MARCH 2021

 MARCH 2021

That's it for March, the month when the sun suddenly rises much later and sets much earlier than before, reminding us that winter is on the way. The ten year average rainfall figure for the month of March is 106mm but this March we recorded an average of 84mm on the estate, bringing the total seasonal average to 986mm. The lushness of the scrub on the estate has nourished the animals and all species are looking healthy and happy. I remember featuring Kudu in my blog of July 2019 because they seemed to have moved from Rivendell and Nooitgedacht into our area soon before then. They are still very much here and this year saw at least four new little additions to the breeding herd, which has now fragmented into two groups and a bachelor herd of young males. In another blog (December 2019) I explained how young males, once leaving the natal herd, tend to group together with other young males to form bachelor herds and, through wrestling with their horns, establish a hierarchy amongst themselves and when they are confident and experienced enough, may challenge a local dominant bull for mating rights. If they succeed, they become loners and will only socialise when a cow or cows in a herd come into oestrus and are ready to mate (or when another bull wants to challenge him). Well, the kudu bull lying down in the above picture, captured on the parking across from the picnic spot close to Otter's Creek, chewing cud like a king amongst all the girls, is a large dominant bull. His horns are not particularly impressive but his thick, muscular neck enables him to out wrestle any other bulls in the area. He will most certainly be the father of the next generation of calves born from this breeding herd.

When driving through Rivendell farm on the way to the estate, as one descends Klipspringer Hill at this time of the year, one cannot but help notice the large number of beautifully multi-coloured aloes dotting the mountainside. These are Foster's Aloes, Aloe fosterii, a member of the spotted aloe complex which are notoriously difficult to tell apart. The distribution, time of flowering and the multi-coloured bloom of flowers with a swollen base lead me to identify them as Foster's Aloe. While travelling this hill, keeping in mind that the rainfall there is only half that of Finsbury's, also keep an eye out for the myriad other species of succulents like Crassulas and Kalanchoes scattered amongst the rocks.

Like this deep wine-red Crassula alba ("alba"= white) which, incidently, has a contradictory common name of Non-white Stonecrop. 

Sticking with the Asphodelaceae (aloe) family, take a look at this massive colony of Common Marsh Pokers, Kniphofia linearifolia. In a blog in March 2017, I featured a colony of these plants that numbered more than two hundred individuals but since the big fire in August 2018, I have seen many more colonies but this colony, situated between the staff village and the steep winding road that leads up to Spioenkop, has well over three hundred individuals. Sunbirds must've thought they had died and gone to heaven! 

This odd-looking spider with its' large, sloping cephalothorax (head and thorax joined) making it easy to identify as a Spitting spider, Scytodes sp. is a haplogyne spider, which is a grouping of spiders that do not spin webs; have simple female genitalia; only have six eyes (as opposed to eight, like other spiders); and whose spiderlings do not balloon when dispersing (see blog of June 2019 - Hairy Field Spider). They are slow-moving spiders that occupy the darkest, dingiest places available, searching for their favourite prey: Fishmoths. What makes them so different from other hunting spiders is their offensive armoury, very similar to Spiderman's armoury (or it should actually be the other way around!): The spider approaches its' victim fishmoth and begins to tap on it with its' front legs like a blind man with a cane. This behaviour is hard to explain but it appears as if the spider is positioning itself for its' onslaught while the prey item, mysteriously, does not flee. Once satisfied the spider spits a double strand, one from each chelicera, at the incredible speed of thirty meters per second (over 1000 km/h), of venomous, liquid silk over the victim! While performing this incredible feat, the spider sways, at high speed from side to side like a vibration, making the strands overlap over the prey and binding it up in a sticky, venomous net. Uniquely, this venomous silk is produced in the venom glands at the base of the chelicerae, not the silk glands which are found at the tip of the abdomen. If the prey still struggles once it is subdued, the spider will package it in normal silk like other spiders do, then inject venom and enzymes into the prey's body to liquify it and suck up the juices like other spiders. The spiderman-like shooting silk is also used as a defense against enemies. Spitting spiders also practice pre-social behaviour, which is when they live together with other adults of there species and all take part in protecting, feeding and raising their young. This is quite noticeable in the photo because the adult spider is carrying her egg sac in her jaws while the offspring of another adult female is walking beneath her.   

