SUMMERTIME! 2026

 SUMMERTIME 2026

What a lekker wet summer it has been! Starting to quickly dry now that it is May. I have certainly never seen the river levels this high at this time of the year, that's for sure. We have enjoyed a mean seasonal average of 1139mm across the estate, the third highest rainfall season recorded over the last sixteen years with the average at 903mm per season since then.

Within the estate, the north (Pebble Creek) received the highest rainfall, at 1362mm, and the lowest fell in the west, measured at Patrick's boom gate at 918mm.At the office we measured 1117mm; in the east, measured at Rock Solid, was 1244mm; and the south measured 1056mm, measured at Rainbow Rivers. Lots and lots of rain! We have been very fortunate, because even though there was so much rain, it fell relatively gently, particularly at the beginning of the season, allowing plant growth to establish itself sufficiently to protect the ground from too much erosion. 

Last season was quite the opposite, with violent rainfall and lots of hail at the beginning of the season and this, combined with the serious runaway fires of the previous dry season, caused a lot of run off and silting up of the weirs and rivers.

With all this rainfall, there has been a lot of life happening on the estate and below is a gallery of some of this:

There have been snakes and snakes galore! As you are all quite aware, I am very fond of the scaly beasts, so the last few weeks have been filled with joy for me! In my last blog I showed you a picture of the Mole Snake that I encountered on the Rock Kestrel trail. That was the beginning of my snake run!

I was on a security patrol close to Mount Formosa (the mountain with the ruin on top in Emoyeni property) when I almost trod upon this very aggressive Ring-necked Spitting Cobra, Hemachatus haemachatus, better known as a Rinkhals. They are not actually aggressive snakes at all and with all the other four encounters I've had with them on the estate so far, I have not managed to get a good photo because the snakes were always trying to get away, not facing me with hood expanded like this one. I think I gave this one a big fright because I was walking rather quickly. In fact, this one was so upset it even approached me aggressively, making me stumble backwards over some rocks!

I did put my spectacles on to protect my eyes in case the snake decided to spit at me, but it didn't, although you can see his mouth open in the photo, so I think he / she was contemplating it! I have had to capture many Mfezis (Mozambique Spitting Cobras) at lodges where I worked before, and it was always imperative that I wore specs, because they almost always spat at me when catching them. I remember how the venom would dry and crystalise on my skin and on the spec's lenses. There were always copious amounts of it!

This snake belongs to the Elapidae family, together with Mambas, Cobras and their relatives, Kraits, Coral snakes, Sea snakes and the baddies of Australia, the Taipans and Fierce snakes. They are characterised by hollow, fixed fangs at the front of their jaws though which they can inject venom into their victims.

The snakes in this family have venom dominated by neurotoxins, toxins that affect nerve ends, stopping synapses from occurring, which successfully paralyses the involuntary muscle system, like the muscles required to breathe, resulting in suffocation and cardiac arrest in victims. Neurotoxin is the fastest acting venom in the snake world and require immediate medical care to avoid severe complications.

Neurotoxin does not, however, damage cells, so will do no harm if it gets into one's eyes. Spitting snakes in the Elapidae therefore need a different type of venom to affectively deter enemies when spitting in their eyes, so their venom has smaller amounts of neurotoxins in it and large amounts of cytotoxins, the venom that dominates in the Viperidae, the family that vipers and adders belong to. Cytotoxin is not as dangerous as neurotoxin (see Puffadder later), making the Rinkhals less venomous than the cobras and mambas. They are still venomous enough to easily kill an adult human being, though!

Although the Rinkhals closely resembles a Cobra, it is even further from a cobra than a Black Mamba is. The most notable difference between a Rinkhals and a Cobra are the Rinkhals' keeled scales, scales with a small ridge across the top, giving the integument a rough texture. Cobras have smooth scales, resulting in the body having a glossy shine. Another difference is the fact that Rinkhals' have no solid teeth, just fangs whereas cobras have front fangs and fixed teeth. A final and glaring difference is the fact that a Cobra is viviparous, meaning it lays eggs, while a Rinkhals is ovoviviparous, meaning that the eggs hatch just prior to birthing, within the mother's body, so that live young are born.

A lovely experience!

A few weeks later, I was sitting in the Landcruiser on top of Klipspringer Hill in Rivendel property trying to phone Eskom because our power was down (again!). I had parked the Cruiser perpendicular and just off the road, with the front of the vehicle facing the road. After the call, while scrolling through messages, I looked up and this spectacular animal was warily approaching the Cruiser, well aware that it was not a normal fixture there. It was in the middle of the road with its head lifted off the ground as it approached me....

Jinne! It was a Black Mamba, Dendroaspis polylepis, a sighting in the wild which I have not had since 2006, twenty years! I wanted to get a photo before it went under the vehicle, but didn't want to take it through the windscreen, so I extended my hand out the window and managed to get this photo before it reacted by lifting up and beginning to turn around. I managed to get out of the vehicle and approach taking a video before it rushed off into the bushes where it stopped and watched me through gaps in the grass. Alas, the video quality is very poor because of the speed and me shaking with excitement!

This was slap-bang in the middle of the breeding season, and the Mambas are obviously very active at this time. If this was a female, she would be leaving a pheromone trail behind her as she moves around during her normal activities, and if a male encounters the trail, he will follow it until he finds her or another male on the same mission. If he finds another male, they will twist around each other and wrestle until one is subdued by the other forcing his head to the floor and dominating him. They do not bite or harm each other during this display. The winner will then continue until he finds the female. Once together, they will enter a burrow or cave or hollow etcetera and mate for a few hours. 

In the Elapidae family of snakes, together with the Rinkhals and Cobras, the Mamba is actually more closely related to the Cobras than the Rinkhals is, as mentioned above. It is believed that the Mambas evolved from Cobras as they became more arboreal, with their slimmer bodies more able to move in trees (although Black Mambas spend more time on the ground the genus name, Dendroaspis, means "snake of the trees"). Indeed, Mambas also spread a hood when molested, like a Cobra, which this one did do when it was fleeing from me.

The Black Mamba can get to 4,5m in length, making it the largest African venomous snake and the second largest on the planet after the King Cobra, which can reach a length of 5,85m, although Mambas usually average around three meters or so. I measured the track that the middle of its body is on in the photo, and guestimated this Mamba to be about 2,5 meters long.

It is also the deadliest African snake with massive quantities of a powerful neurotoxin that quickly immobilises its prey or kills its tormentor. They seem to know this and sail through the bush with an attitude! It is beautiful to watch!

As mentioned above with the Rinkhals, neurotoxins inhibit nerve synapses, resulting in muscle paralysis, causing suffocation. The Black Mamba has a very powerful neurotoxic venom, comparable to that of the Fierce Snake or Western Taipan from Australia, which is regarded as the deadliest snake in the world (even more deadly than the Yellow-bellied Sea snake which was previously regarded as the deadliest). It also has a lot of this venom, so is theoretically capable of killing ten adult humans by biting each one after the other as they stand in a row!

