OCTOBER 2020

 OCTOBER 2020

October certainly started off with a bang with 36mm of rain falling on the first two days and another 80mm falling over the following week. It was definitely enough to get everything growing nicely but, unfortunately, there was no further rainfall during the rest of the month. But the lifting of the more stringent Covid-19 restrictions seemed like a floodgate being opened and so we had lots of visitors which means I enjoyed leading many mountain and gorge walks. Although we do enjoy large animal sightings on these hikes, it is not always the norm. But this month I got to see quite a lot: like a distant sighting of a leopard while walking with Sue Band and friends from Finsbury House (unit 23) high up near the Troutkloof waterfall; or being approached and then by-passed by a herd of around fifty Blesbuck, Damaliscus dorcas phillipsi, pictured above, near the summit of Mount Anderson with Paige and friends from Rod's Rest (unit 7). I have described a few of the other interesting things I saw and did during the month below:

I encountered this spiny, squat little lizard up in Flavida plains on the Miner's cottage road in the heat of the day. It initially attempted to hide away from me but when I exposed it, it approached and looked straight up at me like this. It is a Ground Agama, Agama aculeata, and I thought it was rather cute. But I may not have approached it so closely with my little camera if I had read what I read after taking the picture: that they are aggressive for their size and very willing to bite with sharp teeth that project from the outside of their jaws, like with Chameleons, Iguanas and Bearded Dragons, within whose suborder they reside taxonomically. Fortunately though, it didn't jump up and attack my face. Another feature these lizards share with their chameleon cousins is that they are able to change colour. Not to blend into their environment like a chameleon since their habitat is quite consistent and so their fixed cryptic colouration certainly suffices. But they will darken when needing more heat and lighten when needing to cool down and also the males can attain bright colouration, particularly around the neck and head, during the breeding season to help advertise himself to potential mates. The best example that all who visit the Kruger Park will know, is the Bloukopkoggelmander that bobs its bright blue head up and down on his territorial tree. The male Ground Agama's head also turns blue, albeit not as brightly as the Bloukopkoggelmander, and he establishes a ground-based territory and advertises by bobbing his colourful head from atop a large stone or boulder in a prominent spot within it. Since it is well into the breeding season I would surmise that the above individual is either a female, or a juvenile male who both remain cryptic at this time. 

This massive Twig Wilter Bug, Anoplocnemis curvipes, was perched atop a grass stem beside Loop road just after the first heavy rains of the month. Remember, all true bugs (Hemiptera order of insects) have sucking mouthparts which are used to suck juices from their vegetable or animal prey, and this bugs powerful mouthparts can be seen tucked beneath its chin. It inserts this sucking apparatus into a young twig of its chosen plant and injects an enzyme which liquifies the plants' cells so the bug can suck them up. Most vegetarian bugs like Aphids (blogs of July 2019 and January 2020) or Spittle bugs (blogs of February 2019 and April 2019) don't have to liquify their food first because they insert their probiscids into the phloem, the vascular tunnels that transport sugars and minerals around the plant, and suck up the fluids therein, This allows them to suck up large quantities of juices that they can filter and use as protection as in the Spittle bugs, or food for body guards as in the Aphids. The Twig Wilter bugs' use of enzymes to liquify the plants cells provide it with less juices but more nutrition. This injection of enzymes also causes the young twig of the plant to immediately wilt, giving the bug its common name. Once the female lays her eggs in a row, within the stems of the chosen plant, she hangs around nearby and protects the site. After the nymphs have hatched, she still remains nearby to protect them with the strong-smelling, toxic fluid that she can emit from the gland just in front of where the rear leg attaches to the body (surrounded by reddish skin in the photo). Oddly, of all the literature I scraped together on this bug, which was quite a lot, there was always mention of the enlarged back legs but never a reason given for it being swollen like that. 

I'm touching the new shoots of this Cascade Asparagus, Asparagus ramosissimus, that occurs commonly in our forested gorges. The fresh tips of these shoots, or spears, are edible like the cultivated species but a lot smaller. The roots are also a good source of nourishment and were always included in the lists of edible plant matter in our survival courses back in the lowveld. But this species' habit of its quickly growing, heavily branched, up to three meter long trailing branches cascading over the edges of rocks in the gorges make it a grand garden rockery subject for shaded spots. It is truly beautiful in that setting and easy to grow from seed.

This is the tiniest of the Sugar Ants, a Hairy Sugar ant, Camponotus niveosetosus, at six or seven millimeters long, upon a lichen-encrusted boulder up on the grassland flats of Goudkoppies. These are among the most widespread South African sugar ant and also the ant most commonly associated with butterflies of the Lycaenidae family (see the Lydenburg Copper in the January 2020 blog for an idea of the butterfly larvae life cycle; and also see 'Some small animals' blog from 19 November 2018) and the care and upbringing of their caterpillars by ants (Myrmecophily). Caterpillars with thick, leathery integument so the bite and handling by ants does not affect them. Caterpillars that don't inherently wriggle when molested so that they don't excite the ants. Now it's the honeydew that the caterpillar produces from the seventh segment of its body that initially attracts the ant. But, as discussed above, the caterpillars chew plant material, they don't suck the juices from the vascular system so they cannot produce copious amounts of this 'honeydew' like aphids and spittle bugs do. The caterpillar's main objective, though, is just to get the ants near them so that they will be able to pick up the 'ant' pheromones that the caterpillar is releasing from small epidermal glands dotted over much of its body. These pheromones, produced by the caterpillar, are the same as the pheromones the ants produce to tell other ants to stay calm! Clever eh? In fact, the caterpillars have a pair of tubercles on their eighth segment that appear to have an olfactory function that prevents the ants from over-utelising the honeydew producing gland. Crazy.

