us to explore the grasslands, mountains, gorges and rivers. Below is a gallery of some of the interesting things I discovered during the late summer:

I spotted this little, stumpy Southern Rock Agama, Agama atra, as it scampered into a rock crevice up on the cliffs between us and Potato Seed Production. I approached the crevice and found him or her squeezed between the rockface and a smallish boulder which was easy for me to remove. The Agama pretended that I didn't move his defensive rock and just lay there with its eyes open only to slits.

It was only a little one, about 120mm long, whereas an adult male can reach 250mm. This may be the reason why I spotted it, because it was too inexperienced to hide away quickly enough while I was approaching. I say that because these agamas live in colonies, and this is the only one I spotted. The colonies can be quite densely populated, reaching densities of 165 individuals per hectare! Within the colony, dominant males and females both establish territories, with the males' territory being larger (about 100 square meters) and encompassing two or three female territories. These territories are established to secure a small area where the individuals can forage for food without direct competition.

Food consists of insects, millipedes, centipedes and spiders, with ants being their favourites, while they, in turn, are favoured prey items for snakes and birds, ranging from the Southern Fiscal (shrike) to buzzards and eagles.

During the breeding season, which lasts for most of the summer months, the most dominant males' heads turn a glorious blue, like those of the closely related and well-known Blue-headed Agama or Bloukopkoggelmander that we see regularly in the Kruger Park. And, also like that species, the Rock Agama male performs press-ups, which makes this bright blue head bob up and down as an invitation to the females whose territories fall within his boundaries to mate with him, and as a warning to other males not to enter his territory. Interestingly, these males are a bit like chameleons in that they can, if stressed by a potential predator, quickly lose the bright blue colouration and return to a cryptic pattern to help hide from those predators.

Once gravid, the females dig a hole in the soil near the rocks and lay a clutch of five to eighteen eggs within, before covering them up again. They do this twice in the season, once at the beginning of the season, and once at the end. The incubation for the first clutch is between two and three months, depending on the temperature, while the incubation for the second clutch is the length of the dry, winter season, so that hatching will occur at the beginning of the following season.

Considering that these lizards live in colonies and that the males are brightly coloured, we get to see them very rarely. In fact, this is the first confirmed sighting I have had of this species since I have been here on the estate. This is, therefore, a new species for our Finsbury reptile list. The list does contain the Ground Agama, Agama aculeata, which I have featured in my blog of October 2020. Nice to have both species on the list now!

This photo was sent to me by Trish Myburg from Vakatsha (aka K9 Cafe). It is of a large, very boldly marked Puff Adder, Bitis arietans, that she encountered on the Kliprots road close to Lone Tree Cottage. Now, the weirdest thing is that in all my years here at Finsbury Estate, I have never seen a living puff adder! I Have seen a dead one that tangled itself up in the fence by Don and Anne's house and I found one that had burnt to death in one of our grass fires. But still, never a living one! This is odd, very odd, because many Finsbury visitors have seen them and they are, after all, Southern Africa's most common venomous snake and probably the most widespread snake species on the continent, with a very varied habitat tolerance ranging from sea level to more than 2000 metres above that. the only place you won't find them is in rainforest or true desert. 

Let's hope I see the first one I encounter before I tread on it. I should be alerted to its presence, though, because I have enjoyed many puffie experiences in the past and once you hear the "puff", the explosive sound it emits when issuing a warning, you never forget it. In most cases, a puff adder will puff before you stand on it and your body will just automatically respond to the sound by rapid retreat! This is very important because the specific name for the species, arietans, comes from the Latin word arietare which means "to strike violently" and it rather descriptive of the snakes striking capabilities. The enormous girth of the snake is not made up of fat, it is pure muscle, and when this muscle is strained up, it can produce the fastest strike of any African snake! Little ones sometimes strike so violently that the strike action lifts the body off the ground as the momentum throws it forward at the same time, giving the impression that it is leaping towards you.

The venom is powerful for the adders and, although cytotoxic like other vipers, is more haemolytic in action than that of the other adders (like the Berg Adders' venom is cytotoxic but with a heavier neurotoxic element than found in other viper venom, see blog of May 2019 for more), meaning it breaks down blood cells in addition to the normal cellular damage caused by cytotoxins. The body of the victim begins the digestive processes before being consumed.  

Trish told me it was a really big snake, as much as a meter long. If so, together with the longish tail and bold markings, I would suggest that it is a male snake. Females are generally smaller than males, have short, stumpy tails and, when as large as this, are less boldly marked. 

He will live his life concentrating on feeding and avoiding predation until he comes into contact with a pheromone trail left behind by a female ready to mate. Once on the trail, he will follow its scent with his flicking tongue until he finds her (refer to the publication of August 2020, Berg Adder, for explanation of scent). If she is already being courted by another male, the males will engage in a wrestling match to establish who is dominant.

Once the male has established dominance over others, he will mate with the female. Interestingly, the female does not use all the sperm the male deposits, often storing some of it for subsequent seasons so that she doesn't have to mate every time she wants to have offspring. The sperm can be stored for more than five years in the female's body.

After fertilisation, the eggs develop within the female's body and, when fully developed, hatch inside her body and the young are born alive (ovoviviparity). Usually about fifty of the little blighters come out with the record being for a snake in a zoo with 156 of them! A record for any snake. These 150mm long babies immediately radiate away from their mother and begin to look after themselves. They survive mainly on insects, like grasshoppers, and spiders until they are large enough to go for their favourite food, rodents, which they catch by ambush. 

In our area, their staple will most probably be the Highveld Gerbil, Gerbilliscus brantsii, because they live in colonies with burrows connected by little pathways called runs, although we have many other yummy rodent species in our vast grasslands too. The puff adder concentrates on the rodents that use runs to travel from point to point. The snake finds this by flicking its tongue in and out until it smells the rodent run. It then simply waits in ambush for the rodent to pass by, when it strikes at lightning speed, injecting a dose of venom, and retracting to its original position within a quarter of a second! 