The above wording is important, because these snakes don't have the most powerful venom at all, just the quickest working venom, meaning you die quicker. In Africa, the Boomslang, Dispholidus typus, is the snake with the most powerful venom, meaning that one only requires a tiny droplet to kill an adult human. The venom, though, is very slow acting, so treatment can be performed long before death approaches. The Black Mamba is the deadliest because the victim has very little time before the venom takes effect.

Conversely, the most dangerous African snake is the Puff Adder, Bitis arietans, because they are quick to bite and do not retreat easily. They are therefore responsible for the large majority of dangerous bites and loss of life.

Interestingly, Black Mambas do not occur in Finsbury Estate because we are situated in mesic grassland and mist-belt grassland, a habitat unsuitable for the Mamba. Rivendel is situated in the Lydenburg Bushveld Biome, much more suitable for this snake. A good example to illustrate the differences in our biomes, even though we are only a few kilometres apart, is the presence of the Cape Batis (bird) here on the estate, as opposed to the presence of the Chinspot Batis, a bushveld species, in the Rivendel biome. You will not find the Chinspot Batis here, and you will not find the Cape Batis there. Crazy, huh?

This was definitely my highlight of the last while! Every time I go to the Kruger Park (which is often), I wish that I will get to see a Black Mamba. I was shaking with excitement the whole day after this experience. 

This is a beautifully brightly coloured baby Puff Adder, Bitis arietans, which I saw about two hundred meters further up the road in Rivendel from where I saw the Mamba, less than a week later! She was only about fifteen centimetres long, which is not much longer than they are when they are born. Yes, the Puffadder is also ovoviviparous like the Rinkhals above......

Just a quick explainer: We get three types of birthing systems:

1. Viviparous - This is when the foetus develops within the mother's body and is nourished by the mother. One of the main benefits of this system is that the baby is protected by the mother right until birth. A drawback is that it is very demanding on the body of the mother.
2. Oviparous - This is when the mother lays an egg. The baby is nourished by the yolk of the egg, exerting less pressure on the body of the mother. A drawback is that the eggs need to be protected or hidden away sufficiently where they will not be disturbed.
3. Ovoviviparous - This is when the egg hatches within the mother's body, prior to laying, and the baby is born active. Advantages are that it is less demanding on the mother because the foetus develops from the yolk, but the baby is protected by the mother until birth.  

I have had little experience of Puffies in Finsbury for lack of sightings, but seeing this little one reminded me of how different they look compared to a similar sized Berg Adder: The Puffie has a much broader head compared to a Bergie of the same size. This little one was just head, with a tiny body! You can see the blur on the latter part of the body in the photo because the little blighter was rushing over the ground and striking at me at the same time.

As mentioned above, the Puffadder is regarded as the most dangerous snake in Africa because it is responsible for the majority of serious bites. This is because, instead of moving away when someone approaches, the puffie prefers to rely on its camouflage and lies still. Once it realises that it is going to be trod on, though, it will emit a loud, explosive puffing sound (hence the name Puffadder), which should warn the approaching animal. If one doesn't know the sound, one might tread on the snake, causing it to bite. 

And it bites really quickly too! 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, like this one, 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 digesting before being consumed!

In our grassland biome, 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 it as it is 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.

Like the Mamba above, the female will leave a pheromone trail behind her when she is ready to mate, and the male/s will follow it until they find her or another male on the same mission, and like the Mambas above, they will wrestle until one submits. The victor will find the female and they will mate.

After fertilisation and a suitable gestation, about fifty of the little blighters come out with the record being for an individual 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. 

That's three of our most dangerous snakes for me within a couple of weeks!

But that's not all, folks! There have been three Southern African Rock Python sightings in Rivendel in the last few weeks. Three different individuals too, even though they were viewed in the same area. We know they were different because of their size differences. Firstly, Annette from Riverbed Africa photographed one that was over four meters long! This snake was seen in the same area by our staff about two years ago. It is a big snake!

Then Don MacCrimmon photographed this small one within a few hundred meters of Annette's sighting. It was about one meter long, always so much more beautiful when they are young.

Then, only a few days ago, Anne MacCrimmon saw and photographed one about three meters long at the bottom of Klipspringer Hill, also close to the other sightings. This is probably the offspring of the huge one, and the small one is probably this one's offspring. A real family affair!

The Southern African Rock Python, Python natalensis, is Africa's largest snake and amongst the largest, fifth or sixth, depending on the source, in the world. Longest is the reticulated python with a length of up to 10,5 metres according to my old Fitzsimons tome, but only 6,95 meters according to Wikipedia where they only measure the skeletons of dead individuals. Interestingly, I just read an article today about a new record for the longest living wild snake, again a Reticulated Python, measured in January in Indonesia, at 23 feet 8 inch 7,2136 metres long!

Although they are long, they are slim, so the 6,95 individual weighed 59 kilograms. The Green Anaconda is the second longest with a length of 9 metres in Fitzsimons and 5,9 metres in Wiki, but the 5,9 individual weighed 163 kilograms! Much heavier, so a bigger snake. The longest Southern African Rock Python was 5,8 metres long and weighed about 70 kilograms, also a heavy snake.

I have had many glorious experiences with these beautiful and enigmatic serpents. They are magnificent, easy to catch (if they are big) and a thrill to all around. The largest I have encountered, that I could relatively accurately measure, was about 4,4 metres. It was a huge snake. The longest I have managed to capture, was about 3,5 metres and it was very strong! I needed help to remove the coils from around my arms and waist! 

I also, once, was following a female leopard in one of the reserves where I worked, when she suddenly pounced into some thick bush and exposed a huge four-metre-odd-plus python! They scuffled a bit, but it didn't take long for the leopard to kill the python. She then spent two days eating the snake, which she stashed in the thick bush.

The python family is one of the more primitive of the snake families, with a few characteristics they share with lizards and not with other snakes. For instance, pythons have a pair of lungs, like us and lizards, whereas other snakes only have a single lung. Pythons also have pelvic bones and vestigial legs, visible as claws that protrude from where the back legs would be. Some remarkable features also include the presence of heat sensing pits at the end of the top jaw, helping it to locate warm-blooded prey in the darkness, and a mouth filled with more than a hundred backwards curving teeth!

Another thing that these snakes do that is unique to snakes, is to incubate their eggs! The female, when ready to lay her eggs, will find a suitable shelter like a cave, termite mound burrow or the like to spend the following two months in. She then lays her eggs, thirty to fifty of them, in pile on the floor and wraps her body around this pile and vibrates her muscles, rising her body temperature to a few degrees above ambient. She will only leave every now and again to drink water for the entire six to eight weeks that she spends with her eggs.

When the eggs are ready to hatch, she leaves, never to return. The 60-centimetre-long babies hatch by slicing the eggshell open with a temporary protrusion on the tips of their noses called an egg tooth, which falls off soon afterwards. They never see their mother, like other snakes, and have to fend for themselves from the very start.