I posted a blog in November 2017 called "A Successful Burn" and it was all about the very hot management fire that we burned to help rid the very north eastern block of the estate of woody plants, including large seed-bearing Pines. In that blog I explained why a hot fire was necessary and in further blogs (April 2019 and February 2020) I have explained the advantages of the Patch Mosaic burning plan that we have adopted at Finsbury. This is when we burn more smaller blocks each year in the wet season to simulate lightning fires. That very north eastern block that we burned hot has had three years to regrow and therefore this season was the right time to burn again. But since it was previously infested with large seed-bearing Pine trees, the majority of the seedbank in the block has germinated, resulting in swarms of new Pine saplings invading the same block again. This means that another hot fire was necessary so I planned on burning it, again, after the first significant rains of the season. Well, that happened at the beginning of the month and, once again, a successful hot burn was completed. In the picture above, you will notice Andries Maphanga, one of our senior field workers, igniting the fire from the bottom of the hill and behind him, the huge flames rapidly consuming the green field of Pine on the slope. The old tree skeletons in the picture are the remains of the larger Pines that were destroyed in the previous burn. We are winning the war against alien invasive plants here in Finsbury and although fire is only one of the weapons that we are using, it is a very powerful one against Pine. Another successful controlled burn... 

I remember a few years ago, Fraser Moore from Rock Solid (unit 22) gave me a photo of a Spotted Harlequin Snake, Homoroselaps lacteus, that he had encountered on one of his very long hikes up into the mountains. Having never worked in the grassland biome before coming to Finsbury, I had only ever seen pictures of the snake before and was quite jealous of the young man. Finally, while on a walk along the Zebra trail during the month, I saw a flash of colour from my peripheral. After some searching I finally came across the most colourful snake I have ever seen, a Spotted Harlequin snake. And the photograph does not do it justice. It is a highly glossy, fast-moving and vigorous snake whose erratic movements, combined with the bright, shiny, contrasting colours, confuse a potential predator, making it harder to pin-point and capture. This is the same sort of result a Zebra gets with its contrasting stripes and erratic movements when escaping predators. This endemic snake is venomous, has a very narrow gape and broad fangs in the front of its mouth with hardened scales on its snout. This design is adopted by snakes, like Burrowing Asps, that follow and catch other burrowing animals in small, confined areas. Very little is known about the venom but it appears to be very similar to that of its cousins, the Burrowing Asps, and therefore could be harmful to humans. Beware this beauty if you are a legless lizard, blind snake, thread snake or even termites and their larvae because you will always need to have one eye over your shoulder in those closed spaces you thought were safe!

This attractive flower belongs to a small tree or bush from the Mint family called Blue Cat's Whiskers, Rotheca myricoides. The tree is found on forest fringes and in riparian areas but is not common in either of those. There is an easy-to-find specimen at the lowest point of the dip in the path that runs from Solitude (unit 5) to its water tank. The plant was originally placed in the Clerodendron genus in the Verbenaceae family but, after molecular and genetic studies carried out in 1998, it was moved to the Rotheca genus in the Lamiaceae (mint family). Its habit of rapid growth combined with the attractive foliage make it a sought after garden subject but it is most suited as a large pot plant for a patio. It also responds well to pruning, which makes it very dense with copious amounts of bloom.

A beautiful mosaic of mosses carpet a south-facing (always shady) quartzite boulder at high altitude on Mount Formosa. The ropes are Running Clubmoss, Lycopodium clavatum, and the green bottom right is Haircap moss, Polytrichum sp; while the pale moss is a luxurious bog moss from the Sphagnum genus. The pale bog moss is a true moss which is non-vascular and whose roots act only as anchorage; the Haircap moss is also a true moss, but it has columns of enlarged cells that conduct water surrounded by smaller cells that pass nutrients around. Sort of like very primitive xylem and phloem. Its roots also act only as anchorage; then the Running clubmoss is also a very primitive plant that produces spores instead of seeds like the two previous species but it is vascular, with roots that absorb water and nutrients, and xylem and phloem that transport these throughout the plant. My blog of 25 April 2020 gives more on mosses and Haircap mosses but the pale bog moss is what excites me the most because it is quite rare in Africa and a great find. It is very common in the northern hemisphere, New Zealand and the south of South America where it plays a vital role in the creation of peat bogs because by storing large quantities of water, it prevents the decay of dead plant material. The moss contains two different types of cells: one containing chlorophyll which is used in the process of photosynthesis and the other as large, dead, structural cells that hold water up to twenty times the plants' weight. Sphagnum / bog / peat mosses are well known to gardeners because it is sold in nurseries to be used as a soil conditioner, increasing the soils capacity to store nutrients and water. It is also used as a natural wound dressing because of its absorption qualities and its acidity, which prevents bacterial and fungal growth. When I touched the moss, it felt so very soft and it was about fifteen centimeters deep! Very luxurious.

I explained how a foundress Umbrella Paper Wasp establishes her little colony in my blog of June 2019 but I learned something new when researching this similar species, Polistes fastidiotus: When the larvae, who are restricted to their hexagonal cells, see a nurse wasp arrive on the scene with chunks of yummy caterpillar, they bulge out from their cells while opening and closing their gaping mouths and some even scratch against the sides of their cells to create a noise, begging for the food like a bird chick would. What I found out is that the nurse wasp has a motivation to feed the larvae, and that is a clear, viscous liquid that leaks from the side of the larva's mouth when it is touched by the nurse, which is obviously to the taste of the nurses because they relish it. In fact, it has been found that, when a nurse wasp is not in attendance, other male and female wasps sometimes try to solicit this liquid gold and if the larva does not release some, the wasps can become aggressive and try to pull the larva from its receptacle and then suddenly shove it violently back until it emits some! 