The victim has no idea what hit them as they are hammered by the physical force of the strike, and simultaneously impaled by the enormous, scythe-like fangs and injected with copious amounts of venom! The victim is left to run off with a head start before the snake starts its pursuit by slowly following the victims scent trail, once again with its flicking tongue. This behaviour is necessary to avoid potential injury by the struggling victim if confronted immediately, since the venom does not affect the nervous system like the elapid snakes, and so is slower acting. Usually, once recovered by the snake, the victim has already succumbed to the venom and is ready to swallow.

When it is very moist and rainy, there is an incessant chirping from the vast grasslands that is hard to ignore. This chirping is emitted by male Mozambican Rain Frogs, Breviceps masambicus, as he hides in the entranceway to his subterranean nest. He is attempting to attract a mate with the call, as do all male frogs and toads. This family, Brevicipitidae, of frogs gets their common name because of this habit of calling only when the humidity is high enough, like when it is raining.

One day, not long ago, while it was drizzling continuously, it seemed like a good time for the termite alates to take wing. These are the future king and queens of the termite world and, as I'm sure you know, all the different colonies in an area somehow manage to synchronise their activity of releasing their winged males and females at the same time, resulting in millions of winged termites filling the skies! 

There were flying termites everywhere while I was climbing a grassy hill, and all I had to do was pinpoint the spots where the winged termite alates were being launched from, and I would find some sort of happy predator there and these were mostly in the form of Mozambican Rain Frogs guzzling these alates down like there was no tomorrow. These were both the smaller males and the larger females enjoying an easy meal. This male in the picture above is holding down his next bite while he swallows the current one.

Once he is satisfied, he will return to his nest, stand by the entrance, and begin to call. Like other frogs, the females respond and are attracted by the call. Unlike all other frogs, though, this does not take place in a water body where eggs can be laid in the water so that the hatching tadpoles are already in their medium of choice for development. These frogs, normally finding themselves far from a solid body of water, have had to come up with another plan to raise their tadpoles.

When she arrives at his nest, the male invites her in and begins to court her. If successful, he mounts the female by excreting a sticky fluid from his chest and pasting his little round body to the back of the much larger female, and amplexus (mating with external fertilisation) takes place. A dozen plus large eggs (instead of the hundreds of tiny eggs of normal frogs) are laid in the nest and on top of that, she lays water-filled sterile eggs that help to keep the real eggs moist. The tadpoles hatch within the larger, water-filled egg filled with nutrients and develop there instead of in a body of open water like other tadpoles. Once developed sufficiently, they then break out as froglings, with developed legs but remnants of a tail still, and are able to fend for themselves from thereon. 

The Afrikaans name for these frogs is "Blaas-op" which means to inflate. If one tries to pull one of these little frogs out of its hole, it will inflate its body so it looks like a little balloon, and this makes it very difficult to extract it from the nest.

Another bird photo sent to me by Dave De Vos from The Crofts (Unit 19). This time it is a lovely shot of a Chorister Robin-chat, Cossypha dichroa, not a rare bird on the estate, but an elusive one, sticking to the darkest thickets in riparian bush, forests and deep, shaded gardens. They are endemic to the forests of South Africa and Eswatini, our smallest biome, which means that they only naturally occur in these forests and nowhere else.

The male establishes a permanent territory of a hectare to a hectare-and-a-half in these dark forests and advertises it via a loud, musical voice. The song is very variable and contains lots of mimicry. The whistle is rather human-like, and it sounds just like a person whistling in the forest sometimes. Here, at Finsbury Central, our local Chorister Robin-chat loves to mimic a Fiery-necked Nightjar and, if it wasn't for the fact that the mime is made during the day, one would be forgiven for thinking it is the real thing! Before I got used to it, it caught me every time.

Besides successfully mimicking various other birds (including Fish Eagles), the bird is also accomplished at mimicking a dog barking!

It is not understood what the advantages of this mimicry are, except when the bird mimics a Red-chested Cuckoo (Piet-my-vrou), which sometimes parasitises the Robin-chat, because it is believed that it tricks a potential parasite into believing that there is already a parasite in the area, and so may protect the Robin-chat from parasitism by these cuckoos.

The monogamous male and female Robin-chat pair remain in this territory for their whole lives unless their territory is located in an area, like ours, that gets very cold in the winter. Then they migrate to lower altitude forests, the same place each year, for the duration of the cold before returning to their territory. These lower altitude forests are usually occupied by territory holders already, so the visitors are required to behave in a subordinate way and to remain silent during their visit.

One territory was observed over time and the same male occupied it for a mind-blowing 26 years!!!

The pair forage for insects, beetles and ants mostly, other arthropods like spiders, millipedes and, of course, every bird's favourite, earthworms. they also eat fruits and are therefore very important seed dispersal agents for Asparagus Ferns, White Stinkwood, the Currant Rhus species, both Red Pear species, the Cat thorn creeper, and the indigenous Forest Raspberry. Unfortunately, they also disperse the seeds of the bad invasive plants like the exotic Brambles and the Bug Weed.

In spring, the female constructs an untidy cup nest in a rot hole of a tree or a hollowed-out stump above the ground. This nest sight may be used over and over again annually if it remains undisturbed. Once completed, she lays between two and three eggs in the nest and incubates them alone while the male brings food for her.

Once hatched, both parents feed the young until they are able to leave the nest two weeks after hatching. The young are then cared for by both parents for a period of up to six weeks, teaching them what to eat and protecting them from danger, quite long for a smaller bird like the Robin-chat. 

During the late summer, the forests are the at their most moist and it is a super time for those that are searching for mushrooms and lichens. This year there seemed to be more of these very noticeable mushrooms than normal. You cannot miss them, their bright, almost luminous orange colour sticks out like a sore thumb! They are called Golden-scruffy Collybia, Cryptotrama asprata.

The Golden-scruffy Collybia is a saprobic fungus, meaning that it is responsible for the decay of previously living material. The mycelium, which form three-dimensional networks throughout the body, in this case a dead branch, release enzymes from these threads that break the body down so that the mycelium can absorb them as food.