One last amazing fact about these snakes is their ability to go long periods without food. If captured in the wild and introduced to captivity, pythons are quite well-known for refusing food. Nowadays the curators even resort to force feeding the snakes by forcing the food down into the throat and then massaging it down to the stomach. They then tie a ligature around the body, just above the stomach, for half a day to stop the snake from regurgitating the food. In the past, they used to just wait till the snake decided to eat, and that is when the remarkable record of two years and ten months without food was reached by an animal in captivity!

I have not seen a python on Finsbury property yet, but there is a record of Graham Baartman, a past manager, finding the spoor of a four-plus-metre-long specimen in the shaft of Jackpot mine above unit 16 two decades ago. Also, about ten years ago, I'm sure I remember someone from Kliprots Creek (U24) showing me a photo of a snake found there that was thought to be a python.

My goodness! It sure is a dog-eat-dog world out there! This would be the clash of the titans in the arthropod world!

I was leading a hike on the Zebra Trail when I noticed this Two-spotted Flower Crab Spider, Thomisus daradioides, atop an Umbrella Everlasting flower head, clutching a huge South African Mantis, Miomantis affra, in its clutches. It was quite a sight!

They are both apex predators and will happily eat one another any time but, on this occasion the spider came out on top. The Mantis must've approached the flower for the same reason the spider was there, to wait for a pollinator insect, like a bee or butterfly, to arrive at the flower for a meal of nectar. But the spider, with its ability to change colour to suit its background, managed to deceive the very sharp-eyed mantis. There must have been quite a struggle holding down that fearsome mantis while the spider's venom took hold!

The Crab Spiders, with multiple species here on the estate, are rather common and very easy to find, because you just need to inspect the flowers blooms around you, and sooner rather than later, you will find one matching the particular colour of the flower it is lying in wait upon. I have therefore featured them regularly in my publications in the past. Click on the search bar of this website and type in 'Crab Spider' and it will pull a bunch of previous blogs up.

The mantids too, are diverse and plentiful on the estate (with some really beautiful and bizarre ones) and I have featured them quite often, more recently "Midsummer 2025" and "Finsbury Festive Season 25/26", both available on this website.

There was something about this species of Mantis that did catch my eye, though, while reading about them. They are endemic to South Africa, meaning they don't occur naturally anywhere else in the world; however, they were accidently introduced to New Zealand in 1978 and have since become a problem there.

In New Zealand, the common name for this South African Mantis is the Springbok Mantis, and it is the only other species of mantid in the country after the indigenous and endemic New Zealand Mantis and, although they are not so closely related, they do resemble each other quite closely, and this is where the problem comes in.

The New Zealand Mantis is one of the few species where the female doesn't eat the male after mating, making the males more trusting. Regarding the Springbok Mantis though, the female does regularly, and even worse, she partakes in a behavioural phenomenon called pre-copulatory cannibalism (precc) too, as opposed to the more normal post-copulatory cannibalism (poscc). Now I can appreciate the advantages of poscc, because the female has been impregnated, so mission is accomplished, and she gets a nice big meal to help develop the eggs. It is the ultimate sacrifice by the male.

It is much more difficult, though, to even begin to understand the advantages to a female that eats the male before he mates with her, so I did a bit of digging. I could find nothing on this behaviour regarding praying mantids but did find a few papers on this subject involving spiders, which are probably just as notorious as mantids for sexual cannibalism. After reading two very complex (to me, not an entomologist, I'm sure) papers on the subject the effect of precc on the health of the population concerned is negative, and so why did it evolve?

What I could surmise was that it is a form of sexual selection to increase male fitness (think of why a male peacock has such a large tail fan). They found that the females tend to eat the smaller of the males, creating a competition in the males of the population and therefore increasing genetic fitness. An obvious benefit to the female is that her food comes to her, so she doesn't have to waste energy on the hunt.

Now the problem that this poses to the New Zealand Mantis is that, firstly he is unwary, unlike males from species where the female does eat them, and so walks nonchalantly into her jaws, and secondly, because this species is a bit smaller than the Springbok Mantis. This means that the female Springbok Mantis will probably eat all of the New Zealand Mantis males that come along, and even less of the Springbok ones that come along. This creates a negative effect for the New Zealand Mantis population and conversely has a positive effect on the introduced Springbok Mantis. Double whammy!

Finally, once we had completed our Zebra Trail hike and we were returning to the homeward path, we passed the spot again. Amazingly, after about three hours of being away, the spider was still trying to complete his huge meal! The mantis, though, was decidedly slimmer by this stage.

While I'm on Crab spiders, when I encountered this one, I was interested in the fact that it appeared to have chosen to change its colour to blend with the greens of the flower bracts, rather than the blue flowers.

It was quite an awkward photo to take, so I zoomed in on the camera after the shot, and it was only then that I noticed a pair of brown legs apparently wrapped around the green spider. After manipulating the flower inflorescence somewhat to expose the other side of the spider without spooking it, I exposed a smaller brown male who appeared in the process of mating with the female.

I looked up as much as I could on their mating habits and discovered that the females of these spiders do practise post-copulatory cannibalism but produce pheromones just before their final moult into adulthood, inviting the males to approach during her moult when she is incapable of eating them. Males are therefore often seen riding on the abdomen (safely) of the larger female, waiting for her to begin her final juvenile moult when he can risk mating.

In this photo he is in the process of mating, which entails him spinning a tiny triangular web and depositing a sperm package on top and moving this over the female genitals. let's just hope that this chap has followed the above guidelines so that he can get away afterwards.... 

Another weird-looking spider! It's called a Common Kitespider, Gasteracantha versicolor, and both names are quite descriptive: The English common name refers to the kite-shaped abdomen, which is very accurate; the scientific name literally means "Spiny abdomen with variable colouration" which is very descriptive because they occur in many different coloured patterns all brightly coloured, though.

This is a daytime active orb-weaving spider who spins an orb web on the vertical plane, usually in the path amongst bushes where insects fly. The spider sits openly in the centre of the orb, enabling it to feel the slightest vibration anywhere on the web. This position exposes the spider to all sorts of predators, especially birds.

You may remember me mentioning a phenomenon called aposematism, which is when an animal advertises its dangerous nature to potential predators, mostly through bright, contrasting colouration. Well, that is the function of the bright patterns on the spider's abdomen. It is warning potential predators that they are going to hurt their mouths on the sharp spines should they try to eat the spider.

This is the larger, showier female. The smaller male is of blander colouration with much reduced spines. The advantage of the males being smaller is that they have a smaller energy requirement giving them more mobility and agility. This needed when he is forced to leave his web in search of a sedentary female. Her larger size enables her to produce more eggs.

Another beautiful photo taken by Dave De Vos from "The Croft's" (U19). This time of one of my favourites, the Olive Woodpecker, Dendropicos griseocephalus, a small, quiet and very beautiful bird that frequents our evergreen forests and thick riparian bush. They are small for a woodpecker, pretty and quite secretive, normally only exposed by their call, which is woodpeckerish, but still unique.

It's a nice shot, because it shows the zygodactyl toes, although they are not positioned correctly in the photo (I think it was moving its foot when the shutter snapped closed), and the tail feathers anchoring the bird against the substrate, a characteristic of all woodpeckers.