During the Bioblitz that we held in February (see February blog) we erected a number of camera traps around the reserve for the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency. These cameras' function was to record the diversity of large mammals in the reserve. Pictured here, in a truly spectacular setting on the watershed between our Kliprots valley and the Origstad valley, is one of three cameras that I erected, all along that watershed. The cameras captured the following usual suspects between the time of the Bioblitz and the middle of March: Leopard, Brown Hyaena, Bushbuck, Eland, Reedbuck, Rhebuck, Baboon and Zebra. Many more species were captured by the various other cameras scattered far and wide across Mount Anderson Ranch. Far in the distance beyond the pictured camera, in the valley below, just right of centre, you will see the Origstad dam in the Origstad Nature Reserve. And what a pleasure it is to see the dam so full (normally would have been a sandy smudge in the distance)! First time in quite a few years.

But that camera above did snap this shot of an African Wild Cat, Very special for me because I had yet to see any sign of them here. I always used to say they were the direct ancestor to the domestic cat, domesticated in Egypt circa 4000 BC, six thousand years ago. Domesticated for the purpose of protecting grains from rodents. Well, illustrating the importance of updating one's knowledge every now and again, I discovered that, in 2004 already, the remains of an African Wild Cat were found, buried together with what appeared to be a person of importance, in an excavated sight on the island of Cypress in the Mediterranean. This sight is dated at 7500 BC, proving not only that these cats were domesticated long before what was originally thought but also that they were perhaps more than just grain guards. Now, there are a list of characteristics that differentiate between African Wild Cats, Felis lybica, and the now separate species, the Domestic Cat, Felis catus, and this individual seems to have all that are visible: Longer legs; Slim, black-tipped tail (although it doesn't appear to be tapering to a point like it should); bold vertical banding on the legs; a reddish wash on the inner thigh and black paws underneath. It has become important for conservationists to differentiate between the two because, the African Wild Cat's biggest challenge for survival is not habitat destruction or human persecution, but its genetic integrity. Being direct ancestors to domestic cats, the two inbreed readily. A big and dangerous difference between the two, though, is that wild cats are only able to reproduce after at least six months of age and only produce one litter per year BUT domestic cats are able to reproduce at only four months old and they can rear three litters a year! This means that there is always a large population of feral domestic cats that accompany humans as they expand up against the protected areas, and these ferals can quickly compromise the genetic integrity of the wild cats in those protected areas. They say that of all the genetic samples they took throughout the Southern African range of the wild cat, the most tainted samples came from the Kruger Park which, as you know, is just over the hill (the least tainted samples came from the Kgalakgadi population). This makes sense because of the large human populations on the fringes of the reserve. I have my very wild feral friend (see blog of May 2020) that visits me for a few days a month (still, like clockwork) and I am only six and a bit kilometers away from where the above photo was taken. Trash, my visiting feral, is not young and she has clearly not had kittens before so let's hope she has been fixed in her past. Otherwise I will have to arrange to get it done. Doesn't sound like fun for any of us.     

The bizarre underwing pattern of the Foxy Charaxes butterfly, Charaxes jasius, perched on the rose-like leaves of an Oldwood tree. I was lucky to get this close with a macro-only camera because they are nervous, fast-flying butterflies unless you find them gathered around a rotting fruit or weeping tree gum. They are found all year round and their caterpillars feed on the leaves of many of our local trees and bushes like African Stinkwood, Spikethorn, Sugar Bush, African Almond, Hibiscus and others. 

This minute little critter, only two millimeters from the tip of its outstretched pincers to its posterior, looks just like a scorpion without a tail. It is a Pseudoscorpion from the Chernetidae family and although it is an arachnid, like a scorpion, scorpions are more closely related to spiders than Pseudoscorpions but all are almost equally distantly related to the Harvestman (see January blog and next photo). Like most arachnids, though, pseudoscorpions evolved around three hundred and eighty million years ago and have undergone little change since. They are quite common in homes but easily overlooked because of their size, and before you act, remember that they are beneficial because they prey on dust mites and booklice and other little creatures that are also missed because of their size. They move about great distances and into your houses by hitching a lift on larger insects and the like by a phenomenon known as phoresy, a commensal symbiosis between arthropods practiced by many different arthropods but usually illustrated using pseudoscorpions and various flying insects. Pseudoscorpions are surprisingly long-lived for their size: They only undergo three moults over a course of three years and then survive as adults for a similar length of time. And to protect themselves during the vulnerable moulting times, and when climatic conditions are not suitable, they will construct a cocoon, spun from silk produced from a pair of glands beside their jaws, and hide there. When out hunting they behaves pretty much like a scorpion and although they lack the tail with a stinger on the end like a scorpion, they have venom glands within the bulge of the pincers and their moveable "finger" is hypodermic, so they stab their prey as they grab it and inject venom all at the same time. They then vomit enzymes over the subdued victim and lick up the juices as the enzymes go to work. Also like scorpions, when a male is confronted by a female, he deposits a spermatophore on the ground, performs a little appeasement dance, grabs her by the pincers and pulls her over the spermatophore where she picks it up. And again like scorpions, the babies are protected by their mother and they ride on her back as she moves around. 

