SPRINGTIME 2025

 

Spring rains came nice and early this season with gentle falls in mid-September to get the season going. Then, October brought an average of 50mm to the estate, also nice and softly. Soft rain is important because there is less run-off and more absorption into the aquifers that are the estate (that's why we are a water catchment reserve). It also gives the vegetation time to germinate and root, binding the soils so that they are not washed away.

November was a tempestuous month with high winds and some violent storms delivering an average of 224mm across the estate, which is 1mm below the annual average for the month. There certainly was more run off because of the quantity of water that fell, but the rivers remained relatively clean because the softer rain from the previous months allowed the vegetation to thrive and bind the soils.

The photo of Mount Anderson above, taken from above and to the south of Little Joker mine in Emoyeni, gives an idea of how green the estate was in the middle of November. It is a lot lusher and more verdant as I write now, at the beginning of December!

Below is a little gallery of some of the exciting things I encountered during the Spring of 2025:

I have three cameras set up on the estate. One in the picnic spot parking, one at K24, and one on Loop Road. Between the three of them, they have recorded seventeen mammal species over the last three months. These include: 

1. Common Duiker
2. Grey Rhebuck
3. Mountain Reedbuck
4. Bushbuck
5. Kudu
6. Eland
7. Warthog
8. Bushpig
9. Baboon
10. Porcupine
11. Water Mongoose
12. Large-spotted Genet
13. Civet
14. Honey Badger
15. Side-striped Jackal
16. Leopard
17. Aardwolf

Seven carnivora species and six antelope species is a good count, especially considering that, besides the Aardwolf and Side-striped Jackal, the remainder of the species were recorded multiple times at all three locations!

But the one that has me the most excited at the moment is the Aardwolf, which was photographed on Loop Road just before ten in the evening on the 22nd of September (pictured above)!

I know that the Aardwolf, Proteles cristatus, is supposed to occur here, and Charles Stewart from Jackpot Cottage has seen a few of them on the estate in the past (although I don't think for a long time now), and also, I had a member's guest once describe an animal that they saw at K9 one night, leaving no doubt that it was an Aardwolf. But I have never laid eyes on one here at Finsbury myself! I've also, till now, never caught one on one of our camera traps before in all the twelve years I've been using them here on the estate. Pretty cool to have my first photo, albeit not a great one!

Looking at the way the hair on its back is raised, I think the infra-red from the camera must have spooked it or something, because it has raised its body-mane. They can also raise a mane on their necks, and when they are side on in full display with all their hairs raised, they can make their bodies appear seventy-five percent bigger than what they actually are! Enough to give any potential predator a second thought.

They are remarkable animals, being in the hyaena family but adapted to eating termites almost exclusively, unlike the other members of the family who are scavengers and also formidable carnivorous predators. They also concentrate on one genus of termites, the Trinervitermis genus, Snouted Harvester termites, like the ones that dominate the termite landscape here on the estate.

Snouted Harvester termites, Trinervitermis trinervoides, like other harvester termites, are termites that have to leave the safety of their mounds to collect their food, which consists mainly of blades of grass, cut into small pieces (hence "harvester"), which are brought back to the mound and put into storage. They come out in the night, in their tens of thousands, to harvest this grass. Unlike other harvester termites whose soldiers have massive jaws that can snip an ant clean in half, or even give a human a nice pinch, the Snouted Harvester's soldiers have a long, hypodermic tube protruding from their faces called a fontanellar gun, from which, when defending the workers, they expel a strand of poisonous snot that chases most predators away!

This poisonous snot is made up of terpenes, which are unsaturated hydrocarbons produced mainly by plants to make their leaves taste bad or to make their flowers smell good to certain pollinators, amongst other things. So, terpenes are pungent and have a bad taste... Terpenes are also produced in putrid meat, producing a bitter taste....

Aha! Now we can begin to see how a member of the hyaena family could go on to evolve the eating habits of this species. Hyaenas have long evolved an ability to tolerate terpenes because of their presence in rotting carcasses, which hyaenas devour with glee. Aardwolves can consume a quarter-of-a-million, about a kilogram, of Snouted harvester termites in one night, removing more than one-hundred-million termites in a year! Lots of stinky terpenes in all that. 

Socially, they have a similar system to jackals, where the male and female form a monogamous bond that prevails throughout their lives. They both actively defend a small, common territory by marking, pasting (like other hyaenas) and pursuing trespassers. With up to ten burrows per territory, the male and female do not sleep together in the same burrow, often not even nearby to each other. They also forage alone, unless accompanied by one or more cubs after weaning and before they are chased out. The male does, however, guard the entrance to the female's burrow, when the cubs are still too young, while she goes foraging, usually for up to six hours.

When an aardwolf forages, it does so by sound. As I have experienced, if one is quiet enough, a human can actually hear harvester termites snipping the grass blades while they harvest them. Aardwolves have very acute hearing, enabling them to pick up harvester termites while they are some distance away. They then approach the termites, and with a long, very broad tongue, they lick the termites up off the floor, together with their loads of grass and all the sand particles around them. Consequently, aardwolves generate enormous scats, made up almost entirely of sand and grass, which it buries in a shallow oval-shaped midden near territorial boundaries.

Aardwolves are abundant and usually quite commonly seen where they do occur. The reason, I believe, that they are not so common here on the estate, is because our rainfall is a little too high at over 900mm per annum. There band of tolerance is usually areas that have a rainfall between 100 and 800mm per annum, drier than where we are. 

Very, very exciting!