These birds forage in pairs, albeit widely distributed, with the occasional soft contact call to stay in touch. They eat anything of the correct size by probing for victims under loose bark, amongst mosses and lichens, cracks in the bark of the stems or, like most woodpeckers, they tap on dead branches and find the tunnels of wood boring beetle larvae, home in and excavate a hole where the tunnel ends, ie. the beetle larvae sits, insert their telegraphic barbed tongues, stab the grub and then pull it out and swallow it! Yummy!

They are monogamous, but for only the season, so next season they will rack up with somebody else. The pair jointly excavate a new hole for the season in a tree trunk and build a nest inside. The hole is not used again for breeding but is often used later on as a roost in which they sleep every night, although they are constantly harassed by the pesky Red-winged Starlings, the rats of the mountains, who commandeer their holes on many occasions.

A thing though: they are pretty common here and we see them quite regularly, but I have never, yet, seen a Scaly-throated Honeyguide, Indicator variegatus, here before. They are brood parasites - like a Cuckoo that lays its eggs in another bird's nest, and the other mother raises their young often to the detriment of the host species' brood - on this woodpecker, and so I would expect them to occur here. Please let me know if you have seen or heard one here.

They are sedentary all around their range, but like many other sedentary species, they are local migrants when it comes to the higher-lying mountains of the escarpment, like we are here. This is because it gets a liiiiitle too cold here and they therefore move down to the coastal forests where they tolerate the stresses they encounter from violating locals' space, just to get on before they return to good old home.

There's no better camouflage than covering yourself with your surroundings. We stumbled upon this Water Scorpion, Laccotrephes sp., when we were on the Brewery Hike on Easter Saturday. It was hiding just beneath the surface of the water in a puddle formed by water leaking from the bank on the side of the road.

A water Scorpion is a bug from the Hemiptera order of insects. Bugs are characterised by the presence of a "beak", a tube-like structure (probiscis) which is designed to pierce integument (also that of your finger if you are foolish enough to handle one) and suck juices from either a plant's vascular system in vegetarians, or the juices from the body of another animal in predators. Bugs are also hemimetabolic, meaning they have a simple life cycle: egg, nymph, adult (as opposed to holometabolic: egg, larva, pupa, adult, like in beetles).

They are poor swimmers, so hang around in the shallows, enabling them to walk on the bottom in search of a good spot to ambush potential prey. If no good cover is found, the Water Scorpion will cover itself with dust from the bottom of the pond, like the individual in the photo.

 When they require oxygen, they will only break the surface with the tip of their long siphon, just like a snorkel, extending from the tip of their abdomen on the floor. In the photo above, you will notice the siphon extended up, towards the camera, and the tip is just above the raised water created by surface tension (the small white dot on the extreme right, in the centre between top and bottom of the photo). Air passes down this tube into a chamber beneath the elytra (folded wings) where it can be used later (like an oxygen tank on the back of a diver). 

Once a good hiding place is located, the bug will lie in wait until a potential prey item approaches close enough, and bang! The raptorial forelegs, like those on a Praying Mantid, shoot out and grip the victim and hold it tight while the probiscis is stabbed into the victim's body, and the juices sucked out. Potential prey may include aquatic invertebrates, like Dragonfly larvae, tadpoles or even small fish.

So, although they resemble a scorpion, the "sting" merely a breathing tube, and there is no venom present, so except for a painful (I've heard) bite from the probiscis, the animal is pretty harmless. Unless you are a tadpole or such.....

A very round head with an inquisitive stare! It's an African Wood Owl, Strix woodfordii, in its acclimatisation enclosure at K9 Cafe (U9). It is one individual of a group of three orphaned siblings of these owls, at the end of their acclimatisation period at the moment who will be released any day now.

We've had a good relationship with the Dullstroom Bird of Prey and Rehabilitation Centre (visit their website www.birdsofprey.co.za) near the lovely little town after which it is named, since the initial Covid lockdown in early twenty-twenty. I'm sure you all know of the place, since most of you drive past it on the way here from the Big Smoke. Many of you have even visited and enjoyed one of their spectacular demonstrations, where you get to see some of our most magnificent raptors up close. 

Our relationship began in late March twenty-twenty, while we were in the first of the COVID-19 lockdowns, David, our then staff supervisor, found a wounded Cape Eagle Owl at Cochy-Bundhu (unit 1). We noticed it was wounded but it could still fly, albeit very weakly. After attempts to feed it with trapped rats failed, Don contacted the Dullstroom centre and Magdali Theron, a passionate animal protector, came all the way out here to collect the owl. Unfortunately, the owl was past saving and died two days later. (refer my blog: FINSBURY AUTUMN WILDLIFE 2020) 

Then, more recently, during the winter of 2023, the Twiggs' from "the Crofts" (unit 19) found the carcass of a Cape Vulture on the Spekboom river. I recovered the carcass, and because they are such an endangered and iconic species, I contacted the Dullstroom centre to report it. Once again, Magdali came over to Lydenburg where I met her and handed over the carcass for a post-mortem to discover the cause of death. There was a crack on its beak which was characteristic of the wound suffered by these birds after a collision with power lines, which we have running over the Spekboom at the spot where it was found. (refer my blog of WINTER 2023)

Then Magdali contacted Don in March 2024 and requested that they be allowed to release a pair of Serval and a Cuckoo Hawk on the estate. Don naturally agreed it was a good idea and so, on February thirteenth, Dullstroom Bird of Prey and Rehabilitation Centre arrived here with a young sibling pair of Serval cats and a beautiful Cuckoo Hawk (refer my blog of Animal Release Finsbury)

Since then, they have released a few Cape Eagle Owls and African Wood Owls here. To acclimatise, these owls are kept and fed in Trish Myburgh's (U9) vegetable garden enclosure for a month or so, then the enclosure is opened, allowing them to fly out, although this can take a while. This is where the above siblings are about now.

These are the only forest-dwelling owls in the region and so enjoy a very patchy distribution. I have never seen a wild one here on the estate and was first alerted to their presence by David Dampier (U2) who heard one calling in the Steenkamps valley long before any were released here. He certainly had the best description I have heard for the soft hooting call: "Sounds like the noise somebody makes when touched inappropriately!" - hilarious!

They live in monogamous pairs in small territories of as little as fifty hectares and feed on insects, small roosting birds, centipedes, small rodents and frogs.

And finally, a little information on our management fires:

This, seen from Hidden Valley looking west, is a "beautiful" evening patch mosaic fire burning from above Kliprots Creek (U2), up to the Miner's Cottage Road. 

Since your visits here from January, you may have noticed the many scars of smaller fires all over the estate. These were controlled fires, following a patch mosaic fire regime. I have given brief rundowns on this subject a few times in the past but feel it is necessary to go over it again a little more thoroughly, to help explain these odd patterns on the mountains.

Firstly, the patch mosaic fire regime is a relatively newly adopted regime that tries to simulate dry and wet lightning fires during the rainy season on the eastern escarpment. It is a regime used by the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency and is being used further afield more and more. It apparently was inspired by the practices of Australasian Aboriginals in the past. The idea is that, with this modus operandi, the fire is as healthy as a fire can be. The soil is still wet underneath after the fire, so seeds and exposed roots etcetera are left undamaged, and many fauna species easily escape to safety, as opposed to a hot, dry fire. 

