March 2020

MARCH 2020

Wow, it is amazing how quickly things can change. The world has pretty much cancelled Easter because, like, 2 billion people are on lockdown due to a global viral pandemic. Who woulda thunk? March is not finished yet but I thought I would post my monthly blog a little earlier since you are all holed up at home.

The rainfall during March has reached 99mm which has brought the total seasonal figure to over 600mm, about a third of our mean average seasonal figure. And once again, even though the rainfall is quite low, we have had good absorbing rain with minimal run-off, resulting in good vegetable growth and lots of life. Check out some of the stuff I got to see this month while carrying out my duties here in the mountains:

This huge, terrifying wasp belongs to the Hemipepsis genus in the Spider-hunting wasp family Pompilidae. The common name is a Tarantula Hawk and it is amongst the largest of wasps, longer that 50mm. Very difficult to photograph because it vibrates and hums, almost like it is emitting electrical currents as it moves ominously through the thickets in search of the hide-away of a Baboon Spider (see November 2019 blog - Harpactrinae). It really is quite scary. And it should be, since it is one of only three species of Hymenopterans (Bees, wasps and ants) to be rated 4 on the Schmidt's Sting Pain Index. This is a scale devised by the entomologist, Justin Schmidt that takes the following into consideration: venom composition; size of the stinger, length of effectiveness; and his own experience of the pain, which is subjective but consistent because he tries them all. 1 on the scale is the mildest sting, like those from Miner bees, while 2 is where the majority of wasps and the Honey bee is placed. 4 is where he has placed the most painful of stings, the Bullet Ant, Paraponera clavata, the Warrior Wasp, Synoeca septentrionalis, and the Tarantula Hawks from the Hemipepsis genus. He describes the sting from 4 on the scale as such:" Pure, intense, brilliant pain...like walking over flaming charcoal with a 3 inch nail embedded in your heel!". That's how he described the Bullet ant. He says the only positive thing about a Tarantula Hawk's sting is that it is short-lived, only about 5 minutes. The stinger is only present on female Hymenopterans and they use them to prepare food for their offspring. I once saw what she does, when she finds the hole of a Baboon spider, in the Timbavati Reserve in the Lowveld:

She tickled the web lining the burrow until the Baboon spider emerged to investigate. When the spider saw the wasp, it reared it's front legs up and exposed its fangs. The wasp and the spider sparred for a minute or so, moving back and forth across the ground until the wasp managed to grapple with the spider and sting it in the face. The spider immediately froze. The wasp flipped it onto its back and dragged it back to its burrow and disappeared inside with it. After some time, the wasp emerged and picked up a dead leaf from the floor and covered the entrance to the spider's burrow with it. She then faced her back to the burrow and kicked sand over the leaf. She picked up some small stones and littered them around until the spider's burrow entrance was invisible before she left the scene. Later, after reading about it, I found out that the spider was paralysed but still alive and that she placed it in its own chamber and laid an egg on it while she was down there. Later the wasp larva would have hatched into a grub and fed off the living spider, only eating the tissue and not the organs so the spider remained fresh and alive until the end. The larva then pupated and emerged as an adult wasp in the safety of the spider's burrow. When she is not terrorising spiders and all other things, the female and male wasps feed on nectar and, as explained in my blog of January 2019, are very important pollinators of certain Milkweed plants. 

This Rain spider, Palystes supercilliosus, 10cm from front to back, would certainly fall to the Tarantula Hawk if she were there. But it is rare to find this spider on the floor where the wasp would be searching since it spends its time up in trees (or on the wall in your home!). The only reason the spider was on the forest floor was because it fell from a tree that I disturbed, onto my shoulder and then onto the floor. I did let out a little yelp, yes. There is, though, a species of Pompillid wasp that specialises in using Rain spiders as a food source for their offspring, like the Tarantula Hawk does to Baboon spiders. Anyway, this is probably a gravid female spider because she has well-defined markings where males and females that are not ready to lay eggs are more plain coloured. She will soon construct a large nest of leaves held together by silk in the foliage of a tree in which she will lay her eggs. She will construct 3 of these nests in her 2 year lifespan. The spiderlings remain in this nursery, guarded by their mother, until they are big enough to bite their way out of it. The mother is very aggressive at this time and bites readily. Fortunately the spider's venom is not very potent and will only cause a small, necrotic wound at the bite site. The Rain Spider is a hunting spider, not using its silk to catch it's prey, but rather actively hunting for prey, mostly at night. Prey consists mainly of insects and other arthropods but quite often, in the home, also Lygodactylus Gekkos (also featured in my blog of January 2019, coincidently), giving them the alternate common name of Lizard Spiders.