For the past fortnight I have had a pair of these Lesser Striped Swallows, Cecropis abyssinica, visiting around my house for entire days at a time. If I open my sliding door they enter my lounge and sometimes come to a rest on my window sill while making quite a racket. I initially thought they were planning on building a nest under the eave of my patio but, either they are very careful and, even after all this time, they have still not decided, or they simply enjoy the insects around my house and have a nest elsewhere. When building a nest, they collect soft mud from the sides of puddles and mold it into a pellet in their mouths, fly to the nest site and add the pellet to their mud construction. The finished product, which takes two or three weeks plus to complete, is a sealed bowl with a long entrance tunnel, attached to the underside of a rock overhang or bridge or house's roof eave. The construction is undertaken by both sexes in their monogamous relationship and they begin to roost in the unfinished nest already when it is only half complete. The female lays an average of three eggs which are incubated solely by her while she is being fed by the male for two to three weeks. Both sexes spend 18 days feeding the rapidly growing chicks until they are fledged and taught to fly. They all roost together as a family for another month or so thereafter before the chicks depart and the breeding pair begin with their next brood. This happens two to three times a season and the breeding pair often return to the same nest year after year, either simply repairing the nest from last year, or breaking it up completely and building a new one where the old one was. 

This little colony of mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of a single fungus which contains a very powerful set of peroxidases that decompose both cellulose and lignin in hardwoods, causing white wood rot. Not common mushrooms, these Large-pored Funnel Caps, Polyporus arcularius, can be found on dead hardwood trunks and branches deep in our forested gorges. Most mushrooms that we are familiar with have gills on the underside of the cap that release the reproductive spores (same spores as in the primitive plants at the beginning of the blog) while these chaps have elongated pores which is noticeable in the photo. Medicinally, extracts of mycelial culture from these mushrooms showed antibacterial activity against Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and Staphylococcus aureus, all bacterium associated with severe food poisoning.

Another fungus, this time a bracket fungus called Turkey's Tail Mushroom, Trametes versicolor, is also found in our forested gorges, but more commonly than the above species. Although not edible to humans, this mushroom is very yummy to a bunch of insects like the caterpillars of the Fungus moth, Nemaxera sp, the maggots of the small, hunch-backed, forest-dwelling flies, Polyporivora picta, that form dancing clouds at dusk and dawn; and the Fungus Gnat, Mycetophila sp from overseas. Medicinally, though, Polysaccharide K and Polysaccharidepeptides can be obtained from the mycelium of the mushrooms. These extracts have been clinically used in cancer therapy, treating hepatitus, hyperlipidemia, chronic bronchitis and others since 1977 in China and Japan.  

Look at this stunning little forest of Lichens (see blogs The Jolly Season 2018, May 2019 and January 2020) residing together on a small branch on a dead tree high up in the mist belt above Kliprots valley. A five rand coin would easily cover the entire forest! There are three different species of lichens here, representing all the different lichen forms. The orange standing discs are the apothecia (spore-producing fruiting bodies) of the yellow, twiggy Teloschistes pulvinaris lichen which is a good example of a fruticose lichen. The grey pot with the pink porridge in it is an apothecia of the grey lichen called  Hypotrachyna, which is a good example foliose lichen. Then, finally, the circular, browny discs on the right of the picture are the apothecia of Lecanoria sp which is a good example of a crustose lichen. Looks like plants from Mars...  

That's it for October. Although the estate is looking lush and green, we could still do with a lot more rain and let's hope that November is the month for that. Can't wait to see you all here for the festive season. Have a great November.

SEPTEMBER 2020

SEPTEMBER 2020

September showed a lot of promise when it comes to rainfall by hosting the first rains of the season on the first day of the month! Okay, it was only 6mm of rain but it was still wet. Unfortunately there was only a further 2mm for the remainder of the month but it was overcast for a lot of the time, providing us with some spectacular skies like the photo above that was taken from the helipad facing north east. Being spring month, there was a lot of wildlife activity as everything seemed to be waiting in anticipation for the life-giving rains to arrive proper. Below is a gallery of some of those things that I managed to capture on this little camera of mine:

I was enjoying an afternoon walk with Roger Nicholson and his guests from Kliprots Creek (unit 24) when someone found this Donkey-faced Weevil hiding out inside a Saint John's Wort flower. Very appropriate it's name is, since it really does have a dufus sort of donkey face. It even has chewing mouthparts at the end of that long nose just like an ass. The snouted weevils or true weevils belong to an enormous family of beetles called the Curculionidae and although the members of this family look rather similar, their diets and behaviours are extremely diverse. Generally though, their defense, once molested, is to simply fall over sideways with legs outstretched and to play dead. The elytra, which are the hard shields on the back that cover the wings of other beetles, are fused together in snouted weevils, leaving them unable to fly but to provide them with an almost indestructible exoskeleton. In fact, even when they are trodden on by large mammals they are usually just pressed into the ground and not crushed, leaving an indentation in the ground after they move on. This suits them because most of them are very specific about their food plants and they choose the same plants as larvae (fat white grubs) and as adults. This means that they don't need to move very far in their lives and so they can be, and are, rather sloth-like. I suspect the Donkey-faced Weevils, Bronchus sp., have a similar lifestyle to their close relatives from the Chrysolopus genus and so would share a similar life cycle where the female weevil bores a hole for each egg into the stem at the base of her chosen host plant. Once the eggs hatch, the larvae burrow down into the roots of the plant and feed there until they are ready to pupate. They pupate beneath the soil beside the host plant and emerge as adults who dig themselves out of the ground and proceed to climb the host tree closest to them, slowly. This lifestyle where all stages feed on the same plant make weevils a great pest to man in many parts of the world but also make suitable candidates as bio-control agents. Depends on which side of the fence you sit...

