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.

_______________________________________________________

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.

SPRINGTIME 2024

 SPRINGTIME 2024

Oh dear! You get "no rain", "good rain" and "bad rain". We've had a lot of the first and the last, and not enough of the middle one! Rain didn't arrive very late this season, with our first downpour in the middle of October, but last season's rain ended rather early, so it was a particularly long dry season. 

I remember, in my Springtime 2023 blog, I mentioned that, although we had had less than normal rainfall so far for that season, the nature of the rain, falling softly for extended periods of time, was so good that all that water had a chance to get absorbed into the ground, thus filling up the aquifers, ensuring waterflow throughout the year, even during the dry season. To see more on the importance of our grasslands as a water catchment, refer to my blog of March 2022 (8th article).

So, of the average of 160mm that has fallen on the estate over thirteen occurrences since the 10th of October to the end of November, less than half has been soft and absorbing, the rest has been violent with massive run-off, taking a lot of topsoil and attendant seeds with it directly to Mozambique! Not very good for us at all.

Still, with the resilience of nature, the estate is finally starting to green-up, although the river levels are still worryingly low, and all the life associated with it has kicked into action, bringing with it some lovely encounters which I will feature below:

I suppose many may think that this is not one of those lovely encounters, eh? But anyway, with the arrival of the rains, comes the arrival of the mosquitos too. I have noticed that the genus Anopheles is the most prevalent on the estate of the two genera in the mozzie family, and this genus is the one that is responsible for carrying the Malaria protozoan Plasmodium species. Fortunately for us, the elevation and climate on the estate are not suitable for the protozoan, so although we have many potential carriers flying about, they will not be affected. Maybe with climate change that will change, though.

These mozzies have a very short life cycle, lasting from a mere two weeks to as much as six weeks, depending on the species and the temperature. Eggs are laid singly onto the surface of the water where they float till hatching (unlike the other mosquito genus, Aedes, Anopheles eggs have floats attached to the sides), which occurs within two to three days.

Also, unlike the Aedes genus, Anopheles larvae do not have a breathing siphon attached to their abdomen, so they lie parallel with the water's surface so that they can breathe with the spiracles on their abdomens. Aedes with their breathing siphon, on the other hand, hang head-down from the water's surface with their siphons on the surface. This is a very good way to identify malaria mosquitos when they are still larvae.

The larvae have a large head with mouth brushes that filter out microorganisms, like algae and bacteria, from the thin surface film of the water. After four instars, when the larva grows too big for its skin, and so sheds and grows a bigger skin, the larva turns into a pupa, which looks like a little three-dimensional comma floating, thick part up, on the surface of the water. 

It will then take a few days to develop into an adult, which will emerge from the pupal case and fly off in search of a mate and food, which consists of nectar from night-blooming flowers, making mosquitos a very important night-time pollinating species. It is only the female mosquito that seeks out a blood meal, and that is only when she has been mated with and is ready to develop her eggs.

To achieve this, she has carbon dioxide receptors in her palps, the two thick antennae-looking things sticking out ninety degrees from her head in the picture (this is also a good identification feature of the Anopheles genus, because with the Aedes genus, they hang down with the rest of the mouthparts). These receptors pick up the carbon dioxide emitted from our bodies and so help the mosquito find a blood host.

Interestingly, these receptors are particularly sensitive to the very particular carbon dioxide complex that is emitted by human feet! This helps them find a human ankle, where the skin is thin, and the blood pressure is highest, perfect for a juicy blood meal!

Another interesting fact: If the female is infected by the malaria plasmodium, these receptors become more sensitive and the protozoan even changes the mosquito's behavior, making her more desperate and willing to take more chances to get her meal, increasing its chances of finding a human host.

Anyway, once she has had her blood meal, fifty to two hundred eggs develop within her, and she deposits these, singly, on the water's surface. 

And the cycle continues.....