It gets a little more complicated, so that one must provide a hot fire on occasion when woody plants begin to dominate again. The paradox is that hot fires kill the woody plants, cool fires don't, so every now and again, a hot fire is again necessary. It is random, but a pattern develops over a decade or so.

Let me explain the facts as I, together with my mentors, interpret them. There are many different fire regimes out there that cater for different human needs, like farming or hunting. One must remember that we are dealing with our specific area and that large herbivore carrying capacity is not our main objective, simply because we don't have many of them and we are not a farm, so our protocols may differ from other fire regimes. Hell, I've seen so many different ideas and reasons for burning that it would be difficult to generalise.

But, in our situation, where biodiversity and water absorption are our main objectives, this is how I can try to explain it:

We are part of a water catchment reserve because we are the source of some of the many tributaries that fill the mighty Olifants river that flows east through the Kruger National Park and beyond to empty into the Indian Ocean. The grassland biome in which we reside is a natural sponge that absorbs water during our high rainfall seasons into the massive aquifer that we are. In this instance, an aquifer is defined as an area of porous sedimentary rock, our estate, in a high rainfall area that absorbs water and lets it out slowly in springs, through friction, so that streams flow throughout the year, even during the four or five months of dry winter.

Key to the functioning of this sponge is the grass in the grasslands.

Grasses are designed to be in a severely crowded situation, so they can grow up close together and with their relatively upright leaves and can survive comfortably without too much competition in this crowded situation. So, when the rain falls, the water is forced to linger in these forests of upright leaves, encouraging it to absorb into the ground instead of rushing off downhill.

Woody plants, on the other hand, appear like a continuous sward across the fields like grasses do, but have a stem and a canopy so, although they are close together, below the canopy there is a large gap on the ground between the stems, which is often bare because it is too shaded for other plants to grow. This results in sheetwash erosion, because, during rainfall, the water runs freely downhill between these stems instead of being forced to absorb by the vertically growing grass plants. This, in turn, results in more run-off and less absorption of the water and a shallower aquifer that will not be able to supply water perennially, or continuously, throughout the dry season, resulting in an environmental catastrophe.

I must now add that grasslands are the only biome that require outside influencing factors, apart from geography and climate, to remain relevant, and those are fire and / or grazing pressure. So, if a grassland is not grazed and or burned relatively regularly, it will retrogress into a woodland, which, if instigated by man, would also be an environmental catastrophe.

You see, this is the grasses' secret: Their meristem, the growing point on the plant, is situated at the very base of the plant / leaf, right at ground level, so if you cut the leaf blade, it will just continue growing like a fingernail would. A woody plant's meristem is at the apex of the plant, so if you cut it, it has to begin again and coppice from below the cut. Therefore, if grasses can dominate, they will only manage to avoid serious competition with encroaching woody plants with the help of fire and / or grazing, because then they can grow close together and squeeze those woody plants out.

If grasses are not burned or grazed, in other words, if their old, dead leaves are not pruned, they will begin to shade themselves and their neighbours with these plumes of dead leaves after a few seasons of growing and create gaps between the grass plants. This is when encroaching woody plants begin to establish themselves, in these gaps. They then grow higher than the surrounding grass plants and begin to shade them and everybody else. So, after ten or less years of no grazing and or burning, your grasslands begin to retrogress into a diversity-poor sort of fynbos, and ultimately into an ecologically unproductive, species-poor woodland. 

We are in an area prone to dry thunderstorms like most of the high lying grasslands on the entire escarpment and are subjected to the odd, random dry lightning strike. The fires started by these strikes do not get a chance to burn very widely because of our roads, firebreaks and firefighting efforts, but if it wasn't for these unnatural obstacles, these rare, random fires would burn for tens-of-thousands of hectares before the next rains doused the flames.

Also, before we got here and really altered the environment with roads and fencing, this place would be filled with thousands of large herbivores grazing in the summertime and moving to the lower-lying sweetveld during the wintertime. This is solely because we are a mesic grassland, that is a grassland that is exposed to very low temperatures in the winter, resulting in deadly frost. Our grasses, therefore, have to try to absorb all nutrients into their roots for the cold season, rendering the protein content of the grass leaves above ground, the grasses that those herbivores eat, much lower than the same species of grass in the lower-lying, warmer sweetveld areas.

We have extremely little grazing pressure here in our grasslands compared to a natural, unimpeded migratory situation, so fires become even more important. So, we are left to burn multiple small patch mosaic burns to try to maximise the diversity, therefore the health, of our grasslands.

This strategy is proving to be very beneficial because it uses much less resources than original fire practices, relieves us of having to burn all usual firebreaks later on and because it minimises the fuel load in the grasslands, reducing the chances of serious, out-of-control fires that we may have to fight at the end of the dry season, endangering lives and property, exhausting for all and very bad for the environment!

Come for a walk with me and I will be able to explain it with the help of my props, the grassland species.

This is a photo of the first / second leg (depends on who you are) of the Brewery Hike, a traditional outing we enjoy on Easter Saturday every year, weather permitting. It includes less than half of the very large group that we had this year, resting atop the egg hill, waiting for the laggers to arrive.

It is one of the many trails available on the estate, either to traverse on your own, or with me as a guide. The trails are laid out in your house files (in each house), with all the information you will need to complete them on your own. Remember, one doesn't have to stick to any trail, the mountains, gorges and grasslands are all yours to explore, as long as you do it safely: Use a map or the Finsbury app; take a radio with spare battery; and let others know what you are planning.

Winter's on its way, quickly. Temperatures have plummeted this first week of May and mid-winter is close on the heels. Water levels are still nice and high, so this is a good time to visit. welcome!

 

 

FINSBURY FESTIVE SEASON 25/26

 FINSBURY FESTIVE SEASON 25/26

What a festive season it has been! In the two months from the beginning of December till the end of January, we have had an average of 396mm precipitation over the estate, with a high of 474mm in the north (Pebble Creek), and a low of 318mm falling at Patrick's gate in the west. I am sure that more has fallen in the north and east, but I was unable to check the gauges at these two locations for the final seven days of rain because I was unable, due to flood waters, to get to the locations, so I averaged the figures for the remaining locations for that period. 

That is a lot of rain! Fortunately, it fell gently, so there was minimal erosion and the run-off was not so dirty. Even with all this rain, the fishermen have been raving about some really good fishing (a couple of seven pounders were hooked!), and we have still been able to indulge in many activities in the mountain grasslands and forested gorges. 

I think I must have hiked the entire property over the season with a whole bunch of lovely families! We saw a lot of exciting wildlife, so below you will find a few of these. Enjoy.

This is a rather common moth species found in the Lowveld and Kruger National Park, but not common here on the estate at all. It is a Reticulate Bagnet Moth, Anaphe reticulata, but may be better known by the common name of their caterpillars: Processionary Worms.