We did have quite a few successful fungi walks this summer and our Finsbury list now boasts one-hundred-and-one species of mushrooms and lichens so far encountered and identified within the estate. These can be viewed by you at the following address:

www.inaturalist.org/observations?taxon_id=47170&user_id=jimmy_whatmore&verifiable=any

In my previous blog, I featured a Giant Cone-headed Mantis that I encountered in the grasslands north-east of Pebble Creek. Now, this month, I encountered another species also with a bizarre design. It is a male African False Flower Mantis, Harpagomantis tricolor, and I found it in the riparian bush alongside the Spekboom River. 

I went quite in-depth about Praying Mantids in the previous blog to this and so shall not repeat myself here. The life history is very similar with this species except the African False Flower Mantis is strictly seasonal, meaning the ootheca (foam-like egg sack) enters a diapause, allowing it to overwinter so that the little mantid nymphs hatch at the beginning of springtime and they will have the whole of spring and summer to complete their life cycle.

Also, the Giant Cone-headed Mantis from the previous article has that very useful cyclopean ear which can pick up the echolocation pulses emitted by bats, allowing them to be active at night, whereas this one, the African False Flower Mantis does not have this organ and must remain exclusively day active.

Since the African False Flower Mantis is a monotypic species, meaning it is the only member of its genus, it has been quite well studied for an African species. A lot of research has been done in the laboratory with this species, allowing observations into mating behaviour, egg development, sex ratio and more.

The results of this research suggest this species is strictly day active; has strong competition amongst males for mating opportunities; and has a lifespan, barring accidents like predation, lasting an entire spring and summer season.

Regarding the competition between males, it was noticed that they developed much quicker than the females. They matured at a smaller size with proportionally larger wings, allowing them to spend more time searching for females. Also, when copulating, the males ejaculate within twenty minutes but remain attached to the back of the female for six hours, blocking other males from accessing her.

Preying mantids are placed in the order Mantodea, and the Mantodea is grouped together with the insect order Blattodea (Termites and Cockroaches) in the superorder Dictyoptera, consisting of the more primitive insects that lay eggs within an ootheca. So, interesting, the closest relatives to preying mantids are cockroaches and termites! Who woulda thunk....

I was hiking the Rock Kestrel Trail on my way to the summit of Mount Andrson when I saw this anomaly on the ground in those high-altitude grasslands. The snail I could identify as the Giant Land snail that it was, but the ... things attached to it were very obscure (check blog of January 2019 for more on the snail).

At first, I actually got a bit of a fright because Rinkhals initially came to mind (think rough scales). Then I thought it was a girdled lizard, which are not found anywhere near here but have a similar scale pattern to what this looked like. Then, after bending down and moving some of the grass out of the way, I saw it was a group of insects, beetle larvae actually. Then I remembered that firefly larvae are predators of snails, and everything began to make sense.

They are the larvae of the beetles we know as Fireflies, and I've narrowed these down to the genus Lampyris. The larvae of all the species of firefly in the Lampyridae family of beetles are poisonous and, instead of their bodies being brightly coloured (aposematism) like most poisonous insects, the abdomen emits a flashing light, which will scare almost any predator away.

All adult males in all species in the family have wings and take flight, but some of the species' females, all in this genus, remain wingless and resemble the larvae, except they have compound eyes instead of the simple eyes of the larvae.

 

Now, because the larvae of all species emit light, while not all species' adults do, it is proposed that the insect evolved the ability to emit light as a defence against predators, again a type of aposematism. Only later did some species use this ability to luminesce as an adult, to emit light as a signal to attract the correct mate. Only later still, did the adult females of one particular species use this ability to attract unsuspecting mates from a different species, only to devour them as they arrive!

It is not common to see more than one larva eating a snail and I have yet to find a photo of one. The larvae have the ability to recognise the slime trails of snails and slugs and then to identify the direction which the snail or slug took. They will then follow the trail until they locate the victim and then attack it. With a snail this size, the snail will just pull itself into its shell to defend itself, but this group of larvae will simply crawl into the shell and inject a neurotoxin, via massive, channelled jaws, into the foot of the snail, paralysing it.

The fireflies then bite chunks of snail meat off the main body and vomit up enzymes all over the chunk, liquifying it. The firefly larvae then suck these juices into their mouths.

Interestingly, the firefly larvae (and unwinged females) have a tubular membrane connecting their heads to their thoraxes, allowing them to extend the head far out and to pull it in under the protection of the scaled thorax. Just like a tortoise does (or a bit like the snails that they eat). This adaption is for when the insect feeds on a smaller snail whose shell opening is too narrow for the insect to fit into, so it can stretch its neck to push its head far inside the shell to eat the whole snail.

Another interesting fact that you may have noticed which is definitely not common, is that the firefly larvae are both poisonous and venomous. They are filled with a poison that will make a predator sick if they eat a Firefly larva, and the larva can bite and inject a venom that will paralyse its prey. So, you don't want to pick one up or eat one. Just leave 'em bee...

I'm always very excited to add a new ant species to our Finsbury insect list, with this new species being the seventeenth species so far recorded on the estate. They are called Furry Cautious ants, Meranoplus peringueyi, and, once again, the common name is very descriptive. 

I kicked a rock over while climbing up a slope and exposed a few individuals. They approached the open area very slowly as if they were being cautious, so when I saw the name while trying to identify them, I immediately knew it was the correct identification. They are also very hairy, as their name suggests.

These ants belong to the same tribe as the very common Cocktail ants, Crematogaster species (see blog of July 2020), which is quite obvious when looking at the shape of the body, particularly the abdomen, although this seems where the similarities end.

These ants are much less common and have much smaller colonies, with an average of 150 individuals, as opposed to the thousand odd individuals that make up a Cocktail ant colony. Also, these ants are not arboreal (found in trees); do not build paper-like nests, and do not swarm aggressively when disturbed, unlike their cousins.

Instead, the Furry Cautious ants excavate a subterranean nest which is invisible from the surface, and they forage alone with an omnivorous diet consisting of seeds and scavenged animal matter. Also, when disturbed, instead of lifting their gasters and swarming like the Cocktail ants do, they roll in the dirt, gathering up sand particles in the long hairs of the body and display thanatosis (play dead), so that they lie still, covered in sand and blend in with their surroundings. 

I was climbing over the decades-old rockfall debris beneath the cliff between us and Potato Seed Production when I encountered a Perdepis tree there. I was excited because it is a forest-dwelling tree that can also be found on exposed rocky situations like where I was, and this was the first time for me to find one in the latter habitat.