I featured this very same photo in my blog of March 2020, where the identification was narrowed down to the Anopheles gambiae complex, of which there are seven or so species. Since then, though, I have had input from a specialist who was very sure it was Anopheles merus, and she stated many reasons for it. She did say, though, that the larvae of that species develops in salt water, either on the coast or in salty marshes inland. She points out two salty marshes in the Kruger Park where that species has been recorded from. 

I told her that I was unaware of any salty marshes or water on the estate and explained that I was bitten by this particular individual in a dark, forested gorge by a fast-flowing stream. She said that the only species it could be then, which resembles A .merus is Anopheles ardensis, which is very rare and is not known to bite humans (Hmmn, maybe I'm not as human as I thought!).

So, it is either the one or the other. She is still convinced it is A. merus but she asked me to capture the next one I find, and if she can get it under a microscope, she will be able to tell me which one it is.

Although this looks like a normal caterpillar, it is actually a Sawfly larva, Arge sp, the most primitive member of the Hymenoptera order (bees, wasps and ants). The Hymenoptera is the most recently evolved order of insects, with the most primitive being the Archaeognatha order, primitive fishmoth-looking insects (refer to my blog of Summer's End 2024 that I posted in May). 

Unlike the rest of the order, an adult sawfly is easy to identify because, although it resembles a wasp (see blog of January 2020 for a pic of an adult), it does not have a narrow restriction between the thorax and abdomen like all other Hymenopterans. Regarding larvae like this one, the sawflies have five pairs of prolegs as opposed to the four pairs found on the Lepidopterans.  

Another striking difference between the Sawfly and other Hymenopterans is the fact that the female's ovipositor has not been modified into a stinger, instead it has remained as an ovipositor but with serrated edges so that it can saw its way into plant tissue in which to lay her eggs (hence the name Sawfly).

Many Sawflies, however harmless they are, resemble other more dangerous members of the Hymenoptera, like bees and stinging wasps. This mimicry, when a harmless insect mimics a harmful insect, or a tasty insect mimics a poisonous insect, is called Batesian mimicry as opposed to Mullerian mimicry, where a poisonous insect mimics another poisonous insect. or a harmful insect mimics another harmful insect. 

The problem with Batesian mimicry is that predators often have to learn which colours mean danger on its prey animals by eating one and getting sick because it was poisonous or getting hurt because it was harmful, only to learn that in the future it will not go near an insect that looks like that again. 

So Batesian mimicry only works when the population of the mimic does not exceed twenty five percent of the population of the model because, if that happens then the predators will probably eat the harmless ones as well and decide that not all prey items that look like that are harmful and this will negate the effect of the aposematic colouration (warning colours). A good example illustrating this fact is a species of butterfly, a Common Diadem, where the very edible female mimics an African Monarch butterfly which is very poisonous. The Common Diadem keeps the mimicry low by only allowing the females of the species to mimic the Monarch while the less important male Diadem looks like a completely different species of butterfly.

Anyway, back to the Sawfly: After she lays her eggs within the fleshy parts of leaves or stems, the larvae, who look very much like a worm caterpillar, hatch and chew a hole to the outside world, exit and begin to devour the leaves, usually in groups. The larval stage can last anywhere from a single season to more than a year. That's lots of leaves to devour!

The pupal stage is spent in a neatly woven, silken cocoon. Male specimens in many species are yet to be found, suggesting they may reproduce parthenogenetically, like the female being cloned over and over. This lack of needing to find a mate results in an extremely short adult life span of just over a week. Then, the adult emerges, and the cycle continues.

Another lovely shot sent to me by Dave De Vos from "The Crofts" (unit 19). This time of a Pied Kingfisher, Ceryle rudis, in flight. just after it had alighted from a tree beside the Sharktank (W3) near the hatchery.