In January's blog, I featured a Harvestman, a common but very much overlooked arachnid, like the pseudoscorpion above but an omnivorous one. Since then, I encountered one up on the top of Goudkoppies, near the Zebra Trail, and got up-close and personal. Wow! What an odd looking creature - like a mix between a spider and a crayfish. 

When I first noticed this two inch bug, it was because it had just landed nearby and the flicker of its wings caught my eye. When I looked again, it had disappeared. Mmn? I looked closer and the twig I saw (the bug was tightly hugging its branch at this stage) was actually an animal, hiding like it does best. It was hiding from me really, because it normally attaches itself to the bark of a branch and then inserts its proboscis into the vascular system of the host tree and remains there, like a broken twig, while it feasts on the sweet juices of it host. They are called Lantern Bugs, Zanna sp. Fulgoridae, and the common name is actually an interesting misnomer: In the middle of the eighteenth century, Carl Linnaeus, the great founder of these damned confusing scientific names, was told by a reliable source, a well known naturalist, that these bugs' elongated foreheads lit up in the evenings. And so Carl coined some very specific names for the genera and species of the insect, like Lantenaria, phosphorea and candelaria. This was a good example of misinformation because the insect does not illuminate in any way, ever. But, because of these names, the common name stuck.

Sometimes when you walk through forest fringes, along the base of cliff faces and in disturbed places, you find yourself and all your clothing full of irritating Burweed seeds, Cyathula uncinulata, those little burs that burrow through your socks and stab your ankles! So hard to get out that it makes you want to throw your socks away. If you're unfamiliar with the spinach family and you look at any book with a description of the species, you will always wonder what the flower looks like. The flower should precede the seeds, so the bur, since its the seed's method of dispersal, should come after the flower, right? I checked the plants around the office area periodically for years and never seemed to find a flower to photograph for my files. Only a fortnight ago, I looked at a rather fresh looking bur and, 'Lo and behold! I noticed this tiniest little flower. Now that's an ugly duckling for you.

I was hiking the Zebra trail with Donald Rogan and his beautiful family when we came across this little cocoon. I remember telling him that I had seen a picture of this same cocoon in one of my books in the past. I had. It is the cocoon of a wasp from the Ichneumonidae, a family of parasitic wasps. I've mentioned the horrific parasitism in wasps before in my blogs, and the benefits they carry for us against the insect pests we face in agriculture, but this family is what created a huge conundrum for old Charles Darwin regarding religion: "How could a fair and loving God create an animal that lays its eggs within its living victim (a caterpillar) and allow the animals larvae to consume the digestive organs of the victim, while it twitches in agony, before devouring the vital organs and killing the victim and using its body as protection for the animals' pupae?" This, among much else, helped him devise his theory of Natural Selection. The female Ichneumonid wasp appears like most other wasps except she has an extremely long, hair-like ovipositor protruding from the tip of her abdomen, instead of a sting. She "knows" the host plants that are those of her caterpillar prey, and inspects these while on the hunt. When she encounters a caterpillar victim, she bends her abdomen beneath her and pierces the caterpillar with that long ovipositor and lays a few eggs within its juice-filled body and then flies off, looking for her next victim. The caterpillar continues its work of stuffing its face while the hatching maggots... Anyway, once the maggot has fully grown, it crawls out of the caterpillars dead shell and constructs this most attractive cocoon, hanging from a solid thread in the grasslands. A nice find!  

As you know, March was much drier than the rest of the season, but it was also much drier than previous years of much lower rainfall. This season past has been similar to the seasons I remember when I first went into the bush. Lots of rain at the beginning of the season, petering out by April. Let's look forward to a nice chilly winter as we enter our very short autumn. See you there.