While absorbing the differences the tree exhibits in this situation, I noticed a bird dropping on one of the leaves. On closer inspection, I realised that it was a caterpillar. I was excited because the caterpillar of a Citrus Swallowtail butterfly is supposed to look like a bird dropping, and that is exactly what I thought it was, so the description is accurate.

That fact and the fact that it was eating leaves of a tree in the citrus family, Rutaceae, confirmed it was the caterpillar of a Citrus Swallowtail, Papilio demodocus, which, incidentally, I featured in my blog before the previous one, and in the previous one, I featured the very close cousin to this, the Emperor Swallowtail.

All the instars of the caterpillar resemble bird droppings except for the final instar, just before the caterpillar constructs its pupa. The final instar is too big for this deception, so instead, it is similar to other Swallowtail larvae in being green with a swollen prothorax (area just behind the head) with large eyespots on each side. 

Then there is an organ called an "osmeterium" that lies inverted just before the head, and when the caterpillar is disturbed, it unravels this organ and it pops out just above the head of the caterpillar. It is reddish and looks very much like a snakes' forked tongue and this, together with the eyespots makes the caterpillar resemble a snake, hopefully scaring the potential threat away.

It seems as if all the members of the estate have visited the beautiful little waterfall behind Bulldozer Creek (U21) in the last little while. It is a very beautiful waterfall and looks like the prop for an adventure movie, with weeping rock walls and stunning plants and mosses!

One of the most abundant plants there is the Common Wild Forest Impatiens, a fleshy plant with beautiful pink flowers featuring a long spur. The spur is a twenty-odd millimetre long tube with its opening in the flower and the other end is the nectary, so only insects with a long enough probiscis can reach the nectar.

Each time I have gone there I have seen these Spider flies, Psilodera hessei, pollinating the Impatiens'. If you look at the photo, you can see the folded probiscis jutting out from behind the abdomen, meaning it is longer than the insect's body. When visiting the flower, the fly unfolds this probiscis and inserts it into the spur, reaching for the nectary right at the end, collecting pollen on its face at the same time as it enjoys its reward of nectar and, hopefully, depositing this pollen on the female parts of the following flower it visits, completing the pollination process.

The interesting part is in the name: Spider Fly. This is because the larvae of this species are parasitic on spiders. The first instar larva (maggot) is tiny, about a millimetre long, with a sclerotised (hardened) body and is highly mobile. This little larva quickly moves around until it finds a spider, to which it attaches itself prior to burrowing its sclerotised body into the abdomen and then, once inside, attaching itself to the book lungs of the spider. Once comfortably ensconced, it changes into its next instar which is immobile and it slowly, over its remaining instars, eats the spider's insides until the spider dies when the final instar is reached. The final instar exits the dead spider, drops to the floor and buries itself and enters its pupal stage, later emerging as an adult.

That's it then. Autumn is arriving together with a late Easter this year. Even though the rainfall has not been of the volume needed, the estate is looking gorgeous, so get over here and have some fun.  

MIDSUMMER 2025

 MIDSUMMER 2025

In my previous blog, I was whining about the rainfall, or the lack of absorbing rain that characterised the beginning of the season. It was like the gods read the blog, because it was around that time that the good rains arrived! Just in the nick-o-time for Christmas. Since then, until the end of January, we have had 18 days of rain (out of 31 days in total), bringing an average of 230mm of precipitation to the estate. That's an average of 13mm per rainy day, or 7,7mm per day since. That's plenty water! And because of the softer nature of the rain, much of that has been absorbed into our aquifers, and so our river levels have risen nicely and are staying up. Great news!

The average humidity has obviously also increased which has been much appreciated by the myriad epiphytes (air plants), mosses and lichens which require humidity to thrive. In the above photo, it is hard to tell the branches and trunk of the Hardleaf Currantrhus, Searsia tumulicola tumulicola, apart from the rock with both of them smothered in lichens of all types, puffed out and fully hydrated. I found this community of life on the high-altitude, north-facing slopes of Little Joker koppie, high above Majubane and Steenkamps' valleys.

With the rain too, popped up all sorts of life in so many different forms! I managed to capture some of these in the gallery below:

In my blog of January 2020 (soon before the dreaded COVID virus turned our world upside-down), one of the articles I featured was on a Sawfly called Arge taeniata, where the gravid female saws into a Pelargonium leaf, into which she lays her eggs. With that species, from the Argidae family of Sawflies, the larvae chew their way out of the swollen leaf once they hatch, proceeding to eat the leaves of said tree. 

With the above species of Stem Sawfly from the Cephidae family of Sawflies, the gravid female uses her saw-like ovipositor to saw into the stems of Krauss' Everlasting, Helichrysum kraussii, exclusively, where she will lay a single egg. Because of certain hormones that she injects into the plant tissue at the same time, the plant reacts to this invasion by swelling at that point, creating what is known as a gall. The egg hatches within this gall and the caterpillar-like larva eats the swollen tissue, hollowing out the gall. Once all the tissue has been consumed, the larva will be ready to pupate, which it does in the safety of the hollowed-out gall.

Alas, I, of course, interrupted this whole process when I sliced the gall open, exposing the poor larva before it entered its pupal stage, abruptly ending its journey. But if I didn't, the larva looks like it was almost ready to pupate, after which it would chew a hole in the side of the gall and emerge as an adult.

Krauss' Everlastings are a very common and widespread shrub on the estate and, I must say, I don't think I have ever seen a full-grown shrub without several of these galls present. This means that this specific Sawfly is also very common since they exclusively utilise this bush, meaning that each bush is host to multiple individuals of the same species of Sawfly..

As I mentioned in that previous post, Sawflies are a primitive type of wasp, easily recognisable by the fact that, unlike other wasps, Sawflies do not have a restriction at the waist (between the thorax and the abdomen), and that their ovipositor is modified with teeth, enabling it to saw into plant tissue. Other wasps have a very narrow waists and their ovipositors have been modified into a sting, or in families of parasitic wasps, into a tube that can inject eggs into the bodies of other insects.