Although they are certainly the most widespread and common of our fish-eating kingfishers, they are not very common here because they prefer large, unwooded, slow-moving bodies of water than what you find here on the estate. In fact, they are quite nomadic and are prone to move away when the water levels become too low and if it becomes too cold, and the only time they become sedentary and territorial, is when they nest. And then, they only defend the nest hole and the area directly around it, only until the fledglings have emerged from the nest.

Their diet consists of fish, crabs and aquatic insects and their larvae, which they catch from a perch nearby, called hawking, or by hovering directly above the water and dropping straight down on their prey. They use the latter strategy more because it is more successful than hawking, although it does use a significantly larger amount of energy. They also have a special adaption to help them avoid breaking their necks when they hit the water on a dive: They have solid bone neck vertebrae, unlike the super lightweight aero-like bones that are found in other birds and the rest of the Pied Kingfishers body.

Interestingly, only a handful of birds on the planet can truly achieve sustained hovering in still air, and this is one of them. The others include some hawks, like our Black-shouldered Kite, most sunbirds and, of course, Hummingbirds who have perfected it, even able to reverse while hovering. Many other birds, like our Snake Eagles can also hover, but they require a headlong wind to achieve it. This is the only Kingfisher that can truly hover, though. 

A side note: Sunbirds hover on two occasions, when they are slurping up nectar from smaller flowers with no foothold to land, and when they pick spiders out of their webs, which is a common sight.

Pied kingfishers are monogamous breeders (only a single mate), that solicit help from up to four male helpers when nesting. the nest is a half meter to two-meter-long horizontal hole burrowed out from a vertical bank, low down and close to the water surface, excavated by the parents.

The female does most of the incubating while her mate and the primary helper/s provide her with food. The primary helper/s are sons from the previous brood, while secondary helpers consist of unrelated males that could not find a mate, or those that failed to breed. The population of Pied Kingfishers is skewed towards males by a ratio of about 1.8:1, which explains why there is a surplus of males in the system. The cause of this is believed to be because the female incubates and broods in the nighttime, and predation is more common then, mainly by Water Mongoose who dig up the nest, or snakes that slither down the passage. The primary helpers are active from the beginning, while the secondary helpers only get involved once the chicks have hatched.

After about four weeks, the fledglings emerge from the nest hole and immediately begin their foraging training from their parents, while the helpers contribute to feeding them all. The youngsters can already dive for their food within a fortnight, but it takes up to two months for them to become self-sufficient.

Nice one, Dave! And thank you. Please, a request to all members. I am proud to have photos accompanying all of the species (plants, animals and birds at around 1500 species) that I have encountered on the estate. These photos have all been taken on the estate, except for birds! I do not have the camera (even if I did, it would be too bulky for me to carry around during my normal duties) that can take decent photos of birds, so the list I have created for birds is full of copyright-free photos taken off the internet. I would love to have ALL photos taken here on the estate. Dave is and has supplied many of these so far, but there is still over a hundred-and-fifty species that require a locally taken photograph. So, if you have or can, donate your photos of birds. The photo will be credited to you when it is displayed.

What odd-looking thing is this? It is an adult Cicada bug emerging from its pupal case, high up in the grasslands on Mount Prospect.

Cicadas are best known to us by the loud, high-pitched, incessant buzzing sound that the males produce to attract the attention of a potential mate. The females hear this with their tympanal organs (ear-like) which pick-up and analyse sounds, particularly the mating buzz of the males. The males also have these hearing organs so that they can space themselves but must disconnect them when calling because the sound he produces can reach, in some species, one hundred and twenty decibels (a gunshot is around 130db) and that would damage his own hearing.

If you manage to catch one of these bugs, which is quite an achievement, and turn it on its back, it is easy to distinguish between male and female: The female will have a sharp, scythe-like appendage (ovipositor) at the tip of her abdomen while the male will not. Instead, he will have two semicircular plates at the rear underside of his abdomen which cover his sound-producing organs. Both sexes "ears" are situated here in the abdomen too. 