If you search through the undergrowth during the month of March, you may find yourself the weirdest looking mushroom you could imagine, a Star Stinkhorn fruiting body. This bright red mushroom with a diameter of about 50mm grows out of decaying debris on the floor and once it has fully developed, it produces gleba, dark brown powdery spores that deliquesce into a stinking brown mucus that is very attractive to Bot flies and their kin. The flies then help to spread the reproductive spores of the fungus around in the environment. The scientific name, Aseroe rubra, means "disgusting juice, red" and it is very descriptive.  

I'm sure we have all had the privilege of seeing the family of Klipspringers, Oreotragus oreotragus, on the hill in Rivendel when you access the estate. That hill is actually called Klipspringer Hill because of the pair and their offspring. Male and female Klipspringers are monogamous and maintain a life-long bond that is only broken when one of them dies. They establish a well-defined territory that is demarcated by middens of droppings and pastings from their pre-orbital glands (equivalent to our lacrimal gland that produces tears), a territory which the male defends against other males and the female defends against other females. Even when inside their territory, the male and female always remain close to each other. So when they detect danger, their alarm call is sang in a duet, a buzzing call made first by the male and then followed up by the female. They bare a single lamb (rarely twins) who is raised in the safety of the territory and evicted after a year. Special adaptions for their rocky habitat include thick, hollow hairs that help insulate against the temperature extremes in rocky terrain and also cushion their fall when they lose their footing, making the hair the preferred stuffing for saddles in the old days. There hooves are also inverted and rather rubbery, helping them to stick to the rocks and giving them a unique spoor that is easy to identify. The picture above is of the old man with his son who is almost at the age where he will be told to get out and get a job...

I couldn't resist taking a photo of this Large Sprite or Christmas Forester, Celaenorrhinus mokeezi, resting on a leaf  in a lone shaft of sunlight in the Steenkamps gorge forest near the waterfalls. They are quite hard to spot because they inhabit the dark, shaded forests but when they rest up in the sun like this, the gold on their wings shines beautifully. The larvae feed on Buckweed plants (Isoglossa woodii) which are non-descript understory plants also favoured as browse by bushbuck and Duiker, hence the name Buckweed. I have not found any of these plants here on the estate and as far as I know they are confined to coastal forests but it is the only plant listed as the host for this butterfly. We do have a few species of Acanthaceae that grow as understory plants in our forests like Hypoestesa aristate and H. triflora. I will dig a little deeper but if anyone can shed some light, please do. 

The 25 plant species in the Amaryllis family all have bold, showy flowers and although they are all endemic to Southern Africa, they are found throughout the world as garden subjects because of their spectacular flowers. This, the Narrow-leaved Spider Lily, Nerine angustifolia, is no exception and was in full bloom for the month of March throughout the estate alongside high altitude streams in the grasslands and in marshy areas. I remember finding a large colony of about 20 individuals along the stream just below the sundowner spot in Hidden Valley a few years ago. It was such a spectacular sight that I took people to show them the following day and they were all gone. After some investigation I saw that a herd of Eland were browsing the area and had eaten each and every flower. Must taste good? Anyway, they make a great garden subject and if you plant a bunch of them in a sunny spot with rich soil, you will be rewarded by a dazzling show each late summer.

This is Rhombic Night Adder, Causus rhombeatus, the fastest of the Vipers, it can travel at 3,3km/h which is quite fast for a snake. The snake that holds the record for the fastest speed over the ground is the Black Mamba, who can travel at 19km/h! The Night Adder is also easy to tame as they do not bite readily and will relax completely after being captive for only a short period of time. But although a bite from one of these should just result in local pain, swelling and mild necrosis which usually disappears within a few days, there has been a case where a minor was bitten and doctors had to perform a fasciotomy, where the integument and fascia has to be sliced to alleviate swelling pressure (this procedure is usually performed for Puff Adder bites). The snake can tolerate the bufotoxins produced by the paratoid glands of toads and so specialises in them as prey, although they will also take small mammals, like rats, resulting in many sightings of them in the recycling area near the office, attractive to rodents, where this photo was taken. 