This strange sight is a batch of eggs laid on a living branch by a gravid Green Lacewing from the Chrysopidae family. I did feature a photo of these eggs in my blog of May 2019, where I explained that, when laying her eggs, the adult female Green Lacewing excretes a sticky fluid from the tip of her abdomen, touches it to the substrate and then lifts her abdomen away from said substrate, stretching the sticky fluid into a straight thread, which hardens quickly when exposed to the air. She then proceeds to lay a single egg on the end of this hardened thread so that it resembles a miniature helium-filled balloon on a string. She repeats this exercise until her full batch is laid. 

During spring and summer, she will lay these batches on plants that she can see are heavily infested with aphids, those small little bugs that suck the juices from a plant, the enemy of any gardener. The larvae hatch as voracious predators with poor senses, moult for the first time immediately, and then embark on a feeding frenzy where they walk around swaying their heads from side to side, and if they encounter any creature that can be subdued by their massive, pincer-like, hypodermic jaws, they will clasp the victim within these jaws, inject a cocktail of enzymes, and suck up the liquesced innards that result. Even a sibling! It is surmised that this, together with the fact that aphids are often protected by ants, who also love to eat eggs, is the reason why the Lacewing deposits each egg on the tippy top of a hardened thread: to keep the hatchlings further away from each other so that they have less chance of coming into contact and devouring one another. In fact, the digestive enzymes that they inject into their prey is so potent, that it will liquify the innards of a small, soft-bodied insect within two minutes of injection!

I featured the life cycles of these lacewings in my blog of Late Summer 2023 too. Check it out.

 I encountered these little critters in a forested gorge running from the base of Mount Prospect to the Steenkamps' northern waterfall. They are a pair of rival male Clinotaenia grata - Forest Fruit Flies. 

And I was present for Fight night!!! The slightly larger individual on the right appeared to be the territory holder, because I first noticed him standing proudly on a large horizontal Plectranthus leaf in the dark forest. I noticed that quite a few leaves, all pretty far apart, had, what looked like a dominant resident male in attendance, facing outwards.

Then, on this chaps leaf, landed another, smaller individual (on the left) who approached this male and instigated THE BIG STARE-DOWN! For at least ten seconds they stood tall less than a centimetre from each other and stared intensely into the others eyes, when suddenly, in a flash, the smaller one attacked the larger one. It was way too quick for me to see (they're also only 5mm long) what transpired but the fight removed them from the ring (leaf) and they disappeared into the foliage. 

Within seconds the larger guy was back on his leaf, standing proudly, facing outwards. Before I could say "well done buddy", the smaller challenger was back! The process repeated itself three or four times before I left the ringside, with the larger one always seeming to come out on top. Quite entertaining. it was!

All species throughout the family look quite similar, with boldly marked wings that remain splayed when at rest and the females are also easy to tell apart from the males by the presence of a rather thick, tapered ovipositor on the end of her abdomen, giving the impression that she has a thick, tapering tail. 

These bold markings, splayed wings. coupled with large eyes suggest that the species primarily uses their vision for communication and confrontation, which is certainly what I saw.

from the Tephritidae, a notoriously pest-ridden family of flies. Notorious for their negative impact on agricultural farming of tropical fruit, celery, blueberries, sunflowers, olives. nuts and many other vegetable crops. I remember when I was a kid, we'd often bite into a fruit and there would be this little worm in the flesh, preferably in one piece, and we would pull our faces and throw the fruit away (or if the worm was in half, we would proceed to wretch!) Those little worms are the maggot larvae of a fruit fly. 

The gravid female fly drills a hole into the side of the fruit, leaf or stem* of a particular plant, and deposits a bunch of eggs within. The larvae hatch and devour the flesh of the fruit, then drop out onto the ground, burrow under the surface and construct a little chamber in which they pupate. If the ground is too hard to burrow into, the larva bends over so that its head is touching its arse and then flicks itself violently so that its body leaps through the air for some distance. It will do this until it finds ground soft enough for it to dig into.

Once the adults emerge, they remain close to their offspring's preferred food plant, feeding off vegetation or nectar from flowers. The males establish a territory on the plant that the offspring feed on, knowing that a female will approach sooner or later. Competition is tough amongst these territorial males as I have now witnessed. 

* Species that deposit their eggs within the stems of plants are gall-forming like the Sawfly larva featured above, and develop similarly, except the fruit flies develop together in a small group. There is also a species of Fruit Fly from Europe that drills a hole into a gall, created by a Stem Sawfly! The eggs hatch within the gall and proceed to devour the Sawfly maggot! 

One thing about the arrival of the rains is the explosion of life! I was walking through the grasslands around Mount Prospect when I encountered this nymph Wahlberg's Katydid, Clonia wahlbergii, shedding its skin. Remember, a baby holometabolic insect (life cycle includes egg, larva, pupa, adult) is called a larva and looks (usually like a maggot) and behaves very differently from the adult, while a baby hemimetabolic insect (life cycle includes egg, nymph and adult) is called a nymph and looks and behaves similar to the adult, just growing up and shedding when the skin gets a little tight around the waist.

A Katydid (mainly USA) or Long-horned grasshopper (elsewhere) is a grasshopper that is more active at night, unlike a normal grasshopper, and is usually a predator, eating other arthropods, while grasshoppers are vegetarians. I did feature a more vegetarian katydid in my blog of "Late Summer 2023". This katydid, though, is a thorough predator and when it is full grown, it is actually quite a frightening insect with long, spiny legs and large wings that flick open and rattle when the insect is disturbed. I have heard that they can also inflict quite a painful bite!

Katydid males, like their cousins', the grasshoppers and crickets, make a loud mating call through stridulation, where they rhythmically rub their spiny legs against spines on their bodies to create a sound that, with a bit of imagination, sounds like "katydid" repeated over and over again. Once a female responds to the call and approaches him, he is required to present her with a bridal gift, a sweet, protein-rich broth prepared especially for her in special abdominal glands. This broth is expensive to produce, so only very successful males in good health are able to produce it, and if he can't, she will not allow him to mate with her.