The sound-producing organ of the male is, in effect, two separate membranes supported by powerful muscles that vibrate and "pop" the membranes up and down, very much the same as you pressing the bottom of a coffee tin in and out. Most of the remainder of the male's abdomen is hollow which helps amplify the sound. The hollow cavity in the males' abdomen also has folded membranes on each side that can be unfolded and re-folded to adjust the volume of the sound produced and when the bug calls it constantly adjusts the volume, and this helps to create a ventriloquist type of scenario where it is difficult for predators (and curious human beings) to pinpoint the location of the insect, but, strangely, not the females.

Once the female responds to the mating call and mating is complete, she will cut a slit into the bark of a branch or twig and lay an egg within, repeating this process until she has laid all her eggs. After about six weeks, the nymphs hatch from the egg and drop onto the floor and immediately burrow into the ground with their powerful, folding forelimbs. They dig down until they encounter the roots of a plant and then create a little chamber in which they will reside while they puncture the root and the xylem within with their rigid proboscis and suck the juices out. The xylem is the vascular pathway that transports water and minerals from the roots to the rest of the plant.

These Cicada nymphs will reside underground, burrowing from root to root, until they are fully developed. Most species are referred to as "annual cicadas" and their nymphs will spend from two to nine years feeding like this underground before they are fully developed and ready to transform into an adult. But at least two species in North America (and more than likely in Africa too) are referred to as "periodic cicadas" and they synchronise their breeding and egg-laying activities so that the nymphs emerge thirteen and seventeen years later respectively, en masse! This strategy is employed to increase the survival rate of the insect by flooding the "market" with youngsters so that, even with a high predation rate, the survival rate will be adequate for the species' survival.

Also, and this is interesting, it reduces the chances of a specialised predator from evolving because the long time frame between the emergence of the generations is longer than most insects will live, forcing them to find other prey species. 

Periodic cicadas or not, when the nymph emerges from underground, it climbs up the base of a tree trunk and secures itself there with its powerful forelegs and then rests. After a while, the skin on the back of the nymph splits open and the adult slowly emerges, wings and all. This is the stage this individual is at in the photograph above. In the photo, you can see that the wings are still all scrunched up. It will need to rest while they harden and gain shape before it can fly away, a dangerous time for the insect! Certainly so, because if I were a hunter-gatherer, I would have slurped it up! 

 Adults retain productive mouthparts and, instead of feeding underground from the roots of a plant, they puncture the stem of the plant above ground and suck the juices from there. The big rounded "nose", easily visible on the nymph and the adult, houses the pumping muscles that suck the fluids from the host plant.

This, then, is an example of an extremely long-lived insect, as opposed to the Sawfly and the Mosquito above. The insect world is truly variable! 

This is a Long-horned Caddisfly, from the Leptoceridae family, that I encountered in a dark and moist piece of forested gorge running from Mount Anderson down to Hidden Valley. It is very exciting for me because it is only the second species of Caddisfly that I have ever seen! The other species, which is relatively common in our area, although easily overlooked, I featured in my blog of May 2019. 

The mouthparts of Caddisflies are very underdeveloped, and most adults do not feed at all. The Caddisfly I featured in that blog does eat, and I mentioned how easy it is to identify them by the characteristic s-shaped dance it performs on the substrate while sweeping up microorganisms with its brush-like jaws. Well, this little critter was doing the same dance, which means it must also feed as an adult, unlike the majority of species. Mmmn?

As I mentioned, Caddisflies are very closely related, but more primitive, than moths and butterflies from the insect order Lepidoptera, which means "Scaled Wing". These chaps do not have scales on their wings, but hairs instead, and the name of the Caddisfly order is Trichoptera, which means "Hairy Wing". So, as adults they resemble one another but the mouthparts are different, and the one has scaley wings while the other has hairy wings.