Now, this Jewel Beetle from the Bupestridae, a different family of beetles, has a remarkably similar life cycle to the Donkey Face above: the female lays eggs in the soil close to the roots of a plant and the grub-like larvae burrow into the roots; once developed the larvae pupate beneath the soil and later emerge as adults; the adults eat foliage, stems or flowers of plants as well but Jewel Beetles are not as particular as the Donkey Face. But where the Donkey Face is slow and cumbersome, the Jewel Beetle is a jack in the box! She's quick to take flight and loves being active during the hottest time of the day. If you look closely you will see that she is also adorned with bright, iridescent colouring, hence the name Jewel Beetle. In fact, this species, Lampetis amourotica, is pretty bland compared to most of the family, who have blasts of rainbow-coloured iridescence covering their elytra, not just parts of the underside like this one. The iridescent colours that reflect off these animals change as you change the direction at which you look at them, like the rainbow colours that change on a compact disk as you move it around in your hand. Now, most insects that are brightly coloured use this aposmetic colouration (bright, bold colouration) as a warning to potential predators that they are either poisonous to eat or dangerous to molest. Or they are mimics of such but this limits population numbers of the mimic to less than a quarter of the model population, otherwise predators will not take the warning seriously any longer. Bright iridescent colouring, however, appears to have the opposite effect: it provides camouflage! Researchers at the University of Bristol filled hundreds of iridescent empty cases (exoskeletons) of Jewel Beetles with mealworms and also hundreds of cases painted with solid colours. They pinned these to trees in a nature reserve and left them for a few days. When they collected these cases they found that the huge majority of surviving mealworms were in the iridescent cases. It seems that the iridescence is difficult for a moving predator to recognise or pin-point. The diversity of the insect world is certainly extreme, that's for sure!

This little camera of mine is unsuitable for bird photography but sometimes I manage to get so close to a bird that I can snap off a poor shot. Like this Black-shouldered Kite, Elanus caeruleus, that allowed me to approach within meters on my motorcycle just beyond the driveway to Elsmere (unit 11) on the Spekboom River. The scalloping on the grey feathers, the slight tawny wash and the lack of a red eye indicate that this is a juvenile and the lack of even a yellow eye suggest that it only left the nest a month or less ago. I'm sure it is this inexperience that allowed me to get so close. Since the first clutch of eggs laid by the female is usually around March and it takes three months to get the chicks to disperse and look after themselves, it appears that this must be offspring of the third clutch of a local breeding pair. With females breeding within their first year of life, this fecundity, and the species' tendency to nomadism, the species is well adapted to respond to sporadic rodent population explosions. Black-shouldered Kites are most commonly seen perched on telephone poles or hovering over grasslands in search of their main food items, small rodents. Still-hunting from a  perch allows the bird to save a lot of energy but only provides them with a 10-20% successful strike rate while hovering, although using double the amount of energy, allows them to exploit areas far from perches and provides them with a 20-35% success rate. Although almost always seen alone, Black-shouldered kites roost in gatherings of a dozen or so individuals in large trees or reedbeds during the night.

If you go back and check my blog of September 2019, you will see a photo I posted of a Mayfly nymph under the water and gave a blurb on how they take up to two years to mature and emerge from the water as adults and how those adults, like the one from the Callibaetes genus shown above, live for a few hours to a few days only. In fact, the name of the insect order, Ephemeroptera, means "winged for but a day." They have degenerative mouthparts so they cannot eat. Even their digestive tract is filled with air to provide buoyancy, not to process food. I also mentioned that this is the insect, as larvae and adult, that flyfishermen model their flies on. What I did not mention is that the Mayfly is the only type of insect that moults as an adult, albeit only once: So when the adult emerges from the water, it is actually only a subimago, or to the angling folk, a Dun. Once these "duns" have emerged from the water they fly to a perch and rest while they escape their final moulted skin and become true imagos, or "spinners" in fisherman terms. These stages of their lives are synchronised, so when the imagos fly above the water performing their mating dance, they do so together with multitudes of others and this is known as a "hatch" to anglers. When a female is ready to mate, she flies into this cloud of performing males and is immediately grabbed by a male and held while he mates with her for a few seconds in the air before he departs and abruptly dies. She then rests while her eggs develop before she drops them into the water and dies too.

These soft, wispy flowers are common in the low-lying dry grasses on the estate at this time of the year. They are called Yellow Tulp Moraea pallida, and they resemble the Iris's of the northern hemisphere and although they are in the same family, that's as close as they get. The biggest difference is that the Moraea have corms, and as such are bulbous plants which evolved to withstand fires in the great grassland savannas of the southern hemisphere, while the Iris's in the north have rhizomatic roots. The resemblance to the Iris's comes from the double sets of three petals underneath a set of three petals above them. The lower petals usually have bright colours on the inner tip to act as a nectar guide to potential pollinators although in this species, the nectar guide is only slightly darker yellow. The Yellow Tulp, together with the Blue Tulp, Moraea polystachya, are the plants most responsible for livestock poisoning in South Africa. Their habit of growing in amongst grasses with long leaves resembling those of grasses make it easy for young and inexperienced livestock to eat them together with the grass and the cardiac glycosides present in the plant can lead to posterior paresis in cattle within a twelve to twenty four hours of consumption and death soon afterwards. It has been found that the concentrations of these glycosides in the plant is very variable and these concentrations are highest in plants occurring in the Mpumalanga grasslands in the north east of the plants' distribution, and lowest in the Western Cape at its most southern distribution. Fortunately it has also been found that the toxicity of the glycosides can be neutralised successfully, in almost all cases, with the timeous introduction of activated charcoal treatment. Of course, we don't have to worry about this because indigenous grass-eaters, those that occur here on the estate, because they evolved together with the plant, have inherently learned of the plants' toxicity and therefore do not consume them. We can simply enjoy their beauty!  