Once she is mated with, the gravid female will drill into the ground with her rigid ovipositor and lay her eggs under the soil. The nymphs will hatch, burrow to the surface and begin hunting for tiny insects immediately, shedding its skin when it gets too tight as it grows. The wings are only fully developed in adulthood.

I also caught this Common Grass Yellow, Eurema hecabe, just as it had emerged from its pupa (so it is a holometabolic insect) and I watched it dry out its wings from a crinkled blob to hardened butterfly wings. This photo was taken beyond the middle of the drying process, explaining the rumpling of the wings. I could actually see the butterfly pumping haemolymph through his wings to get them stretched into shape. The whole process took about a half an hour while I was eating my lunch.

The Common Grass Yellow is an extremely widespread species occurring from Asia to Africa and beyond to Australasia! larval plants include a myriad species from a wide variety of plant families from Cucurbits, Euphorbias, members of the Pea family, like Vachelias and Senagalensis' (the old African Acacias) and, here on the estate, particularly the Curry Bush, Hypericum aethiopicum, with its beautiful and bountiful St. John's Wort flowers.

There are numerous local Grass Yellow butterflies in the area who all look relatively alike, with some difficult to differentiate from one another. This species, however, is easy to distinguish from the others by the characteristic uneven inner edge of the black trailing edge of the upper forewings. 

Another butterfly for us to admire. This is the glorious Emperor Swallowtail, Papilio ophidicephalus, taken by Heidi Robertson from Rainbow Rivers (Unit 17). besides being the largest of our Southern African butterflies, it is also one of the less seen ones because it resides in the Southern African forest biome, which is our smallest biome, although we have plenty of it on the estate.

This butterfly closely resembles the pretty common Citrus Swallowtail, P. demodocus, which is found on the estate, and I featured it in my previous blog with a mention of this species. The differences, as mentioned there, is that this species is larger, and it has the swallowtail-like streamers protruding from the trailing edge of its wings.

The two species of plant from this area that are used the most as a host plant are the forest dwelling trees called the Perdepis, Clausena anisata, and the Small Knobwood, Xanthoxylem capense, both from the Citrus family, and both common in the forests on the estate.

The gravid female Emperor Swallowtail lays a single egg that she attaches with a sticky fluid to the underside of a leaf from one of these trees and flies off to repeat the process until she has exhausted her egg stock. After about six days, a tiny, two-millimetre-long caterpillar hatches and immediately eats the shell of its egg. The larva, for the first four of the five instars, has a dark brownish body with the end bit white as snow, making it resemble a bird's dropping on the leaf, a very effective camouflage. These four instars take about four weeks to complete. 

The fifth instar caterpillar, though, would be a little too large to pass as a bird dropping sitting on a leaf, so the caterpillar's new skin is mottled green and brown, accurately resembling a leaf instead. This larger and final instar also has a defensive weapon in case the camouflage is not effective enough: It has an organ, called an Osmeterium, that lies inverted within the front of the thorax, where it meets the head. When the caterpillar is harassed, it everts this organ, and it pops out from above the caterpillar's head. It resembles the forked tongue of a snake and at the same time emits an odour that is apparently not unpleasant to humans, but is toxic to preying mantids, ants and spiders (probably more arthropods, but these are the ones that have been proven in a lab). This instar lasts about a fortnight.

Finally, once the caterpillar has fully developed, it crawls up a vertical stick or twig and, facing upwards, spins a silken mat that the caterpillar attaches itself to, using special hooks at the end of its abdomen. It then spins a cocoon around itself from foot to head, and when it reaches its "waist", it attaches its waist to the stick / twig with a strong thread of silk looped around itself and the twig. It then continues to envelop itself in its silken cocoon and leans its upper body out until it looks a little like the small letter "r" on the side of the twig.

Two to three weeks later, the beautiful adult butterfly emerges and continues the cycle.  

This is Dibaeis arcuata, resembling many typical crustose lichens found on rock surfaces around the estate. What makes it different, though, is the design of the apothecia, the fruiting body of the fungal portion of the lichen.

Lichens, a combination of two or three species of unrelated organisms, a fungus, a photobiont (either an alga or a cyanobacterium) and a yeast, normally produce small disc-like structures that look like tiny buttons called apothecia, constructed out of tightly woven mycelium, the collective name for the fungal strands that make up a fungus. These apothecia are the site where the fungal spores of the fungal part of the lichen are produced.

The apothecium of this species differs from the others in that they resemble tiny mushrooms like a true fungal fruiting body, instead of the button-like discs that are normally produced by the fungal partner in a lichen. The spores produced here will be dispersed by the wind, unlike most other lichens with disc-like apothecia that disperse spores when water splashes on the disc.

The problem with this sort of reproduction is that only the fungal part is reproduced this way. The fungal spore has to now come into contact with the specific photobiont to be able to produce another lichen. Chances are small indeed.

A slightly more efficient way, although it would be more like cloning, I suppose, is when it gets very dry, tiny fragments of the lichen break off and disperse in the wind to establish itself elsewhere.

This teeny-weeny arthropod is called a Slender Springtail, from the Entomobryidae family of Collembola. I featured my very first encounter with this primitive group of animals in my blog titled "Summer's End 2024" last year. But the ones I encountered were minute, less than one millimetre long! And floating around in my little pond in my rockery. This is a much bigger one at just over two millimetres long, and that's almost as big as they get. 

In that introduction to Springtails, I mentioned that the reason they are called "Springtails" is because of the presence of an organ called a furcula, attached to the final abdominal segment. This organ is a limb that looks like a forked tail that bends backwards, under strain, beneath the abdomen and is attached to the third abdominal segment. If the Springtail is threatened or harassed, it will release this organ which then flicks open and propels the Springtail violently into the air, escaping the area very suddenly. The springtails in that blog were among the few that do not have furcula's because they live in water.

This landlubber does have a furcula. Furthermore, the Entomobryidae is characterised by an elongated abdomen, allowing for an even longer furcula. With this enlarged furcula, members of this family can achieve some staggering results in physics when the furcula is employed: This two-millimetre-long Springtail can propel itself up to one-hundred-and-sixty millimetres. That's eighty times its body length! Also, the acceleration of the Springtail reaches well over nine-hundred meters per second! That generates a g-force (gravitational acceleration) of over ninety-eight! Compare that to a g-force of just over five for the driver of a suped-up dragster. Wow, that's some force.