In the larval stage, they differ in a much bigger way. Moths and butterflies have caterpillars, resembling the Sawfly larva at the beginning of this blog. Caddisflies, though, have larvae that may resemble caterpillars, but they are aquatic, living in the crystal-clear mountain streams, and they are usually protected by a silken case covered in well-placed local debris, from sticks and sand particles to chewed off pieces of vegetation. This affinity with fresh water makes these insects good bioindicators, which are species that can be used to measure environmental health, because they are very sensitive to water pollution. Very different from the caterpillars we know. 

Although most of us here at Finsbury do know them. Many dry flies are tied to imitate the adults, while wet flies are used to imitate the larvae. Adults are often referred to as "sedges" in fly-fishing parlance, or so I have heard. 

Not only has the weather been rather poor for us this springtime, but it was also abnormal at the end of winter. It was extremely hot and dry with banshee-like winds tearing across the mountains. This is perfect weather for runaway fires, and it didn't disappoint!

We were constantly on edge because the fires in the area were so severe, they were jumping fifty-meter-wide firebreaks with ease and causing mayhem wherever they occurred! We helped extinguish two of these fires west of us, in the plots before the reserve.

On two other occasions, we had runaway fires on the estate, and believe me, they were a real battle to extinguish. Each fire was a three-day battle with the second being particularly harsh.

But we survived and, because of all the fires around us, and the lack of rainfall, I have not done any management burns before Christmas like I usually do. I will do a few Patch Mosaic burns later in the season, especially in the south of the estate.

Uh oh, I can feel a bunch of members wondering why I didn't catch this little fellow and ring its neck! It is a young Spotted-necked Otter, Hydrictis maculicollis, which I stumbled upon between the office and my house in the middle of the day. When it saw that I had seen it, it tried to run away, but since they are not well designed for travel over land, I caught up to it quite easily.

I initially thought it must be a baby Cape Clawless Otter because it was so small, but I was dubious because I did not see the white chin and cheeks of the clawless, but did not think further of it till later. I did manage to grab the little blighter, but it tried very hard to bite me, so I released it again and took a few photos before it managed to get itself into the thick bush between my house and the Kliprots river, escaping my clutches. I'm not too sure what I would have done if I had managed to hang on to it, but I did notice that the fur is even softer to the touch than it appears.

When I checked the photos, I saw one thing, in the photo above, that confirmed it was a Spotted-necked Otter, and that was the very visible claw on the pinky finger of the left front foot. Obviously, with a common name like they have, a Cape Clawless Otter does not have claws. this is because claws would get in the way of their fat finger tips as they probe the stream bottom, by feel, for the crabs that form the biggest part of their diet. Spotted-necked Otters, on the other hand, feed more on fish than crabs, and so, sharp claws are necessary to grip the slippery, slimy body of a fish.

Further north in Africa, where freshwater bodies are much more substantial than in South Africa, these otters survive almost entirely on fish around 100mm long and rarely more than 200mm, while in South Africa, where freshwater bodies are much smaller and freshwater fish less numerous, they are forced to supplement their diet with crabs and frogs, especially platannas, which they catch in the water.

Also, north of South Africa, where the freshwater fish are more numerous, Spotted-necked otters live in groups of up to twenty individuals whereas, here, they live singly or in tiny family groups of moms and her two, or maximum three, pups. They also hunt alone here, or if not, it will be a mother teaching her pups to hunt. So, if you see a group together in one of the weirs on the estate, it will more than likely be the more common Cape Clawless otter. 

Walking along the Kliprots after one of the recent thunderstorms, I almost stepped on a Distant's Thread Snake, Leptotyphlops distantii, a tiny snake that looks like a metallic earthworm.

These are typical snakes that differ from other snakes only by their diminished size, the fact that their toothless upper jaw is fused to the skull, so that only the bottom jaw moves (like us), and that their body scales are all the same size, whereas other snakes have larger belly scales.