I'm sure many of you have been to the Kruger Park in Autumn (particularly May) and seen long lines of green, hairy caterpillars, touching head to toe, as they cross the road in single file. These are what are referred to as Processionary worms and that is what it is, a procession to the nearest foodplant after resting up in a safe place.

This long line of worms travelling in single file resembles a larger organism to smaller predators and the slightly toxic hairs dissuade larger predators, so pretty good protection, then. The reason I say they are not common here on the estate is because I have never seen a procession here yet, although the main foodplants of the caterpillar do occur here. They are Crossberry bushes, Grewia occidentalis, and Wild Pear trees, Dombeya rotundifolia, both from the Hibiscus family. 

The pathfinder or leader of the procession establishes its direction (not sure how, but I would assume that the colony hatched on the host plant and that, when they first sought refuge for the night, they left a pheromone trail to follow on their return) and begins to move off while releasing a continuous strand of silk. The silk provides traction for the feet of the next individual in line who is also physically touching the one in front. The leader also releases a fresh path pheromone which enables others to follow if the line is disrupted. The second individual in line also releases a strand of silk and the pheromone to the one behind it which is also physically touching it. This continues till the end of the line which could be as much as six hundred individuals away!

Way into winter, the caterpillars would have completed their final instar and will be ready to pupate. They gather in a place which they feel is suitable, and construct a communal cocoon called a bagnet, with individual cocoons inside accommodating, once again, up to six hundred pupae! The final product looks like a dense silken handbag hanging in a bush.

Well into the following season, the adults emerge and the cycle continues. In West Africa, the bagnets are collected after pupation and the adults have vacated them. These are processed into fibres that are woven into yarn. The process has been happening for hundreds of years, at least, but more than likely thousands of years.

I featured this magnificent little milkweed plant in my blog of January 2022. I will feature it again with some added information. This individual resides in my rockery and was saved from certain death after baboons dislodged it from a cliff face near the Mountain Hatchery. Its most commonly used common name is Rosary Vine, with the proper name of Ceropegia linearis ssp. woodii.

Globally, this species is the most cultivated of all the species of the genus and is known by a huge assortment of common names like Hanging Milkwort, String of Hearts and a few variations of that, Heart Vine, Jacob's Beard and many more! 

The trailing stems grow from a bulb between rock surfaces and at each node, a pair of leaves, flowers or even new bulbs can grow. The heart-shaped leaves are succulent and arranged neatly in pairs and if the plant resides in a spot that offers dappled shade, marbled or variegated leaves develop, like in this specimen. The leaves develop a plain, dark green colouration in complete shade. 

The strange looking flowers are extraordinary little traps and are of a similar design throughout the genus. They have a swollen base and a long tube that has four lobes on top that join at the tip to form four windows (openings) that emit a very specific odour that attracts its small pollinators, Jackal Flies from the Millichiidae family. 

These flies are called Jackal flies because they are scavengers that feed off the leaked juices from unfortunate insects that have been captured by predators like spiders, assassin bugs and Robber flies. When an insect is attacked, it releases defensive volatiles which have a very specific scent. The flies are attracted to this scent and approach the scene and, like jackals, hang around the predator while it eats its prey and snatch bits that leak out or are discarded.

The fly is attracted by this odour thinking it is an insect in distress. Instead, it finds this strange flower. It enters the window to find maroon nectar guides that lead it down towards the tube where it suddenly gets very slippery and the fly falls down the tube into the swollen chamber where the fused anthers and stigma reside with the nectar and pollinia (bags of pollen). The tube is filled with stiff down-facing hairs that allow the fly to fall down, but do not allow the fly to climb up again. This imprisons the fly for six to twelve hours in the chamber. At the base of the chamber are very precisely positioned patches of nectar which forces the fly to position its body in the correct way as to firmly clip the pollinia onto its mouthparts. 

There is sufficient nectar in the nectary to ensure the fly's comfortable survival until the flower droops to the horizontal or more, the stiff hairs relax, and the fly is allowed to exit its temporary prison and fly off in search of a real source of food!

The pollinarium clipped to the mouthparts are extremely uncomfortable for the fly, and so it usually spends some time trying to groom the things off, but they are firmly clipped there. This grooming process is important because it usually turns the pollen bags inside out, so that the cleft which attaches to the guide rail in the following flower is exposed. This ensures that the cleft does not attach to the guide rail of the original flower, avoiding cross-pollination while the fly is incarcerated and stumbling around searching for a way out.

If the poor fly finds another flower instead of a real source of food through this incredible deception by the Rosary Vine, it will inevitably slip down into the flower tube again and attempt to access the small patches of nectar the flower so deviously offers so as to position its body so that it connects with the guide rail which collects the pollinarium with glee! 

Wow! What an elaborate design. After successful pollination, the ovary develops into a follicle, a double horn-shaped seed pod that splits horizontally and exposes many flat seeds with long hairs attached. The change in the moisture in the air around the seeds when the follicle splits, causes the hairs to begin to spread open to form a parachute for the seeds that are then dispersed by the wind. These seeds are characteristic of the Milkweed family, the Apocynaceae. What a crazy little succulent! 

Ceropegia: keros = (greek) wax; pege = (greek) fountain, referring to the flower that resembles a wax fountain.

Diachea leucopodia - White-footed Slime

Stemonitis splendens - Chocolate Tube Slime

Five years ago, in December twenty-twenty, I discovered my first Slime mould on the estate. With this discovery, I proudly added an entirely new KINGDOM to our Finsbury biodiversity list, the Protozoa, single-celled organisms, of which the amoeba you studied in biology class belongs, together with numerous others and these slime moulds.

Let me quickly give you a reminder of how taxonomy in the natural world works, and you will appreciate what a milestone a new Kingdom was for me:

Biological Taxonomy is the classification of all living organisms into taxa (singular taxon), showing their relationship with other organisms. It consists of eight main taxa, from the vaguest to the most specific. As an example I will use an iconic Finsbury animal we all know: The LEOPARD, and show you how it is classified taxonomically:

Domain: ARCHAEA - This taxon includes all living organisms except for bacterium, which are grouped in their own domain.

Kingdom: ANIMALIA - This taxon includes all eukaryotes that can move around in search of food. On the estate, I have found representatives for the kingdoms Protozoa (single-celled organisms like these Slime Moulds); Animalia; Plantae; and Fungi.

Phylum: CHORDATA - All animals that share a nerve chord. Other phyla in the animalia kingdom include Annelida (earthworms and co.), Mollusca (snails and slugs), Arthropoda (insects, ticks, spiders, mites, scorpions, crabs, millipedes etcetera).

Class: MAMMALIA - All chordates that nurse their babies with milk from mammary glands. Other classes in the Chordata phylum include Amphibia (frogs and toads), Reptilia (snakes, lizards and tortoises), and Aves (birds).

Order: CARNIVORA - All animals exhibiting the carnassial sheer, premolar teeth with cutting edges enabling the animal to cut through meat like a scissors. Other orders in the class mammalia include the Artiodactyla (antelope, pigs, giraffes), Perissodactyla (zebras and rhinos), Rodentia (rats, mice and porcupines), Chiroptera (bats), Lagomorpha (rabbits and hares), etcetera.