This odd-looking, pock-marked ant is a Rugged Ringbum ant (what a lekker name!), Bothroponera pumicosa, and belongs to the Ponerinae subfamily of ants, which is also the most primitive grouping of ants. Most ponerines, including the Rugged Ringbum, live in very small colonies of up to a dozen individuals, though some, like the notorious Matabele ant, Megaponera analis, live in colonies numbering more than a thousand individuals. They do not have a queen but instead a dominant worker that is fertile. Remember, in all ants the workers are female but, in this case, the one that is stress-free will have certain physiological processes triggered that enable her to conceive. So, to remain the only one that is stress-free, she bullies her fellow workers constantly, never allowing their stress levels to drop to the point that they would become fertile too. A cold and crazy system, but it works. In fact Wild Dogs do a similar thing. One thing all ponerines have in common is a painful sting, from the Streblognathis ant that stung me so painfully (see blog "The jolly season 2018) to the Matabele ants in the Lowveld (a mighty sting but still not as bad as the Streblognathis) to this lady who I have not yet been stung by. But at 12mm in length, she wouldn't seem like she had a powerful sting, eh? Google the Bullet Ant.

This is one of the 7 species of mosquito in the Anopheles gambiae complex. These 7 species were all previously thought to be the same species. From East to South Africa. The species responsible for the transmission of the protozoan Plasmodium falciparum that causes the most deadly of the 4 kinds of Malaria. I was not worried when this mozzie bit me because, although the mosquito occurs here in our temperate climate, the protozoan does not. And the mosquito has to first be infected by the protozoan before it can then infect a human by passing it on. This is why, once one person gets Malaria in an area, then it quickly spreads to others. Not because he is contagious but because each mosquito that bites the infected person then also picks up the Plasmodium and passes it on to the next person she bites. Only once she has had a full, satisfying meal and her abdomen is bloated and ready to pop, will she rest up in a hiding place to allow her eggs to develop. Interestingly, it has been found that mozzies infected with the Plasmodium protozoan develop a keener sense of smell. They use their palps to detect carbon dioxide and are particularly attracted to human foot adours! The Plasmodium also influences their behavior, making them more desperate and less adverse to risk taking. Weird.

 So the male, with feathery antennae like nocturnal moths, does not bite humans at all. And although the word Anopheles is ancient Greek for "unprofitable or useless", the male and the female before she is mated with, are actually important night-time pollinators because they eat nectar from night-time flowers. It is also rather easy to differentiate between the Anopheles genus and the other common genus of mosquito, Aedes, by observing a few behavioral traits: Firstly, when resting on a substrate or on your ankle, the Anopheles' abdomen points from a 45 degree angle to a right angle from the substrate whereas an Aedes mozzie's abdomen lies parallel. This includes when they are sucking your blood like in the photo. Secondly, the aquatic larvae of the Anopheles does not have a breathing tube so it has to lie parallel with the water surface whereas the larvae of an Aedes mosquito does have a breathing tube, so can allow its body to hang below the waters surface from a 45 degree angle to a right angle (opposite rule to the resting one). Also visually, the adult Anopheles has black and white scales on its wings which is lacking in the other genus. 

So once the female has allowed her eggs to develop, she lays 50 or so of them, attached to little floating devices, onto the surface of still water. Once hatched, the larvae feed on bacteria and algae in the water and after 4 instars, they pupate, still in the water. The time it takes from the egg being laid on the water to the adult emerging from the pupa is temperature dependent with warmer weather speeding up the process to a minimum of 7 days. So although this is the most common genus on the estate, in my opinion, we don't have to worry because it is too cool for the protozoan, Although global warming has already spread the distribution of Plasmodium in some areas.