Another difference, which it shares with all other blind and burrowing snakes, is that its eyes are set behind a scale similar to the rest, where most snakes' eyes are set beneath a transparent scale. So, Thread snakes can only differentiate between dark and light.

Thread snakes spend most of their time burrowing through loose soil or leaf litter in search of termite tunnels or paths containing the pheromone trails left by ants. Once located, the Thread snake follows the trail until it finds the colony. It will enter the colony and release a pheromone of its own that has a relaxing effect on the ants, so that they don't harm the snake while it quickly eats large quantities of eggs, grub-like larvae, and the soft immobile pupae, before making a quick retreat!

With termites the snake eats the eggs whole, but when eating the nymphs and adults, the thread snake sucks the insides out from the rear and discards the skin with the sclerotised head.

Very little seems to be known about the behaviour of the snake, otherwise. They are oviparous, meaning they lay eggs, but little else is known about how they find a mate, although it is surely the same as other snakes where the female releases a pheromone trail that the male picks up and follows. It is known, however, that the closely related Texas Thread snake lays up to twelve eggs and coils around them to protect them.

This is only the second Distant's Thread snake I have found on the estate, so it was a very exciting find!

While walking in the grasslands in Hidden Valley, a metallic glint caught my eye from quite far away. On closer inspection, I found this beautiful, jewel-like Furry Grassland Leaf Beetle, Macrocoma aureovillosa, feeding on the inflorescence of a Golden Velvet grass.

Leaf beetles belong to the Chrysomelidae family of beetles (see blogs of Christmas 2021 and May 2020), a massive family of well-over 35000 described species and about the same amount yet to be described! 

All leaf beetles are plant feeders, in their larval and adult stages. The female lays her clump of eggs on the underside of a leaf and covers them with her concrete-like faeces to protect them. Once hatched, they munch the leaves of the tree they are born on, very much like the caterpillar of a moth or butterfly (or Sawfly). 

Once fully developed, the larva drops off the tree and buries itself in the ground to pupate or, like the species in the article in my blog from Christmas 2021, hangs its pupa from the underside of a leaf. Then, out comes the adult beetle.

This is a striking beetle, but if you check my previous blogs on the family, you will see that they are very different, but all are striking.

A nice close-up of a Citrus Swallowtail butterfly, Papilio demodocus, slurping up the juices from a leopard scat. It is very difficult to get a photo of these butterflies because they almost never stay still for even a moment. Even when perched on the ground like this, they usually flutter their wings continually. This chap, however, was so intoxicated by this disgusting juice it was drinking that it never even shivered while it let me approach to within a few centimeters!

Butterflies eat mostly nectar from flowers but are attracted to the myriad minerals and salts available in liquid form in the excrement of carnivores and herbivores, and also the juices present in carcasses.

Male Swallowtails congregate where there is a concentration of flowers providing nectar, or a carcass or at fresh scats like this one, or on a hilltop and wait for a female to appear. As soon as she enters a male's field of vision, he quickly flies over to her and hovers over her, beating his wings quickly, to secure her from the rest of the males as he gently pushes her towards the nearest surface to land. If she is the incorrect species or she has already been mated with, she will either flee on his first advance, or land and begin to flutter her wings until the male gets the message and flies off.

If she is ready to mate, she will allow him to guide her to land and then let him mate with her, which is quite a prolonged affair and can take up to two hours. Afterwards they will go their own way until the female is ready to lay eggs, when she will begin to seek out the plant species that her larvae need to eat as they develop. After finding these by scent by landing on them and tapping them with her antennae, she will deposit a batch of eggs that will glue themselves the leaf or stem surface, then fly off.