Family: FELIDAE - All cats. Other families in the Carnivora class include Canidae (dogs), Viverridae (genets and civets), Mustelidae (honey badgers, otters and co.), Hyaenidae (hyaenas and aardwolf) and Herpestidae (Mongooses).

Genus: PANTHERA - All the cats that have an elastic ligament attaching their oesophagus to the skeleton, allowing the throat to vibrate, creating a deep growl when required. Other genera in the Felidae family include Leptailurus (servals), Felis (wild cats and the domestic cat), Acinonyx (cheetahs) and Caracal (caracals). 

Species: PARDUS - Leopard and all its subspecies. Other species in the genus Panthera are lions (Panthera leo), jaguars (Panthera onca), tigers (Panthera tigris) and the snow leopard (Panthera uncia).

So far, I have identified seven different species of slime mould on the estate, including these two new ones! 

This is a description of the standard slime mould life cycle:

A single spore finds itself in a suitable environment, it germinates a few flagellated (have a tail for movement) protoplasts called Swarm Cells (not to be confused with a bee hive). These cells move around their environment eating bacteria and other microorganisms.

When they meet up with a potential mate they form a zygote and grow into a plasmodia as they split nuclei. A plasmodia is defined as a living structure of cytoplasm that contains many nuclei, instead of individual cells each with a nucleus. This plasmodia, which resembles slime or foam, feeds on more bacteria and other microorganisms and grows in size as other zygotes "swarm" to join and become an interconnected network of protoplasmic strands, with each strand's cytoplasmic contents streaming back and forth within itself. 

When this mass of single-celled organisms, that now behave like a multi-cellular organism, wants to move, the strand's contents stream in the required direction while protoplasm is withdrawn from the rear, allowing it to move at a top speed of about one millimetre per hour, leaving a snail trail behind. 

When food becomes scarce, the slime mould's behaviour becomes more fungus like and dries, forming a crust to which the nuclei migrate from within the cytoplasmic mass. This crust forms fungus-like fruiting bodies (both photos above), resembling minute mushrooms, that produce millions of spores that are released into the air, and the cycle continues. 

What a beauty! This is a Mole Snake, Pseudaspis cana, and it is a very big snake. This individual was almost one-and-a-half meters long and five centimetres thick at its thickest part! And that is not fat, it's muscle, lots of it. I know this because the snake lunged at me, lifting and throwing its thick body straight at me! This photo was taken moments before it lunged, and it didn't allow me to take further shots. Very aggressive indeed.

They are daytime active, non-venomous, and are equipped with very sharp teeth to help subdue rodents in their burrows. The juveniles are spotted and blotched and colourful, while the adults are plain-coloured. They occur throughout the southern half of Africa, and in the south of their range, are shiny black, in Mpumalanga and Limpopo they are the colour of the one in the photo. Further north they become greyer in colour.

 They spend a lot of time in animal burrows, seeking refuge in them when they are inactive, and searching them for food when hunting. Their main food are molerats (see blog of July 2020), who establish large burrow systems to accommodate their colonies. The snake can sometimes be found with half of its body protruding from a molehill, where the other half is inside the molerat's tunnel, waiting for the molerat to come along the passage. 

Now, if you check the blog from July 2020, you will see that the molerat has enormous incisor teeth that are used to dig its burrows. These teeth are dangerous to the snake, so I think the scars that are clearly visible on the top of the head of the snake in the picture may have been caused by a molerat retaliating to being eaten. Male Mole Snakes are also renowned for fighting aggressively during the breeding season (around October), and often inflict major wounds on each other, so if the snake in the photo is a male, that could also be the cause of the scarring on the head.

These snakes also capture and eat any other rodents, while the juveniles prefer reptiles, particularly lizards. Because of this, juveniles frequent rocky places while adults frequent the soft grasslands. The adults are also well-known egg eaters, particularly those of penguins on the west coast and the eggs of the Karoo Prinia in the Karoo, which are robbed from the nest. This is interesting, because egg-eater snakes have special adaptions that allow them to eat eggs, crush the shells, which are then separated from the contents and discarded while the contents are swallowed. The mole snake simply swallows the eggs whole!

The Mole Snake is also viviparous, which means it gives birth to live young, and it is one of only seven snakes on the planet that can have as much as one hundred babies at a time! The record holder is a puff adder that gave birth to 157 babies in a sitting! The other Southern African snakes in this group are the Mole Snake and the African python, who unlike the puffie and mole snake, lay eggs.

Finally, since the mole snake is diurnal, it spends its nights in the deserted burrows of other animals, its enemy while in its burrow would be Honey Badgers who like to dig for their subterranean prey items. In the day, only large raptors and land predators would be a threat to such a large, aggressive snake. 

I have featured cicada bugs before in my blogs of Springtime 2024, where I featured an unknown species emerging from its exuviae (final instar skin that is shed above the ground), and Autumn 2022 where I featured an empty exuviae of an unknown species.

This is a Cicada bug that I photographed some time ago but have finally managed to identify! It is a Hairy Orange-wing Cicada, Platypleura hirta, and, like most cicadas, it is very specific about which trees it sucks its juices from. 

This is the species we will encounter in the open grasslands sucking juices from our Silvery Sugarbushes, Protea roupelliae (the same protea that the Guerney's Sugarbird associates with). In forested areas, they associate with another tree from the same family, the African Beechwood, Faurea saligna, so if you see a cicada (or hear) on any of these two trees, it will be of this species.

This is a life history description I have given before in those blogs:

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 which pick-up and analyse sounds, particularly the mating buzz of the males. The males also have these hearing organs 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 and turn it on its back, it is easy to distinguish between male and females: 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 semi circular 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 are, 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 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 pin-point the insect.

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, 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 insect 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 rests. After a while, the skin on the back of the nymph splits open and the adult slowly emerges, wings and all. 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. If one manages to find a bunch of these insects together on a branch of a tree, one can safely deduce that it comprises a mixed sex grouping at a feeding site.     

We were hiking north of Goudkoppies when we flushed a Cape Longclaw, Macronyx capensis, from a small clump of long grass in a field of shorter grasses. Cape Longclaws are one of the more common birds found in our open grasslands, where the nasal cat-like meeow is a regular sound. We approached the spot where the bird was flushed from and found this beautifully constructed nest on the floor between two tufts of long grass, with the long leaves of the grass bent over, covering the nest from above.

Longclaws are a small genus of birds that are closely related to pipits, with the major difference being the presence of a very long claw on the "thumbs" of the feet. When the foot is opened the foot and claw measure more than seventy millimetres in length, that's more than a third of the bird's bodies' full length! This long claw is supposed to be an adaption for walking on the top of grass tufts, like someone wearing snowshoes in the snow. Strangely, though, Longclaws do not usually walk on the tops of grass tufts, they normal walk on the ground beneath the grass sward in search of arthropod prey!