I was climbing the gorge on our boundary with Mount Anderson Ranch, high up above Kliprots Creek recently and, in the darkest shadows of the forest, I found this large, scary looking spider half in and half out of the water. The eye pattern tells me that it is in the Pisauridae family which would be Nursery Web Spiders and their allies (see blog from March this year for a Nursery Web Spider) like Fishing Spiders. This spider was standing at the edge of a well vegetated pool with most of its body resting on top of the water. I am waiting for confirmation but I think it is from the Dolomedes genus. These spiders wait at the edge of the pool and feel for vibrations in the water. Very much like a web-bound spider feels its web for vibrations when a victim is ensnared in it. When a vibration is felt, from a tadpole or Mayfly larva just beneath the surface, or an insect is caught up in the water, the spider runs across the surface, relying on surface tension of the water to keep it dry, and hooks the victim with the claws at the end of its front legs like a fisherman would a fish. The spider then drags its prey to the waters edge and immobilises it with it's powerful venom before tucking in. The short, velvety hairs that cover the spiders body keep it dry and if a predator, like a bird, snake or Pompilid wasp (see blog of March 2020) approaches, the spider dives beneath the water surface and escapes while these hairs trap a layer of air around the spider's body, enabling it to continue breathing. This buoyant layer of air forces the spider to cling to the bottom of the pond until the danger has passed or else it will pop up to the surface like a cork. When it does surface it is completely dry! 

Aaaargh! I was so excited when I found this that I did scream! Have you ever seen such delicate flowers before? This is a Mystacidium gracile, an epiphytic (air plant) orchid that I have been hunting for, in the forests, in September and October, every year for quite a few years now - and voila - here it is! It is not actually that rare but it is a tiny bundle of roots, with one or no leaves, attached loosely to branches and is very difficult to spot. The specific name, gracile, means "attractively slender or thin" which it certainly is. The extremely long spurs that hang off the back of the flowers have the nectar at the bottom end of them and this design only allows Hawk Moths with long enough proboscis's to access them and, in doing so, collect pollen on its face and hopefully move on to another plant to enable pollination. Made my month, it did.

This is a frenzy of Copper-tailed Blowflies, Chrysomya chloropyga, feeding on, and laying eggs in the carcass of a bushbuck found up on the Kliprots river. Even though they are actually rather beautiful, they are inherently regarded with revulsion by us because they are serious spreaders of disease in human communities. Because this African fly is synanthropic (meaning it associates with humans), it, together with some close relatives, has invaded the rest of the tropical and subtropical world thanks to globalisation, spreading pathogens that cause diarrhea and bacterias like E.coli, Salmonella and Shigella in developing countries. The female stores sperm donated by males which enables her to rush off to the nearest carcass or open latrine and immediately lay eggs without having to find a mate first. Together with her multitude of friends, she lays between 50 and 200 eggs (per fly!) on a carcass and before you know it, the carcass is a writhing mass of maggots! If the carcass is too small for the masses of maggots, they will turn on each other and an orgy of cannibalism will ensue! In fact, even if a maggot is injured and leaks haemolymph (insect blood), his brethren will eat him! But there are some positive sides to this ghastly story: the maggots are used in wound therapy where they are introduced into a necrotic wound where they consume all the rotting flesh and leave the healthy flesh untouched; and they are useful in forensic entomology where a pathologist can determine the post-mortem interval and determine the time of death of a murder victim.

Right at the very beginning of spring-time one gets to see beautiful pink blossoms scattered around the Spekboom valley and at places on the Kliprots. These are exotic Peach trees (Prunus persica), remnants of the times when Finsbury House (unit 23) was a farm dwelling with a peach orchard between it and K9. There's also an ancient, gnarled Pear tree (Pyrus sp) beside the Picnic spot in the Spekboom valley and it looks very similar to the blooming tree above. But we have our own, indigenous blossom tree that explodes into bloom at the beginning of spring-time and it is the Wild Pear, Dombeya rotundifolia, pictured above. Even though the Wild Pear resembles the exotic Pear, they come from different families: the Pear and the Peach both belong in the Rose family and our Wild Pear belongs in the Hibiscus family. They can be found throughout the estate on rocky slopes but are most noticeable on the slopes above the mountain hatchery (near Morrin Pools) and above SPK1 up towards Spioenkop. Now, this a magical tree for the garden because it is very fast growing; it has a beautiful, kindergarten tree shape; it attracts butterflies; it is frost resistant, drought resistant and it makes a spectacular display in the early spring with its showy flowers that bloom before the leaves come out! And that's not all... It makes an excellent bonsai specimen with corky bark forming and leaves reducing within two to three years of care. It is also beneficial in wilder zones being drought resistant, fire resistant (leading to the Afrikaans name Dikbas) and good browsing for mammals. Wow! What a tree. Why do we even have exotics in our gardens when we have indigenous beauties like this? 

Deep in one of the gorges feeding the Klipdrif stream in Hidden valley, resides this large, bulbous bracket fungi call Chicken-of-the-woods, Laetiporus sp., upon the dead trunk of a huge, but dead, forest tree. The common name is derived from the fact that it is edible and tastes a bit like chicken but with a texture very much like chicken (when they are both cooked). This individual has hardened with age so it was unsuitable but, if the fungus body exudes a watery liquid then it should be harvested and cooked in a creamy garlic sauce. In fact, it can substituted for chicken in any chicken dish and leftovers can even be frozen. It is considered a delicacy in Germany and North America and is cultivated there. I only just discovered this so I will diarise it and make sure I return to harvest it next year as the fruiting bodies apparently appear, in the same place, year after year until the tree collapses. The fungus normally attacks dead hardwood trees but may sometimes be a mild parasite when it attacks the hardwood exposed by a wound on a living tree. The Chicken-of-the-woods is the Guinness world record holder as the heaviest mushroom at 45kg in 1990. 