We get another species of Swallowtail on the estate that can easily be confused with this one. It is called the Emperor Swallowtail, and it is South Africa's largest butterfly. The Emperor Swallowtail's markings and colouration are very similar to the Citrus Swallowtail, but the Emperor has long streamers on its wings which is where the genus gets its common name Swallowtail from, and it is larger. The Emperor also prefers forest while the Citrus associates more with grasslands and riparian bush. Their larvae, though, share the same plant and tree species which are mostly found in the forest, so the gravid female Citrus Swallowtail must at least venture there to lay her eggs.

My alien invasive plant eradication team recently brought this Leopard Tortoise, Stigmochelys pardalis, from the Spekboom river to show to me, knowing that I love this sort of thing. I was very excited because in the twelve odd years that I have been here on the estate, I have never encountered one. There was a time about three years ago when I saw a Speke's Hinged Tortoise on the entrance road, close to the railway line (see my blog of Christmas 2021), but that is within a drier bushveld biome.

Strange this, because, according to the literature, Leopard tortoises find themselves at their greatest concentration in the Eastern Cape's mesic grasslands, which are very similar, and share many similar species to our mesic grasslands. South Africa also happens to boast the richest tortoise diversity on the planet with fourteen species present of the forty species worldwide, although almost all of these occur in the Western and North-western Cape.

They make very good pets, as long as one has a permit to keep one, and that one is in it for the long run, because, in captivity, they often live to seventy-five years old and even older! I had one as a pet once when I lived in White River with my wife and child: 

One day I was returning from the Kruger Park in an official-looking vehicle, when I noticed I was being followed while driving in Nelspruit. When I stopped, a woman approached from the car with a large tortoise in her hands and asked me to release it into the park. She had bought it from some people on the side of the road and she was trying to do the right thing.

I took the tortoise from her but had no intention of releasing it into the park, because I believed it was too big. I have never seen such big ones in the park and I'm sure it is because, when the spaces for their legs get big enough, predators can get in there and kill the tortoise easier.

So, I took her home and she became my toddler daughter's favourite pet until it nipped her finger while she was feeding it! Anyway, I donated her to the Nelspruit Reptile Park where I received a lifetime pass for it. We reckoned she was between forty and fifty years old then, so she could still be there at seventy plus!

By counting the rings caused by spurts of growth on the shell plates, one can estimate the age of tortoises, and I guess that this one is between 18 and 22 years old. This one is also a male. This can be confirmed by turning the tortoise upside down and, if the plastron (dorsal part of the shell) is flat, it is a female, and if the plastron is concave, it is a male. This shape helps him to hug the female's shell while mating.

Like most other terrestrial reptiles, the female tortoise releases a trail of pheromones for potential males to follow. Often, more than one male responds, and this will inevitably lead to combat, where the males try to push the other away until the loser gives up or is tipped over, a potentially lethal situation if he cannot right himself afterwards. The victor then approaches the female and butts her around until she submits and allows him to mount her.

Once her eggs have developed, the gravid female will find a suitably sunny and well-drained spot with hard soil and urinate on it to make digging easier. She then digs a hole about a foot deep with her clawed and armoured front feet, turns around and lays twenty or so eggs into it. She then covers them up, stomps it down, and flattens it by lifting and dropping her plastron over the area.

Gestation takes about a year (9-15 months) depending on the weather, and females develop at higher temperatures while males develop at lower temperatures (interestingly, with crocodiles this is opposite, with males developing at higher temperatures and females at lower) so, if the majority of the gestation is over winter, more males will hatch, and the opposite for the summer.

When the eggs are ready to hatch, the hatchlings sometimes have to wait, because the ground may be too hard for them to dig out of, so they may have to wait for it to rain to soften the ground so that they can hatch and emerge as tiny little mini tortoises.

This is a photo that I featured in my blog of December 2019, but it was not about the wasp, it was about the little extrusions you see poking out from the wasp's abdomen. 

If you know these wasps, you will notice that the bright orange band that usually occurs around the first two segments of her abdomen from the waist, has faded to almost black and she has a strange protrusion from between her third and fourth abdominal segments and another just before the last one. 