In my blog of October 2019 I mentioned how rarely I have seen the Rhinkals, Hemachatus haemachatus, and how excited I was to find the inverted sloughed skin of one up on Goudkoppies. Well, since January I have had 2 encounters! Unfortunately, they are so timid that I would have had to hurt them, on both occasions, to get them to stand up for a nice photo, so I just got shots of them sailing toward the nearest hole with their hoods expanded. The first sighting in January sailed out from beneath the logs that I was chain-sawing at the rehabilitation plot where the Pine plantation has been removed between Cochy-bundhu (unit1) and Rainbow Creek (unit2). I managed to get right up to it before it disappeared down a hole in the ground. The second sighting was a week ago while pushing my bike up the zig-zag road leading up to the Troutkloof ruins on the Zebra trail. This one (bottom of the picture) was much more active - because I nearly trod on it - so I did not have much time to take a photo. But, as you can see, it had a bright yellow hood! Although it was a good meter long, it must have been a youngster because its body colouration is also brighter. So I finally got some photos (besides that of the skin) of a Rhinkals for my data base..  

Looks like it is standing on water, doesn't it? It's actually standing on its very delicate sheet web and its a Nursery Web spider. In my last blog, I featured a Funnel Web spider that constructs a horizontal sheet web to capture prey. The Nursery Web spider, Dendrolycosa sp. from the Pisauridae, also constructs a horizontal sheet web. But not to capture prey. They are hunting spiders, like the Rain spider from before. Instead, she constructs the web around her cluster of eggs and guards them (above) so that the spiderlings are protected from the elements. Regarding the introduction to this spider's blurb, incidentally, the Water spider, the one that runs on water and even eats small fish, is also from this family. They look rather similar, too.

There are 2 species of Suids (pigs) on the estate and they occupy very different niches, in an ecological sense, to avoid competing with each other. The Bushpig, Potomachoerus larvatus, is largely nocturnal and inhabit thick, bushy terrain and forest while the Warthog, Phacochoerus aethiopicus, is a diurnal animal that prefers more open areas. Because of this, Warthogs are seen much more regularly on the estate but there are still plenty of Bushpig. But recently I, for the very first time, got to see both species together, interacting in the open grassy slopes above K13 (same place you saw the leopard with two cubs, Charles Van Heerden!). In the centre of the picture is a large male Warthog, facing away from us, recently disturbed from his mud wallow by the Bushpigs flanking him on both sides. There was at least one  little Bushpig with its mother on the right behind the bush. Both species seemed to respect each other although I got the feeling that the Warthog was the more confident one as they all went their own way. Exciting stuff.

I was very lucky to get these two shots, that I have fused together, of a Clearwing moth, from the Sesiidae, because they are not very abundant. I stumbled upon this beaut in the high altitude grasslands east of Bulldozer Creek. These day active moths have evolved aposematic colouration (see the blurb on Nassinia pretorie in last month's blog) allowing them to mimic aggressive bees and wasps. I have photos of another 3 species of moth to add to my list for the month and they appear below: 

A female cosmopolitan Beet Webworm moth, Spoladea recurvalis,nocturnal.

A male Bar Maiden, nocturnal.

A day active, aposematic Crimson Speckled Footman, Utethisa pulchella, sex unknown. Beautiful!

Anyway, that's it for now. I will be doing a bunch of patrols during this lockdown time because anti poaching is still regarded as an essential service and I will, hopefully, not be encountering any other people. During these escapades I will gather as much material as I can to keep you entertained there in your homes. I know a little about viruses and, I tell you, we are doing the right thing by being disciplined and staying home, practicing social distancing (something I thought psychiatrists said was a negative thing!) and just being aware. Aware that this virus is here and will only be defeated if we all play our part. Good luck and remember to exercise!

February 2020

FEBRUARY 2020

Always a lovely green month, February didn't fail us this year. Everything is green and lush with wildlife at full swing. Like in January we had less than average rainfall but that that fell, was soft and soaking. Excellent for minimizing runoff water. The waters in the streams and rivers have been mostly crystal clear the whole season. 94mm fell during the month compared to an average of 122mm for the month of February for the last 10 years. The seasonal figure is at 535mm so far, with a total season average of just under 900mm over the same period. At least all the little brooks and streams are flowing, even the little waterfall in Olinia gorge, pictured above, with blooming. orange Begonias and their beautifully asymmetrical leaves in the foreground. Check out some of the exciting plants and wildlife I saw this month:

