June 2019

JUNE 2019

June has come and gone and the days are already getting longer.The grasslands have dried out as you can see from the above landscape shot featuring Mount Anderson as seen from the extreme north east of the Estate. There's plenty of beautiful dry season flowers blooming, especially the succulents. The aloes are blooming fiercely this season and I have had trouble driving these country roads because my eyes have been on the aloes and not the road, and at 90km/h it can be hazardous to say the least! I won't make it this year but I love to visit Berg-en-Dal camp at this time because it is filled with aloes of multiple species, with myriad sunbirds flittering in a frenzie all about. 

We have winter and summer flowering Aloes here on the Estate and the species currently blooming are featured below together with a bunch of other interesting wildlife I have encountered during my work here in the month of June... 

A bunch of Cliff Aloe, Aloe arborescens (arborescens = tree-like), growing in its typical habitat in the Lower Majubane valley (Note the Majubane waterfall in the distance behind them). This common aloe occurs all the way from the cape peninsula around the eastern mountainous side of the continent up into Malawi. It is probably the most cultivated aloe worldwide as an ornamental and it certainly is easy to propagate from cuttings or truncheons. They also grow happily in the shade and if you hike to the Steenkamps waterfalls, just beyond the rope balustrade, look north and you will see the south-facing slope before you is festooned with these plants. And they only receive decent sunlight in the very middle of summer! In the Orient, these aloes are commonly grown in gardens and widely used as a convenient first aid remedy for burns and abrasions, by applying the jelly found inside the broken leaves to the wound. Also very soothing for sunburn.

Although the spotted aloes are very difficult to distinguish from each other, I think these are Aloe affinis (affinis refering to its close affinity with other spotted aloes) also with the Majubane waterfall in the distance. They only occur within 1200 and 2000 meters above sea level and in between northern Swaziland in the south, Mariepskop in the north, Graskop in the east and Lydenburg in the west. The most proud specimen stands 20-30 meters east of Patrick's gate on the right side of the road as you enter Highland Run.

This spotted aloe, Aloe longibracteata, is the easiest to identify because of its elongated floral bracts (hence the specific name). Otherwise it differs from the previous species by its smaller stature and the flower stalks habit of branching lower down. 

Ha! Look at the long blonde bangs hanging over this little orb-weaver's eyes. She is a Hairy Field Spider, Neoscona hirta, and she's only 5mm long when crouched like this. Once she reached adulthood, she remained in the same web and is waiting for a male to find her. When he does, he spins a small little triangular web on the ground and deposits a little sack of sperm onto it, turns around and picks this up with his pedipalps (arm-like appendages). He then gingerly approaches the females web and tugs on the strands. She naturally responds as if this movement is a prey item snagged in her web so he drops down on a drag-line to prevent becoming a meal. He repeats this process until she realises that it is a male and not prey. He then approaches her and deposits the sperm pack in her genitalia and beats a speedy retreat lest he overstay his welcome and does become her prey. She can store this sperm for the whole season using only what is required to fertilise her eggs and saving some for later use on another batch of eggs. She produces an egg-sack in which she deposits her eggs and guards them until they hatch and reach their 3rd or 4th instar. Once ready, the minute spiderlings climb to the highest point of their mother's web, unfurl a strand of silk and drift off into the wind and into the unknown like a lost balloon. This process is known as ballooning and it is how spiders disperse from their mother's nest. Many perish because they land up in unsuitable habitats but those that survive, often do so very far from their birth place. David Attenborough has even collected ballooning spiderlings, alive and healthy, many kilometers above the earth's surface in the upper layers of the stratosphere!

Another beautifully hairy chap. A Bee Fly from the family Bombyliidae in the Diptera order (flies). They are powerful fliers and excellent at hovering. They get all their nutritional requirements from pollen and they will hover over a flower and gather it without landing. The gravid female will seek out the entrance to a tunnel that houses the eggs and stored food of  the solitary bee or tsetse fly that is it's host and lay a solitary egg there. When the grub, fat and legless, emerges from it's egg, it burrows into these chambers and eats the stored food and the larvae of it's host. Locusts are a host to some species of Bee Fly and the larvae will do the same to the subterranean nest of these pests, making them a "good fly". 

This velvety Eucalyptus Weevil, Gonipterus sp., with it's metallic golden eyes, was trying to overwinter in the dried inflorescence of a Phymaspermum daisy on the Rock Kestrel Trail before I rudely interrupted it. Weevils belong to one of the largest of all insect families but are all easy to identify with their cute look of long (some very long) snout with antennae in front of it's eyes. Touch any species and they will immediately sham death by falling onto their sides with their legs outstretched and remain like that for some time, looking quite dead. Many species are economically important as they are pests on specific crops. This is an exotic species, brought here from Australia together with it's host plant: Bluegum (Eucalyptus) trees. It was thought to be one species, Gonipterus scutellatus, but is now one of ten in the "scutellatus" complex and is still to be formally described. And yes, I wrapped it back up in it's cosy overwintering inflorescence.