Found me a Wahlenberg's Velvet Gekko, Homopholis wahlenbergii, hiding in a deep crevice between two flat slabs of rock up on Goudkoppies plains recently. Pretty high up for a gecko that is quite synanthropic (my new word!). Anyway, I never put enough effort into really understanding how geckos apparently attach themselves to even smooth surfaces, until quite recently, and it is actually quite mind-blowing. Fundamentally, they use the same technique as glues and epoxies do to adhere to surfaces but, I thought to myself, how do they become sticky when they want to stick to the surface, then suddenly unsticky when they want to lift their foot off the surface? Well, it helps to understand how things stick together: when two surfaces are pressed together, even smooth surfaces, a very small area of the surfaces are actually touching each other because, no matter how smooth they appear, they are rough at a microscopic level. So what glues do is fill the air spaces between the areas that are touching each other to the point that Van Der Waal's force takes effect. You would think "well, why doesn't stuff stick if you put water between them instead of glue?". Good question. The thing is: you get dry sticky; and you get wet sticky; and nothing in between. And dry will not stick to wet, for long, and wet will not stick to dry, for long. Anyway, Van Der Waal's force is (deep breath): when the surface area of the surface to be adhered to is covered enough (all those microscopic spaces of air are filled in) by the surface wanting to do the adhering, that the molecules' electrons, in such close contact with each other, begin to interact with each other, changing orbit, and becoming electromagnetically attracted to each other instead of repelling each other as usual. With geckos then (see insert in photo), apart from having retractile claws to hang from edges, the bottoms of their bulbous toes are ridged like the soles of boots and those ridges are covers in stiff, minute hairs called setae (about 14 000 per underfoot) and the tip of each seta splits into about a thousand nano-width bristles. So when it touches the substrate, these microscopic bristles reach into all the irregularities of the surface of the substrate and Van Der Waal's force takes effect and the foot grips tight. It has now been discovered that a gecko can change direction of these setae in milli-millisecinds so that forces are pushed into different directions so as to stop the Van Der Waal's force and then be able to unstick its foot from the surface enabling it to run, jump and change direction, even upside-down! Fa-sci-nating!   

These strange, closed flowers are called Lighted Matches Mistletoe, Tapinanthus rubromarginatus, and we found them appearing to be attached to the branches of a Common Sugarbush, Protea caffra. On closer inspection, one would notice that they are actually attached to their own branches that seamlessly attach themselves to the branches of the Sugarbush, the host tree. The strange flowers of this hemi-parasite (not full or holoparasite since it does have leaves that provide some sugars to itself through photosynthesis) are attractive to sunbirds who probe the flower with their long bill until the flower pops open and slaps the sunbird on the forehead with the pistil and anthers and so deposits pollen there. The bird then pollinates the flower it visits next when the same thing happens. This mistletoe only parasitises three species of Proteacea and they all occur here on the estate: Silver Sugarbush, Common Sugarbush and Willow Beechwood. The fruits of the mistletoe are small, sweet, red berries filled with seeds in a sticky jelly and birds love them. After the bird has eaten the berry, its beak will be soiled with this sticky jelly with seeds in it and the bird will wipe its beak off on a branch of another tree to clean it. The seeds adhere to the branch and when they germinate, their roots, called haustoria, graft themselves onto the branch and penetrate the vascular system of the host tree and begin to extract nutrients or water. And so the cycle continues....

That's it for September. What a lekker month it was. Now for October when we will hopefully have decent rainfall and jolly times. The flowers are starting to bloom and remember, if you are at the estate and you want to see them, let me know on the radio and I will gladly lead you on a hike in search of all these beautiful and amazing things. See you soon.

AUGUST 2020

 AUGUST 2020

August, that dry, windy month that drags us from the winter into spring, is always busy at the estate because of the school break, and this month was no different. A lot of folk got out there and did some hiking with quite a few families undertaking the new Zebra trail that traverses the Goudkoppies plains high above the Miner's Cottage, offering spectacular, albeit hazy at this time of the year, views over Hidden and Kliprots valleys. 

The end of August also marks the end of the rain cycle where we arrive at our final rainfall figure for the season past. I collected rainfall data from around the area and came to the conclusion that rainfall is locally erratic in these mountains. The official Mean Annual Precipitation (MAP) for the Lydenburg Montane Grasslands, of which we are part, varies from 660mm to 1180mm. That's some variation for a relatively small area. The lowest figure I received locally was Rivendell, west of us, with a MAP of 563mm, and the highest is Long Tom, south of us, with a MAP of 1067mm. North of us, the Rattray property reports a MAP of 676mm and ours is 894mm. Lydenburg towns MAP is 758mm. Rather variable I thought.

So I decided, just for interest's sake, to measure the rainfall from five different points on the estate for this past season (2019/20). The most northern point was the rain gauge at Pebble Creek (Unit 25). Then on the east, the point was Rock Solid (Unit 22). The south was Rainbow Rivers (Unit 17) and the west was the entrance boom where Patrick Mokoena stays and diligently guards us. The central area, in the opening between the Helipad and the manager's house is our central point and the point where our rainfall has traditionally been measured from. 