Like a ghost in it's dew-soaked web, the Funnel-weaver spider, from the Agelenidae, exits its funnel to investigate my gentle agitation of the silk on it's web. Although they spend a lot of time outside their funnel retreat, it is very difficult to spot one because of their good eyesight, which enables them to disappear as you approach. The web, which is a common sight low down in the grasslands, consists of a non-sticky, flat, horizontal sheet of web with a funnel leading to a retreat, usually into cracks in a rock or the base of a thick tuft of grass. Although the web is not sticky, the spider continually lays down layer after layer of tangled silk across the sheet and if an insect, like a grasshopper, falls onto the sheet, it will be entangled for long enough for the spider to rush out it's retreat, at a high speed, and deliver a fatal, venomous bite. When I say high speed, I mean it: the family is famous for the speed at which its members can run. The fastest spider in the Guinness book, for some time, was an Agelenid that could reach 0.54 meters a second! That's almost 2 kilometers per hour. Very fast for a little spider.

One day I was sitting on a large quartzite rock up on the flats of Goudkoppies near Nosey Point when I noticed something small moving on my rock. I looked down to see about a dozen little balls of dirt moving slowly across the lichen-filled surface, On closer inspection, with my magnifying glass, I realised that they were bagworms, of the Psychidae family of moths when I got a look at one's head (see inset). Page back to my blog of March 2018 or google the family to get a brief life history of this odd moth. I have not been able to identify this species but their is a species in the genus Dahlica that has a similar bag of dirt (normally the bag is constructed from sticks and grass stems) that eats lichen growing on rocks - in Australia. I'm sure these were eating the lichen because I could see it with my visual aids, so it must be closely related to the Australian one. I believe that what I saw was a herd of Bagworm larvae grazing in a field of lichen on my lunch rock!

Last month I featured the Brown-veined White butterfly in my blog because they were so numerous in their migration this year. If you had caught and examined all of those butterfies, you would have found a small percentage of them would have been the African Common White, Belenois creona severina, which often join their more numerous cousins on their mass movement (The "Common" part of the name should have been given to the other one). When the gravid female finds a host plant, in this case Wooly Caper bush (those huge creepers that overtake and destroy huge trees in the Kruger Park, especially around Shingwedzi) plus others similar to the Brown-veined Whites' hosts, she lays a cluster of about a dozen small eggs, 1x0.5mm in size, onto the plant and departs. After about 5 days, the eggs hatch and the little worms devour the shells and then get stuck into the hosts foliage. The eating of the egg shells by the newly hatched larvae is critical for some reason because, if in an experiment, the shells are removed, the worms wander around aimlessly and do not begin eating the hosts offerings and so die of starvation. Anyway, once the worm digs in to the host plants' foliage, they sure dig in!  They eat so much that they pass through 5 larval instars (moulting because they get too big for their skins) within 17 days. After that they suspend themselves in a cocoon and enter the pupal stage and they emerge as adults within a few weeks or months, depending on the time in the season.

Trent Sinclair from Mount Anderson Ranch next door hosted a bunch of scientists from the South African National Biodiversity Institute, Mpumalanga Parks and Tourism and student interns for a BIOBLITZ over 3 days, to which I attended. In the few days we set up 20 camera traps for the large mammal specialist, set pitfall traps and light traps for the insect specialist and found lots of species of plant to press for the Lydenburg herbarium. One of those was an orchid known from only a few locations in the world, Disa alticola, of which we found an entire population on the seeplines near Mount Anderson ranch's radio repeater station. The following weekend I took Louise Twiggs, from The Crofts, to the sight to photograph them so that she can paint them (see inset, circled is the tiny flower). The main photo is the one she took in the inset. Worryingly, Louise and I only managed to find a fraction of the flowers that we found only a few days before. Tommy Steyn, the resident botanist for the MTPA, came out the following week and managed to still map the newly discovered population with some success. Always exciting to get a new species but such a rare one, even better! Oh, and check out the new print of a watercolour of the very rare Mount Anderson Everlasting in the office. It was painted and donated by Louise. 