Also, if you look closely, you will notice stiff hairs protruding from the dorsal part of the Springtail. These are called trichobothria, and they are hairs that are anchored in a sort of pit with a stretched membrane covering it. This set-up makes the hair extremely sensitive to air movement, picking up vibrations made by sound, enabling the Springtail to identify sounds and movement nearby.

If any of you have not walked the Steenkamps river path in the last few weeks, you need to do it! The paths have been completed and the walk from the confluence of the Steenkamps and Majubane rivers to S7 is absolutely beautiful! This is a Montane Pineapple Lily, Eucomis montana, in full bloom, and there are crowds of them inhabiting the cliffs opposite the paths in that stretch! 

There are twelve species of Pineapple Lily, and all are endemic to Southern Africa, of which I have found four on the estate, so far. This species, the Montane Pineapple Lily, is endemic to Mpumalanga and Eswatini only. They all have those strap-like leaves, arranged in a rosette at ground level. Then, from the centre-point arises a stout stalk with a compact raceme of flowers arranged vertically, topped by a rosette of green, leafy bracts, which make the whole flowering mass look very much like a pineapple, hence the common name.

The flowers emit a smell of rotting meat, which attracts flies, the dominant pollinators of the plant. Once pollinated, the ovaries swell and capsules, which dry out into a maroon colour, form, and once fully developed, open to release the wind dispersed seeds.

Another photo contributed by Dave De Vos from "The Croft's". Thank you, Dave.

This is a common little bird found on the estate that everybody should recognise. It is a male Fiscal Flycatcher, Melaenornis silens, and each house on the estate should have their own resident couple during the summer months. They are most often observed perched on an exposed spot a few meters off the ground, from where they search for insects, usually crawling on the ground, but sometimes flying by. They also eat the smaller fruits found on the estate, like the little red berries found on a Dogwood or one of the many Currant species. Unfortunately, they are also responsible for the spread of Bramble and Cotoneaster seeds, which are invasive exotics!

A male and female pair up in the spring and establish a territory which is often the garden of your house. The male brings gifts of plant down, presumably to line the future nest with, which he holds down while chittering and dancing for the female. He then deposits it in a place where he has deposited other gifts, and if she accepts, she will pick it up and follow him to his perch, where they will mate.

Nest construction is left up to the female, who constructs a cup-shaped nest in the fork of a tree, often Ouhout, the most ubiquitous tree on the estate. Afterwards, she will lay up to three eggs in the nest, one day apart, and incubate them alone for about two weeks, while the male brings food to her regularly. The male's other job is to defend the nest, which he does with gusto!

In fact, the plumage of this bird closely resembles that of the Butcher bird, or Common Fiscal (previously Fiscal Shrike), which is a notoriously aggressive bird, and other birds think so too, sometimes mobbing the Flycatchers like they mob the Common Fiscal. Maybe this trait has emboldened the Fiscal Flycatcher because it often attacks other birds bigger than itself and drives it away from the nest. This is especially so for Red-chested Cuckoos, or Piet-my-vrous, because the Fiscal Flycatcher is one of their chosen hosts to raise their chicks.

Once hatched, the chicks are fed exclusively by the female for a further two weeks or so before they are driven off and the couple will prepare for a second brood. Although the male is noticeably present, he does not take part in feeding the fledglings.

Like many other smaller birds, the Fiscal Flycatcher often takes part in an activity called "anting". This is when the bird sits on the floor, in the vicinity of the activities of Pugnacious ants (see blogs of MARCH 2019, where I show how they overpower much bigger termite alates, and FINSBURY AUTUMN WILDLIFE of April 2020 where I explain their breeding), and spread their wings and feathers apart, inviting the ants to crawl all over it. The bird then picks an ant up and rubs it over its feathers. This harassment causes the ant to spray defensive formic acid over the feather of the bird. This, in turn, excites all the other ants when they come into contact with it, and they also begin to spray formic acid on the birds' plumage. It is believed that the formic acid repels bacteria and fungus, keeping the feathers critter-free.

 

This a photo of a pair of Harvester ants, Messor capensis, communicating with each other while walking by. The genus name "Messor", is the name ascribed by the romans to their god of crops and harvest. This genus has been given that name because they harvest seeds from the grasslands for food. 

The colonies of these ants can be, and usually are, massive, and founded by a single queen ant. They live in a huge, complex nest with many passages and chambers. Some of these chambers have been constructed to stay as dry as possible, as granaries, to ensure that the seeds stored there do not germinate, even if stored for many years.

The ants are active on warm nights, where different castes of workers, from five millimetres to one centimetre in size, roam the surrounding fields for seeds, which they carry as far as two-hundred-metres back to the nest! The largest workers have outsized heads with massive jaws designed to crack open the husks of the largest of seeds, which is done at the entrance to the nest, before the seeds are taken underground to the granaries for storage. The piles of seed husks concentrated at the entrance to the nests are characteristic of Harvester ants and often enrich the soil in the immediate surroundings, producing more nutritious soil for plants to grow on. In areas like the Karoo, this soil engineering is important to plant growth in the area.

Interestingly, Western Cape Rooibos farmers are faced with a challenge when trying to collect seeds from their plants because the seeds are mechanically dispersed by a spring-load action of the seed pod. When the pods containing the tiny seeds ripen, they burst open, flinging the seeds all around onto the floor. This same mechanism is used in many other plants, but a good example is the wild version of the Pea plant. Those pods are also spring-loaded and fling the peas away from the plant when ripe. During the domestication of the pea plant, though, through a mutation and selective breeding, this spring-loaded seed dispersal method was removed, otherwise peas would be very difficult to harvest.

Regarding the Rooibos plant, local Bushman knowledge enlightened the farmers that Harvester ants love to collect Rooibos seeds and store them in their granaries, even for years until needed. All the farmers had to do was locate the nest of the harvester ants and expose the granaries, allowing them to easily collect seeds for planting the following season. This method is still used to this day.