As you can see from the map, the five points are not really representative of the north, east, south , west and centre of the estate but they are, at least, representative of the estate. Following is a list with the recordings from these five locations on Finsbury Estate, an area of just under 3200 hectares:

1) North, Pebble Creek: 835mm

2) East, Rock Solid: 784mm

3) South, Rainbow Rivers: 637mm

4) West, Entrance boom: 719mm

5) Centre, Office: 704mm

Mean Seasonal Precipitation: 736mm

The seasonal figure, normally only measured from the Office area, is raised by almost five percent. And the north east of the estate recorded eighteen percent more rainfall than that recorded in the central area. There is a variation of more than twenty eight percent of the annual rainfall figure, normally taken on the estate, in an area of just below 3200 hectares. This certainly is erratic and will make a noticeable difference in moribund (in this case dry grass) build up across the estate and therefore the intensity of fires and planned burns. This will also affect the regrowth of alien plants and therefore my plans for follow-up operations. 

So we have modified (thanks Nick) the rainfall input spreadsheet on this site to accommodate all five of these points on the estate and we will continue to monitor rainfall at all of them.

Below is some other interesting fauna and flora that I encountered during the month of August:

The long, tubular flower of the Brown Jaybee, Jamesbrittenia burkeana, Allows only long-probiscid insects to access the nectar although some beetles have been known to chew through the base of the trumpet to access the nectar, bypassing the pollination process. This is a new species to add to our Finsbury plant list and I found it on the grassy slopes beside the gorge that runs from just north of M27 up toward Potato Seed Production. A scruffy bush reaching about a meter tall, the plants flower prolifically and are amenable to containers, making them suitable for outdoor pot plants in full sun. This species, together with two further identifications this month, bring our total number of Finsbury plants so far recorded on our list to 682 species! Closing in on that 700 milestone...

 

During my follow-up work and site inspections I have tried to explore as many gorges as possible to try and find more of the Elephant Foot vines (see blog posted on July 7), of which I have found five individuals to date (three males and two females). While exploring the gorge that runs from just below the sundowner spot in Hidden valley up to Mount Anderson with the Twiggs' from The Crofts (Unit 19), we came across these tiny, brightly coloured mushrooms attached to a rotting log. They are called Green Elfcup mushrooms, Chlorociboria aeruginascens, and, as you can see in the photograph, the mycelium also stains the wood a blue-green colour. The fungus is cosmopolitan, occurring throughout the world, and mostly attacks dead hardwoods, and when it occurs on oak, the wood is called Green Oak and has been used ornamentally in panneling as far back as the 16th century in Italy. It was also later used in Tunbridgeware in Kent in the 19th century and in parquetry (Wooden tiled flooring) since.

You've gotta love these names! Sticking to fungi, this is a forest of fungi called Lipstick Powderhorn, Cladonia macilenta, because of the bright red smooching lips at the ends of the stalks! The red tips are actually the apothecia which produce and distribute the spores used in reproduction. I found this in a moist, shaded area on the southern slopes of Mount Formosa in our neighbouring Emoyeni. This fungus is also cosmopolitan and occurs commonly on all the continents and has been found to produce a metabolite called biruloquinone which is a substance that effectively prevents neurodegeneration in Alzheimer's disease. Because of this breakthrough, a mass liquid culture system for the production of biruloquinone has been established in South Korea. The fungus is also rich in carbohydrates and it's close relative, Cladonia rangifera, grows in such abundance in the arctic that it is the staple pasture for Reindeer, Moose ,Caribou and Musk Oxen in the winter time where these animals access it by digging holes into the snow!

Many of you have mentioned to me that the Warthog population has increased dramatically over the last decade and I have certainly noticed it myself in the seven plus years that I have been here. I know that in fenced properties where Warthog predators have been removed, their populations explode and they become a pest that can be damaging to the environment, particularly in the dry season when they mostly dig for roots, tubers and corms. All our neighbours have also noticed this increase in population except for Cornel at Whiskey Creek to our south. He has not yet seen a warthog on his property. So I decided to set up a meeting with a grassland ecologist from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency (MTPA) and a few of our neighbours' managers. We met at the MTPA offices at the hatchery in Lydenburg only for Frik Bronkhorst, the ecologist, to inform us that, as far as he was aware, warthog are indigenous to this area and were shot out, to the extent that they became locally extinct, probably during the second gold rush from 1930 onwards. This is because warthogs are asymptomatic carriers of the virus that causes African Swine Fever and this virus, although harmless to it's hosts the warthog, bushpig and soft ticks (which are the vectors), it is lethal to domestic pigs. After researching as much as I could on their natural distribution, it appears that they certainly should occur here all the way up to 2000 meters above sea level and I have not seen them much higher than that. Anyway, Frik and Trent, manager of the Rattray property are going to try to get some students involved to try and ascertain if the warthogs are pressuring the environment in an unsustainable way. What I initially thought was a potential problem actually turns out to be a great success story of warthogs reestablishing their population, by themselves, in an area where they were previously shot out. Pretty darn cool! (The photo was taken by our camera trap situated at K24)

This very, very ugly fly belongs to the Gonia genus in the Tachinidae family of flies. This huge family contains more than eight thousand species so far described and many more to come but one thing they all have in common, is that they are protelean parasites. These are insects that  begin life as parasites within the bodies of other arthropods and kill the host to enable them to emerge as free living adults. Most Tachinid females have a long, coiled uterus that enables the egg to be well-developed by the time it is laid on the body of the host. The egg then hatches quickly and the maggot burrows into the victim's body. The Gonia females, though, lay large numbers of their minute eggs on the food plant of the intended host and are ingested while the host, perhaps a fat worm, guzzles its leafy meal. Once inside its host, the maggot allows it to survive normally, albeit in poor shape, as it feeds on tissue within the host and avoids the important organs until it is ready to pupate. Then it will eat the organs and kill its host, pupate within the shrivelled cocoon that its host has become and later emerge as an adult fly. Now that is the stuff of horror shows!