The other day I came upon this large male Porcupine, Hystrix africaeaustralis, in the road, just outside Lone Tree Cottage at two o' clock in the afternoon. He was so relaxed that, after I took this photo, I passed him on my motorcycle in the road without him moving off. Porcupines, Africa's largest rodent, live in extended family units, comprising a breeding pair and their offspring of various ages. They produce one to two offspring per season and once mature, in their second year, the young often choose to stay with the family and help raise the next set of siblings. This social system is quite common in birds but rare in mammals. Also, like humans and unlike any other mammals, they are sexually active at all times, mostly daily,  even when the female cannot concieve. The male actively helps to raise the offspring and when you see a group of these animals together, it is more than likely a father foraging with his offspring. The mother forages alone. Food includes roots, bark and other fibrous plant matter. Even if it is poisonous. The Porcupine is the biggest mammal enemy to the poisonous Tamboti tree in the Kruger Park, which it ring-barks as food which is fatal to the tree. Here in Finsbury they are the biggest mammal enemy to the toxic bulb of the Arum Lily, amongst others. They are also very noisy feeders , audible from 100 meters away while they feed, dig and rattle their quills. But who needs to be quiet when you have protection like those quills to defend you. The quills getting lodged in the eyes and face of a Leopard could lead to infection and then the death of the predator.

While attending the BIOBLITZ mentioned earlier, one of our conversations around the fire one night was rare mammals. I mentioned to the Mammal specialist that I had gotten a photo, from of our camera traps, of a Large Grey Mongoose, Herpestes ichneumon, formerly Egyptian Mongoose. They said it was unlikely as the species did not occur here. Once I got home, I sent them a picture (above) confirming the sighting and received the following reply: "@jimmywhatmore if we include that Egyptian or Large Grey mongoose ot (sic) yours into the catchment it will be a first record and most furthest north and west distribution of the Southern subspecies of this guy! I am very excited about this record!" So cool! I got the photo from a camera trap that I temporarily set up in an Otter den I found very close to where my house is now The date stamp is accurate.

The word "ichneumon", from greek "footprint" to latin "tracker", in the scientific name of the last species refers to the mongooses habit of finding and unearthing crocodiles' nests to eat the eggs, which was noted and revered by the Ancient Egyptians, hence the old English common name of Egyptian mongoose. Above is a picture of a Darwin's Wasp, from the Ichneumonidae family. The "ichneumon" in the family name of the wasp refers to its' members' ability to find well hidden insect larvae in which to lay their eggs. Most female wasps have a stinger which they use in self defense or, primarily, to paralyse  mostly worms and other insects which the wasp feeds to her offspring (see bog of November 2019 for more). The female wasps from the Ichneumonidae, however, have an ovipositor instead. This long ovipositor is used to reach insect larvae or pupae and inject an egg/s within. Some species will follow the egg with a dose of venom that will paralyse the victim like other wasps but most will allow the victim to continue living and feeding while the wasp larvae feed off its insides, only killing it when important organs, which are left till last, are consumed. These wasps are a very important controller of pest insects and it is estimated that between 10% and 20% of host populations are parasitised by them. This makes them excellent candidates for bio control agents and have been used to control the populations of African Sugarcane Borers and the Arctic Wooly Bear moth in the north. The English common name of Darwin's Wasps arose  from the fact that Charles Darwin was moved by the family He famously wrote about how he didn't believe a "beneficent and omnipotent God" would have designed such a cruel animal which eats the insides of another animal while it was still alive.  

If you have visited the estate in the last fortnight, you would have noticed that the small block that contains the Jackpot mine, above Morrin Pools, Tranquility and Jackpot cottage, has recently burned. On the advice from the grassland ecologists of the MTPA, I have adopted the widely approved and utilised Patch Mosaic method for our fire regime on the estate. This method burns many, smaller blocks at random times mostly in the summer months to simulate lightning fires. This burn was a great success with only the use of 4 staff members to control the burn, which took two full days to complete. This method of burning will leave us with healthy grasslands and never again a fuel build-up that results in massive, unnaturally hot fires like we experienced in August 2018. I originally planned 6 of these fires for the season but the lack of rainfall has caused me to reduce those to 4, and to burn them later in the season. I will burn a further 2 in March and a final one in April, all in the southern portion of the estate.