A monogamous pair establish a bond that persists for as long as they are both alive. They then establish a territory in open grassland, which the male advertises with songs from a perch and singing while performing a simple advertisement flight by combining a fluttering flight with song before dropping abruptly into the grass. If an intruding longclaw enters his territory, the male will attack, and believe me, I have witnessed a pair of closely related Yellow-throated Longclaws fighting near Ship Mountain in the Kruger Park, they fight very violently.

On that occasion, I stopped our game drive vehicle beside a pair that were fighting while, what looked like a female, watched on. They paid no attention to the huge vehicle that stopped right beside them, because they were so intent on killing each other. There was blood and feathers all over the place and on both participants! We landed up leaving due to time constraints before the outcome was reached, but I'm sure they were both badly injured afterwards. I hope she was worth it!

Once they have mated, the male accompanies the female while she gathers nest material and constructs the nest as in the photograph, and then she lays two or three eggs within. She incubates the eggs for a fortnight while the male brings her meals of insects to sustain her.

Once the chicks hatch, both sexes feed them for a further fortnight before they are ready to leave the nest for the first time. This is when the kids learn to fly while they accompany their parents for a few weeks while the parents teach them what to eat and how to gather what they eat.

They mostly forage on the ground by scraping termite colony tunnels and exposing them, chasing down beetles and other ground dwellers, and sometimes by perching on the edge of a branch and hawking flying insects. They also sometimes eat green grass seeds which they prune from the upright inflorescences.

All the literature I have read through regarding the Transvaal Dwarf Chameleon, Bradypodion transvaalense, suggests that it is beholden to the small pockets of forest in our grasslands. And indeed, I have always found them in those forests or, at least, in the forest edges or riparian bush along the rivers.

This chap, on the other hand, was encountered in the relatively short, open grasslands high up in our neighbouring Emoyeni property. Not even a small tree within sight in a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree radius! If it was looking for a forest, it was very lost! It did, however, appear quite content, so I think its presence in a treeless environment was by intent.

These odd reptiles are an African thing, only occurring naturally on this continent and her islands, with half of all species restricted to Madagascar alone. There is one species indigenous to southern Europe and a few species in south-western Asia, all obviously radiating out of Africa.

There are five features that sets these unique reptiles apart from all other lizards: The ability to change colour which helps hide them from predators and from their prey; the arrangement of digits on the hands and feet opposite to each other (zygodactyl), enabling them to cling tightly to branches and twigs; Their remarkable ability to focus each eye in a different direction, an ability which is still not entirely understood; the presence of a prehensile tail (a tale that can grab hold of things), enabling them to climb more efficiently; and, of course, their long, sticky tongue that can shoot out of its mouth and entrap prey as far away as the full length of the chameleon's body!

This is a Leafcutter Bee from the Megachile genus of typical bees. They are called leafcutter bees because they cut leaves up into flat sheets that they use to construct the walls of the chambers they build in an existing hole in wood. Those "Wasp Hotels", a block of wood with numerous different diameter holes drilled into it that you hang in your garden, are designed for these bees and their relatives.

These bees collect pollen just like honeybees do, except the main differences are that these bees are solitary and that these bees do not make honey as a source of energy during the winter.

Firstly, the female bee finds a suitable existing hole in the surface of a log or twig or any other object. She then flies to a nearby tree and lands on the flat surface of a leaf. She then cuts the leaf around herself so that she leaves a neat hole in the leaf. She uses the neatly cut leaf disk to line the inside of the hole she has identified.

She then divides this lined hole into separate sections, separated by folded green leaves, creating cells which are stacked one after the other over the entire length of the hollow passage. Each cell is stuffed with pollen, an egg is laid within, and the cell is sealed off from the following one.

After a suitable time, the egg hatches and the larva (maggot) emerges and eats the pollen, moults a few times, and then spins a silken cocoon around itself within its cell and pupates. The adult emerges usually in the following season, and the males go in search of a female and, after mating, promptly die. The females remain alive long enough to build the cells to nourish their offspring. And so the cycle continues...

This is another special type of bee that I encountered on one of my hikes during December. It is a White-barred Cuckoo Bee, Thyreus delumbatus. Another common name for the bee is Curved Cloak-and-dagger Bee. Both names indicate that this bee is deceptive in some or other manner. 

And it sure is: It is a parasite of the Megachile Leafcutter bee that I have just featured before this! This bee even resembles its host, as you can see, which helps it sneak around its host relatively undetected.

The Cuckoo bee finds a female Leafcutter bee and follows her at a discrete distance until it discovers where the Leafcutter is preparing cells for its offspring. She waits till the Leafcutter is gone off to collect more pollen which she is busy stuffing into one of her cells. The Cuckoo bee enters the chamber and lays an egg within, before the Leafcutter lays her egg. The Cuckoo bee then exits and hides nearby until the Leafcutter has moved on to her next cell and the activity is repeated until the Leafcutter is finished.

The Cuckoo bee's larvae hatch before the larva of the Leafcutter and eat all the pollen. When the larva of the Leafcutter bee hatches, it is confronted by a monster instead of tasty pollen! The larva of the Cuckoo bee then eats the Leafcutter larva too!!! Not a nice world out there if one is an insect, that's for sure!

If one notices that a green part of a plant is wilting, it is often worthwhile to approach the plant to see why. In this case, the wilted section of plant was infested with aphids, the bugs that suck the juices from the plant. When I approached this particular plant, I found the aphids were being attended to by Hairy Sugar ants, Camponotus niveosetosus, while they solicited honeydew from the aphids.

I mentioned some amazing facts about the fecundity of aphids in my July 2019 blog, adding how important their enemies were in keeping their numbers down. The aphids though, are certainly not taking things lying down and actively employ guards to protect themselves when the opportunity presents itself.

In this case the aphids attract ants with a sweet excretion called honeydew, which is the still-nutritious waste of the copious amounts of plant sap that they consume. These big, aggressive ants become protective of the sapsuckers and defend them against enemies like Ladybirds, their larva and others (like Lacewing larvae).

 

And on the very last day of January, I conducted one of those bird walks where there are literally zero birds, and, while staring forlornly up, for non-existent birds, in the Steenkamps' forest, I noticed this most delicate string of flowers hanging from the branch of one of the forest trees. It is a new species of orchid for our Finsbury list and is called a Common Summer Tree Orchid, Mystacidium flannaganii. 

In my "Winter 2023" bog I featured a close relative of this, M. gracile, which resembles this as well, although its flowers are bigger and less numerous. I initially thought this was the same species but was puzzled by the flowering time, because M. gracile flowers at the end of winter, while this one flowers in mid-summer.

Check that blog out to get an idea of the pollination of the plant, which is affected by Settling Moths during the night. The flower begins producing nectar, in those elongated spurs, just after sundown until just before sunrise. The resultant odour attracts these moths who rest on the tiny flower and dip their extremely long, straw-like mouthparts into the spur to extract the nectar, collecting pollen at the same time to deposit on the following flower.

I had to return later with a ladder from the workshop to enable me to reach the plant and photograph it, allowing me to identify it, and as is expected in the crazy rules of life, I spotted a male and female African Finfoot in S6 on the way, birds that I would have given a left leg for the day before! 

That's it for the festive season! It was fun, fun and more fun. See you soon...