Another exotic, this fruit capsule of a Jimsonweed, Datura stramonium, is drying out and in so doing splits open and peels it's sides backwards, exposing the 500 odd little black seeds within. Any movement of the plant, either by wind or animal, scatter the seeds about. I remember my generation calling them the afrikaans name of MALPITTE when I was at school, referring to the hallucinogenic properties of the seeds that make a person mad. All parts of the plant contain dangerous amounts of the tropane alkaloids atropine, hyoscyamine and scopolamine, classified as deleriants. The reason it is not utilised in modern times is because the risk of overdose is high, but in older times it was used by the locals in central america to help them commute with their ancestral spirits. The dormant seeds can be buried and still germinate when exposed many decades later and fire also initiates germination. This was realised in the Kliprots valley this past season after the fire of last August when they just sprouted up everywhere, causing me and my team to stop what we were doing and concentrate on removing these plants before they produced seed. The plants are annuals meaning that they die after producing their seeds, so they are geared to growing quickly and I have found that if a plant is uprooted with small undeveloped fruits, the fruits will still develop, draining all the nutrients from the dying plant. This meant that once small fruits were visible, they had to be harvested from the plant before the plant was uprooted. Over a period of about six weeks we filled 46 fish feed bags with these fruits and with about 1000 fruits per bag and 500 seeds per fruit, we are looking at about 23 million seeds that were removed from the area between K33 south to W6.

A Common Dotted Border butterfly sucking up the sweet nectar of a Wild Aster, Felicia filifolia. These small, hardy shrubs are filled with copious amounts of gay mauve daisies that brighten up the drab winter grasslands. They are particularly common on the rocky, shallow soils around Elsmere on the Spekboom stream. Anne has also successfully planted a few individuals outside the office, behind Simon's quarters, and they are flowering even more profusely than their wild cousins!  

After the aloes, the honey-suckle flowers of the Tree Fuchsia, Halleria lucida, are also an important food source for our sunbirds and sugarbirds. Found in the riparian areas, in the Afro-temperate forests and on exposed rocky situations at high altitudes on the Estate, the Tree Fuchsia is one of our more common trees. The tree is unusual in that it's flowers, then edible but untasty fruits are produced directly from the stem, not from the tips of it's branches like most flowering trees. Fig trees do this too, like our Red-leaved Figs, Ficus ingens, and the Stamvrug, Englerophytum magaliesmontanum, which is not found on the Estate but is plentiful on Klipspringer hill in Rivendell farm on the entrance road. This is a very popular garden plant as it attracts sunbirds to it's flowers and many other birds to it's juicy fruit and it's shiny green leaves are attractive against it's dark, fissured bark.

Another succulent is the Kalachoe rotundifolia, found in the shade in steep rocky situations throughout the Estate. This little crassula grows easily from seed and cuttings and blooms for a long period of time, making it popular as a garden plant as well. Other crassulas that are flowering now to look for on the Estate are the Kalanchoe thyrsiiflora, Cotyledon orbiculata (Also planted by Anne, alongside the Felicia filifolia bushes behind Simon's room) and Crassula swaziensis.

Last year in my winter blog (June and July 2018) I posted a picture and a caption of a Cross-marked Sand Snake, Psammophis crucifer,. It is a blotchy and boldly marked snake that pursues it's prey of lizards and other cold-blooded vertebrates. This month I encountered two individuals of the much rarer plain phase, one where we chop fire wood at the central area and this one that James Mackenzie from Pebble Creek caught at K9. The rarer plain form is found around the Arnot area south west of us and the more common, boldy marked form is found here and south of us. Looks like we are lucky here to have both versions of this active, day-time snake.

This Twin Vapourer moth, Bracharoa quadripunctata, was photographed while resting in the thickets at SPK12. The combed antennae identify this individual as a male, while the females have simple antennae (This is so with all moths). When the female moth is ready to mate she releases and advertisement pheromone chemical into the air and a male, as far away as 100 meters, can detect as little as a nanogram (one billionth of a gram!) of this pheromone with these combed antennae. He will then turn in that direction and fly until he finds the next and the next in a zig-zag  until he finds the female, whence they mate. On the extreme, the male moths of the Silkworm, Bombyx mori, can detect a females advertisement pheromone up to 4,5 kilometers away! 

An Umbrella Paper Wasp, Polistes sp. Vespidae, warms up in the sun. In early spring, an over-wintered female, called a "foundress", begins constructing a nest from chewed vegetation material that dries like paper once it has formed (hence the common name). The nest consists of a pliable petiole that attaches multiple hexagonal cells, each surrounded by a potential six neighbours, to the inner branch of a tree or the eaves of your roof. A single egg is laid in each cell by the foundress and guarded by her until they hatch into immobile larvae with voracious appetites that she has to satisfy with pieces of caterpillar until they enter their pupal stage. The adults that emerge from these pupae are all worker females who are completely subordinate to the foundress and their task is to collect food and protect the next brood. The final brood of the season contains males and females who disperse and find mates. The mated females over-winter to become the next generation of foundresses. What I find amazing about such a simple creature is that when she goes in search of caterpillars for her brood, she actually tracks them down by flying low to the ground in search of caterpillar droppings which are not hidden away like the caterpillars themselves. Once she finds these droppings, she flies upwards into the foliage and searches for the hidden caterpillar responsible for the droppings....busted! 

That's all for this month. The temperature has really been very mild this winter but the temperature has plummeted these first days of July so I suspect it will be cold this month. But there is lots of fire wood so come down and cuddle around the fire during the cold and play in the sun during our beautiful sunny, blue-skied days. See you soon!