This beautiful moth is a Nassinia pretoria, and as can be seen by the feathery antennae, it is a male. Moths are mostly nocturnal animals, feeding socializing and mating in the dark hours. In fact, fossils indicate that the Lepidoptera was originally nocturnal. Then the arms race between bats and moths began. Bats fine-tuned echo-location with lethal consequences to moths. But then moths evolved the ability to detect bat echo-location signals and some learned to apply evasive areal maneuvers and some learned to just close their wings and drop to the floor which negated the effectiveness of the bat's signal. This predation pressure seems to have caused some Lepidopterans to become diurnal and butterflies are the most obvious example. I was reading an article a while back where it was suggested that the biggest obstacle to transforming into day active animals was the moths' mating system. For some, unknown reason, female moth pheromones are ineffective in daylight hours and this has led to transitioning species, like the Nassinia above, to develop a certain degree of aposematism (bright colouration usually employed to warn potential predators of toxicity) as their first step towards a diurnal existence. Looking at species that have already transitioned, these bright colours will eventually be used socially to help females recognize suitable males. In daytime Lepidopterans the males are the ones that attract the females through colours, displays, behavior and male pheromones. So the Nassinia above happens to fulfill all but his mating requirements during daytime activities but is still active for brief periods at night only to find a mate.

Gee, I hadn't seen a leopard since the middle of last year until we embarked on a night drive up in Mount Anderson Ranch during this BioBlitz I attended. There we got a great sighting of this adult female (above) preparing to go on the hunt. During the week that followed I managed another two sightings! One of a young male on Finsbury hill just by the old path that leads to the Miner's cottage, and then a brief sighting of an adult female at K11. In fact, the Finsbury staff have had three or four sightings between them and so have quite a few members had sightings over the month, mostly of a young male but also of the female with at least one cub that hung around Otter's Rest for a week or so. This female grumbled at Nomthandazo, the housekeeper for Otter's Rest, so Don posted a little warning to members together with the most recent newsletter. I do not believe that this growl was one of aggression.When a leopard gets a fright, it lets out a grumble which was probably the case here. There have always been this many leopards in these grasslands but with reduced persecution, each generation of leopard gets a little more relaxed around humans. I don't believe this makes them more dangerous to humans, in fact, most attacks on adult humans are a response to the leopards panic and fear towards us. We are not a natural menu item for a leopard but we do need to be aware, though, that a leopard is an opportunist and so young children and dogs should not be allowed out on their own. Children should either be in groups or with an adult accompanying them. If you do find yourself in a situation where you are close to a leopard, pretend that you did not see the animal and continue walking. Do not challenge the animal. I believe that the young male we are seeing is trying to establish a territory. Once they have been abandoned by their mother at about a year old, young male leopards enter the most trying time of their lives. they usually disperse east or west along the same latitude and just try to survive and stay out of any dominant males way. As time passes and they build up confidence, they will establish a ridiculously small and inadequate territory that they will aggressively mark with smell, sight and sound. I believe this is what is happening between K33 and the Miner's cottage path. If the male does not  attract the unwanted attention of a dominant territorial male then he will slowly increase the size of this little territory until he does, when he will relax his efforts until the threat goes away. This situation will repeat itself until the newcomer leaves the area or manages to establish himself there where, one day, he will be the dominant male of the area. This activity by a new male also causes social upheaval amongst the females in the area because it immediately endangers their offspring and changes the local social dynamics. This is probably why we are seeing more females too. We are privileged to spend our time in a relatively undisturbed ecosystem and we just need to bear in mind that this situation, like most, carries with it a few dangers associated with wildlife. Be alert and aware and enjoy the wildlife we have. 

This, a Springwater Sprite, Pseudagrion caffrum, is the first of 2 new species of Damselfly for my list this month. One of the 3 yellow-faced Sprites in the country, the Springwater Sprite is endemic to Lesotho, Swaziland and eastern South Africa where it is restricted to the hilly upland grasslands where it is associated with fast-flowing mountain streams with grassy banks.

The second of my new species, the Upland Sprite, Pseudagrion spernatum, has a much wider distribution than the previous species and it occurs all the way up to the Congo. It also prefers high-lying mountain streams but prefers bushier, shaded banks.