As I've mentioned in previous blogs, wasps are mostly parasitic, and their activities make good script for horror movies, but it doesn't stop there. In this case the wasp has been stylopised, which means that she is a victim of a horrible parasite from the Xenidae, a family of insects quite closely related to the parasitic flies in the order Strepsiptera. 

The two protrusions from the abdomen of the wasp are either adult female stylopids who spend their entire adult lives protruding from the abdomen of their hosts, or male stylopid pupas, that once pupated, will emerge and fly off in search of a female. Or a combination of both. They do not kill the host but weaken it and make it sterile. 

When the female stylopid is receptive, she emits a scent pheromone that will hopefully be picked up by a male, which resembles a house fly slightly, but with branched antennae and clubbed forewings as opposed to a fly's clubbed hind wings. The male lives very briefly, less than six hours, so he may not dilly dally as he searches out these pheromones. 

Once he finds the female, he must mate with her through an opening on the anterior part extruding from the host, and then he will promptly die. Her young hatch within her, within the host, and eat their mother out from the inside! That's dedication on her side!

These first instar larvae have legs and scramble out of her anterior section and run around in search of new hosts. Once a host is found, the larvae attach themselves and secrete a compound that softens the host's cuticle so that the larva can burrow inside its host's abdomen where they will feed and grow and then pupate, Once the pupal stage is complete, the male flies off for his few hours of adult life and the female remains in her pupal shell for her entire life.

This is a Common Dotted Fruit Chafer, Oxythyrea marginalis, found on many of the brand-new flowers that came out in the early spring, especially in the burned areas. It belongs in the Scarab family, which has over thirty thousand species and about the same amount still to be described, but in the Cetoniinae subfamily of Chafers or Rose beetles.

They feed on nectar and pollen mainly but will subsidise this with tree sap and the juices from bruised and rotting fruit. On two of my recent hikes with guests, I found them committing floral larceny. Seriously, it is a proper botanical term, floral larceny! It refers to the action of an insect, bird or mammal that bypasses the floral parts of a flower in pursuit of the nectar, that is usually a reward for the pollinators for brushing past the floral parts of the flower. So, in other words, it takes the nectar but doesn't pollinate the flower. 

Usually, to do this, the thief has to bite a hole at the base of the perianth to access the nectar. In the case of this beetle, both times it had bitten through the base of the long, tubular perianth of the yellow Long-tube Fire Lily (what I used to know as Ifafa Lily), Cyrtanthus stenanthus ssp. major, a beautiful small Amaryllis that grows prolifically in our grasslands. This flower is much too narrow for the beetle to fit down the perianth, so it was forced to commit larceny. I read that these nectar thieves usually do this as the exception, not the norm.

Besides the larceny, the Common Spotted Fruit Chafer is an important pollinator for many of our flowers, especially our proteas and some of our orchids. Unfortunately, it is also a main pollinator of the Formosa Lily, Lilium formosanum, that beautiful huge trumpet lily that blooms on the estate in late summer. The reason I say unfortunately, is because those lilies are exotic and even slightly invasive, coming originally from Taiwan.

That's it for the spring of 2024. I was supposed to publish this at the end of November, but I had a few technical issues with the site which seem to now be solved (unless the font sizes and styles are all mixed up). The rainfall has remained scarce and sporadic into the first three weeks of December, but, as I write this, we have just enjoyed our first nice rains, soft soaking rains, just before Christmas. 

It looks like we will have lots of people here over Christmas, and, although rainfall has been so wrong, the estate is still lush and green, and if this lovely rain keeps it up, maybe the water levels will rise to suitable levels. Please remember that I am available to take people on promenades, walks, drives and hikes over the festive season (always, really). Simply contact me, Jimmy, on the radio or email (jimmy@finsbury.co.za) or, better yet, by WhatsApp (064 523 7058), and we will arrange an outing.