Now, isn't this a pretty little flower? It is tiny, though, about three millimetres long and standing on a slim stem about 40mm from the waterlogged ground. It is called a Lead Bladderwort, Utricularia livida, and we encountered a few of them in the waterlogged, rocky ground where the mountain was leaking on our exciting Brewery Hike over the festive season. But what makes it special is that it is a carnivore!

A long time ago, and over a long time, a group of plants began producing proteinase, an enzyme that breaks down protein, and began excreting it, via glands, from their leaves as a defence against insect predators. Research has shown that these glands can and do work both ways, resulting in the glands absorbing nutrients from proteins that were trapped by the proteinase, and so on, and so on, until the plants became carnivorous. 

It is believed that plants evolved carnivorous traits independently at least twelve times, although, in South Africa, our carnivorous plants are represented by only two indigenous families: the Droseraceae or Sundew family which is represented on the estate by two species of Sundew (mentioned only briefly in a blog "The Jolly Season 2018"), and is also the family that the famous Venus Fly Trap belongs to; and the Lentibulariaceae or Bladderwort family, to which this beauty belongs.

I have managed to find two species from the Bladderwort family on the estate so far. The Corkscrew Plant, Genlisea hispidula (featured in my blog of February 2019), and this one, the Lead Bladderwort. The Bladderwort, though, has a very different trap to the simpler one found on the Corkscrew Plant, although the traps are also located where the roots of a normal plant would be. 

Both plants lack roots, instead, they have modified leaves that serve the purpose of anchoring the plants to their waterlogged substrate, like roots would. With the Corkscrew Plant, it acts almost like a screwy filter with hairs to trap escapees, while with the Bladderwort, the bladders are interspersed among the root-resembling leaves, ready to trap microscopic animals like rotifers and unicellular organisms.

This plant's trap is much more advanced than the corkscrew type of filter of the Corkscrew Plant, in fact, the vacuum-driven bladder traps on the plants in this genus are regarded as the most sophisticated carnivorous trapping mechanism in the plant kingdom. I'll try describing the process:

Firstly, the vacuum-driven bladder trap is called an Utricle, from the Latin Utriculus which refers to a leather wine bladder, hence the genus name. The utricle actually looks a bit like a balloon with a seem along one plane and a soft, sealed, hatch-like door on hinges with rigid spines protruding from it. The entire utricle measuring about two millimetres across.

The utricle pumps water through its sides via the process of active transport, a molecular process that allows molecules to pass from one side of a cell membrane to another. This displacement of water creates a vacuum that forces the sides of the balloon to collapse inwards, concentrating the digestive juices and remains of the previous victim still inside. Once no more water can be pumped out, the trap is set.

Now, if anything just touches the rigid spines attached to the soft door of the utricle, it bends the door and breaks the seal, allowing the sides of the balloon to pop out again, simultaneously sucking a column of water, together with the animal victim, if it is small enough, into the utricle. The door slams shut again, trapping the animal inside with the digestive juices to digest from within a few hours to a few days, depending on the prey. The process, from the animal touching one of the rigid spines to being trapped in the utricle takes about a hundredth of a second!

Often, when I take people on the Zebra Trail hike in the summer, I search for, and find the white form of the above plant, so join me one day and I will show you...

It's like something out of a sci-fi movie! In profile, this Giant Cone-headed Mantis, Hemiempusa capensis, looks like an intelligent alien life form coming to invade earth!! Some stunning colours and patterns too. 

I stumbled across this massive, eighty millimetre-long Giant Cone-headed Mantis, the region's largest Praying Mantis, in the grasslands beyond Pebble Creek. I would never have seen it if it didn't have to move to escape me standing on it. It has the most bizarre shape that helps it remain camouflaged as it lies in wait for prey to come close. It has leaf-like appendages in all its joints and hanging off its abdomen, very much like a camouflaged sniper in the war.

The Mantis is active in the night and day, so the camouflage is more important in the former, whether the Mantis is trying to ambush prey, or trying to hide from predators. In the night, the darkness helps hide the Mantis while hunting, but while it is flying, the biggest danger comes from bats! But never fear, the Giant Cone-headed Mantis has a cyclopean ear situated on the posterior end of the thorax where it meets the abdomen, and this ear can hear the echolocation clicks emitted by bats! When it hears a bat approaching, it does a quick loop-de-loop and then folds its wings and drops to the floor like a stone!

Night and day, the Mantis uses its excellent vision to track down prey. It has been proven that it can even distinguish between species by sight alone. 

The males tend to fly more (some species the male has wings and the female not) because they need to range far and wide to detect the pheromones in the air that have been released by a female, then follow them to find the female. Then the sports begins... 

The male needs to jump on the female's back, hold onto her shoulders, and try to deposit his sperm in a chamber on the end of the female's abdomen where she can store it and use it when she needs it. The problem though, is that in about ninety percent of species of Praying Mantis, the female tries to eat the male during copulation! She succeeds most of the time in laboratories or in unnatural scenarios, but according to research, it only happens about a quarter of the time in nature. It is speculated that, because of their excellent eyesight, the males are easily intimidated by unnatural movement, distracting him and affecting his efficiency in escaping the females clutches when the time comes.

It has also been found that hungry females tend to eat the males more often, and that males actually avoid hungry females if they can for the very same reason.

Anyway, once the male has escaped, or provided a nice nutritional meal for the female, the eggs begin to develop, and in about six weeks, the female will construct a foam-like egg sack, filled with about forty eggs, each in their own little chamber with snorkel, from the end of her abdomen with the help of two tiny appendages. 

After about six weeks. the minute little mantids emerge from their eggs and escape the egg sac via the snorkels. The Mantids are hemimetabolic, which means that they have a simpler life cycle, egg to nymph to adult, than the higher insects with their egg to larva to pupa to adult, and so look like miniature adults from the beginning, sans the wings.

Finally, if all goes well, which is unlikely, after about ten moults, an adult will emerge and, with the larger species like this one, will have only one season to find a female and continue the cycle.

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Groovy! The estate is lush and green right now, so you need to get here to play! Remember that I am mostly available to guide you and / or you guests on an outing while you're here. Simply contact me on the radio when you are here, or beforehand on WhatsApp (0645237058) or email jimmy@finsbury.co.za and we will make a plan.