A close-up of the numerous tiny, mauve and white flowers that make up the showy inflorescences adorning the Sagewood trees, Buddleja salviifolia, that have been in full bloom for the entire month. This colourful show helps us realise how common these small, scruffy trees are in the estate riparian areas and forest fringes. This is a good thing because their leaves are nutritious and enjoyed by the many browsing antelope we have here. The pleasantly fragrant little flowers, which are tubular with hairs between the tubes and the lobes, are also attractive to bees and butterflies, its pollinators, which in turn attract birds. This fact, together with the fact that the plant is quick-growing, drought-resistant and easily hedged, make it a popular subject in indigenous nurseries. To top it off, I was told that the leaves, boiled while still green, produce a tasty herbal tea and so I tried it and the result was a very pleasant, smooth and tasty tea!  

As I reluctantly emerged from my warm, cozy house on one of the colder mornings during the month, I looked down to see a whole bunch of Pugnacious ants, Anoplolepis custodiens (see blogs March 2019 and April 25 2020)  ), lying in a group, on the pathway, as if dead. I returned a short while later and noticed that one appeared to move slightly. I touched it gently and it stood up and began to groom itself. I touched another and the same thing happened. After a while others began coming to life on their own. Within fifteen minutes they were all up and running around with their usual haste. This is what happens to ectothermic (cold-blooded animals) when the ambient temperature moves above or below their operating temperature. Us endotherms (warm-blooded animals, can operate in any temperature because our metabolism keeps our bodies at a relatively stable temperature. The disadvantage of this is that we need to eat a lot more than cold-blooded animals. Now regarding these ants, in their subterranean nests, when it is colder, the workers tending the eggs, move the eggs and pupae two or more times a day to parts of the nest that are warmer at that time and the ants move to the warmer parts as well. Clearly these ants were caught outside the nest when the temperature dropped below their operating temperature and they simply collapsed until it warmed up again. Not something you see every day although I did, once, find a small Brown Water Snake on a path when it was very cold early in the morning and it was also unable to move until it warmed up, like these ants.

This stunning daisy lighting up the high altitude grasslands far above the Steenkamp's waterfalls is a reminder that day-length has increased to the point that triggers many plants into their growing phase. Spring-time is on the way! This is a Gerbera ambigua and it is one of three species that occur on the estate with a fourth and more famous species, Gerbera jamesonii, or Barbeton Daisy, occurring in our neighbouring Rivendel and the Lydenburg bushveld biome. The genus is named after the German botanist Traugott Gerber (1710-43) who was a friend of Swede Carl Linnaeus (1707-78), who devised the taxonomic system that we use today to classify living things. Towards the end of the nineteenth century Gerbera x hybrida was created by crossing the barberton daisy and the green-leaved daisy, G. viridifolia (which is found on the estate), and this is from where the thousands of cultivars come today. Gerbera is the fifth most used cut flower in the world, after rose, chrysanthemum, carnation and tulip. 

A Chorister Robin-chat, Cossypha dichroa, in a very relaxed pose while perching on the parking poles next to the hatchery. He/she is one half of our local pair that call the office area home. In the latter half of August and beyond, the male asserted the presence, and dominance, of the pair in loud, whistling song from the thickets between the offices and the museum. The powerful whistling song is a jumble of notes but is often interrupted by whistles that mimic other birds or animals. I have heard one mimic a Fish Eagle. The pair bond is powerful and they remain together for life and while the female builds the nest and incubates the eggs, the male assist in raising the chicks thereafter. They are usually secretive, confined to the thickets which makes the call rather eerie but this pair have really habituated around people that they will perch out in the open like this.  

Winter coming to an end means more chance of spotting snakes. Bumped this little Berg Adder, Bitis atropos (see blogs from 9 Jan 2017 and May 2019), on the KLF road high above Hidden valley and got down really close to it. It lay there, dead still, until I got within a foot of it. Then the tongue began to dart in and out of its closed mouth. It was trying to pick up particles of my scent on its forked tongue, which it then inserts into a double-lobed gland, the vomeronasal gland, in the roof of its mouth. This olfactory gland then analyses the scent particle. The advantage of having a forked tongue is that it helps the snake pin-point the direction the scent is coming from. If it spreads the tips apart, more particles will occupy the tip on the side in the direction from which the scent originates, than on the other. This is particularly important to adders because they strike and envenomate their prey and allow the victim to run off. Once the snake has waited long enough for the venom to immobilse the prey item, it will begin to track the victim down by scent, for which it uses its forked tongue.  

Louise Twiggs, the nature artist, has painted a beautiful watercolour of a Mount Anderson Everlasting, Helichrysum summo-montanum, and donated it to the estate. It is displayed in the office. That individual plant that she painted was one of only two plants that I had encountered on or near the estate right up until this month. I visited that plant multiple times each year during the winter, which is when they bloom, and never found any of its flowers fully open. This month, while on a hike through Emoyeni property with the Moore's from Rock Solid (Unit 22), we discovered a whole group of these plants and some had flowers that were fully open - a first for me! The plants prefer to grow on sheer cliffs so it took some time and a little risk to finally get my photograph of the open flowers. What makes the plant so special here for us is that it is regarded as a narrow endemic, meaning that it is only found here, in an eight kilometer radius between Mount Anderson and Mount Formosa, in the entire world. Even the scientific name is beautiful, it means: "The golden sun on the mountain top!" 

As I mentioned at the beginning of this blog, I have been trying to explore as many gorges as possible, hoping to find more Elephant's Foot vines. This is the gorge that runs from Bulldozer Creek up to Little Joker Koppie and it is quite spectacular. Fraser Moore from Rock Solid and I decided we would attempt to reach the very top without having to exit the gorge. I struggle to understand why I though I didn't need wet /dry clothes and shoes. It sure was fun. But, phew, did we get wet!

Spring time has arrived and with it will be all the birds, flowers and babies!