This now, is a fully nocturnal moth called a Vestal, Rhodometra sacraria, and it rests up in the grasslands on a vertical grass stem as pictured during the daylight hours. It belongs in the Geometridae family, which, if you will recall from my blog of November 2019 regarding the Monarch Looper, contains moths whose caterpillars have a long, looping gate, giving the caterpillars the name of "Inchworms". The inchworms of this species eat a wide range of host plants like the leaves from our Rhus (Searsia) trees, Peach trees, Dock leaves and the leaves of the beautiful Oxygonum flower that I photographed the Click Beetle on in my blog of December. These inchworms are also very difficult to find when they are at rest because they lift their bodies diagonally rigid from the surface of a branch and resemble a twig. Excellent camouflage. 

One of my many favourite spots on the estate is the cliffs beside the Kliprots road at the crossing by K15. There is a myriad cremnophytes (I love the term, it means "cliff-loving") to behold, including a "tree mural" Red-leaved Fig; a tiny, bonsai-like Bride's Bush; a funky climbing grape; and a scraggly Cape Gardenia, Rothmannia capensis, whose large, showy flowers, pictured above, have been in bloom for almost the entire month. The tree gets quite large, up to 15 meters, when growing in forests and on forest fringes but are scraggly and stunted when growing in rocky situations like the tree at K15. With it's large, showy, sweetly scented flowers, large, shiny evergreen foliage and shiny green tennis ball sized fruit make this a rather attractive garden specimen. Especially since it is very easy to germinate the seeds as long as they are first removed from the pith.

I found this beautiful shelf fungus growing on the remains of an old Pine stump in an area we recently cleared of alien plants. It is called a Splitgill mushroom, Schizophyllum commune, and it is a cosmopolitan species found throughout the world. Although it is rather tough and rubbery, it is used as a food source in many countries, particularly in the tropics where soft mushrooms do not keep for long, and is a delicacy in some like Mexico or northern India where it is the favoured ingredient in "Paaknam" pancakes. The mushroom also has many medicinal qualities and is used, in western medicine, for it's immunomodulatory, antifungal (odd, since it is a fungus!), antineoplastic and antiviral properties.

Once again, my little camera is not suitable for bird photography but this displaying male Pin-tailed Whydah, Vidua macroura, was so busy trying to impress the girls that he did even notice me a mere few meters from him as he flew by. Actually I don't think it is because he didn't notice me, I think he just didn't care. these little birds are notoriously pugnacious towards other birds at feeding areas, including subordinate male Whydahs and even much larger birds than themselves. This bullying of the subordinates prevents them from developing breeding plumage thus minimising breeding competition within its species. The breeding plumage of the males is the contrasting pied colouration and the long, streaming tail, and they only acquire this plumage at the onset of each breeding season. For the remainder of the year, they resemble subordinate males and females: a little brown job resembling a Red-billed Quelia with the head markings of a bunting. During this breeding time, the male establishes a small territory and tries to keep the flock, consisting of females and a few subordinate males, within these boundaries. Outside of the breeding season, the now drab male and the rest of the flock stay in the area but are not confined to a territory. Another interesting fact about these little birds is that they are brood parasites. This means that they do not construct a nest and neither the male nor the female take any part in raising their offspring. Instead the female lays her eggs in the nests of unsuspecting surrogate birds of different species, in this case Common Waxbills and rarely Swee Waxbills. Once the gravid female Whydah locates the nest of the waxbills, she surreptitiously slips in when the parents are not around, quickly eats the contents of one of the waxbill eggs, removes the shell and then lays her own egg as a replacement for the missing Waxbill egg, and then leaves the area having nothing further to do with her offspring. The Whydah egg hatches, and unlike many Cuckoos for example, the chick does not kill the remaining Waxbill chicks but grows up together with them, quickly learning how to copy the begging behavior of the Waxbill chicks. Once the chicks have fledged, the Whydah chick spends about a week with it's surrogate family and then suddenly leaves and finds a flock of it's own kind to stay with. And then by the end of March, the breeding male Whydah loses it's long, streaming tail and by the end of may it has moulted completely and looks like a little brown job again. 

That's it for the month of February. March means we have already reached a quarter way through the year and that Easter is near. Here's hoping for a busy Easter time. See you then.