Look at this shiny, golden Tortoise Beetle! It looks like a gold nugget. It is called a Fool's Gold Tortoise Beetle, Aspidimorpha tecta, and it belongs to the Leaf Beetle (Chrysomelidae) family. This is one of the biggest families in the insect world, but all members have some things in common, particularly the fact that all of the species' larvae eat leaves and all adults that do eat, eat vegetation.

The larvae of the Tortoise beetles resemble flat worms with a long, flat "tail" (anal fork, or more technically, caudal furca) that can fold itself up over the body, like an umbrella. Then, it has the most interesting of anuses, by the fact that the anus can protrude itself telescopically for some distance. What is all this for, you may ask?

Well, once the larva hatches from the egg, which is deposited, by the mother beetle, on the species' chosen food plant, the larva immediately begins to feed. It digests these leaf pieces within an hour and, when ready to excrete droppings, it does the most fascinating thing: It folds the anal fork over its back like an umbrella. Then its anal opening begins to protrude up and above the underside (now facing the sky because it is folded over its back) of the anal fork. It then excretes its droppings so that they collect on top of the folded anal fork. It then excretes a droplet of "glue" on top of this, which glues the droppings to the top of the umbrella. 

Later, when the insect moults, it glues these moulted skins to the debris pile on top of the umbrella. This umbrella is carried closely over the larva and, with the debris pile on top, provides protection by helping to conceal the larva from predators. The droppings on the brollie also contain all the chemical defences that were in the leaves that it ate, like tannins and terpenes which offer further protection.

The adult (pictured) also has some special defensive features, most notably its tortoise-like carapace that covers its entire body and flair out at the base so that, if threatened, the beetle folds its legs in and the carapace sits flat on the floor while its body is retracted into its "shell", just like a tortoise. It can also, as seen in the photo, extend a single antenna out through the slit in the front, like a telescope on a submarine, to sense if the danger has passed.

If molested, like when I picked it up, the colour on the carapace changes from gold to a reddish-brown colour, and once the danger has passed and the beetle relaxes again, the carapace changes back to gold. The bright reddish-brown colour is a type of aposematic colouration, which is when an insect is brightly coloured to warn potential predators that they are toxic and will harm the predator if it is eaten.

All these defences keep this little adult beetle alive for the whole month of its existence, while it searches for a mate so that it can complete its life cycle

What a work of art! The face of a Lappet moth caterpillar, Eutricha obscura, a pretty common caterpillar to be found on the estate during the Springtime. 

The long hairs on the caterpillar may be beautiful, but they are poisonous and so one should avoid touching them. If you brush a part of your body against the caterpillar, the hairs break off into your skin and urticarial weals (hives) will form almost immediately, causing some discomfort. In more serious cases, the entire affected limb will swell, and systemic reactions may result in vomiting and anaphylaxis. If you have brushed against one, the best way to remove the hairs is to cover the area with duct tape and then to peel it off, removing the poisonous hairs at the same time.

The adult is a large, very boring, brown moth with a wingspan of about 70mm. The mouthparts are reduced, so the adult does not eat at all, meaning that it is short-lived, only long enough for the males to find the females, to mate, and for her to lay her eggs on the chosen host plant, which, in the case of this species, includes multiple species from different families. Host plants on the estate include Acacia species, White Stinkwood trees, Velvet Bushwillow trees and our invasive Patula Pines.

If you find crowds of tiny white mushrooms on bare soil, then you are possibly in for a feast! They may be Termitomyces microcarpus, mushrooms that are associated with termites and their nests. They are the result of an amazing farming culture that evolved in many termites well over three hundred million years ago (we only started farming twelve to thirteen thousand years ago!). 

Although termites can assimilate the dead vegetation that they collect as food, the nutritional quality of the food is not as high as is required the seer the many complex different castes that the termites require to have a fully functioning eusocial colony. So the termites gather up the dead vegetation and bring it into a group of chambers strategically positioned within the mound so that they remain at a relatively constant temperature with a consistently high moisture content. 

They pile the vegetation on top of itself until it forms a shape that is not unlike a human brain. Because the conditions are so favourable, Termitomyces microcarpus fungus grows on the vegetation, consuming it. The termites, when they require high quality food to raise special castes like reproductives or secondary / tertiary queens, harvest the fungus and feed it to the relevant larvae. The definition of farming! When the colony requires more workers, the nursemaids feed the larva normal vegetation from the pile in storage and, because it is not very nutritious, the larva grows into an adult worker that has no wings or genitalia.

At this time of the year, the termites allow the fruiting bodies of the fungus to grow so that the fungus can reproduce. It is edible for us and, although they are small, they are plentiful. I harvested a bunch of them and enjoyed the taste when they were raw so much, that I had finished them by the time I returned home so could not cook them to taste. 

There is another common mushroom that occurs here on the estate that associates with termitaria. it is a Podaxis termitophilus and although it is associated with termite mounds in its range, it can survive without the termites and vice versa. The Podaxis fungus appears to grow from the faeces of the termites within the mound and there is no evidence that the termites eat the fungus or utilise it in any way. It seems like a commensal relationship where the mushroom benefits and the termite is not affected.

This is a Lydenburg Opal, Chrysoritis aethon, a small, rather special butterfly, restricted to this area. Although the butterfly was first collected in 1879, near Lydenburg, it was only properly recognised by Pennington (the famous lepidopterist), also near Lydenburg, when the gold rush was in full swing, in 1934.

In almost all ecosystems in which ants exist, they dominate in sheer numbers and ecologically as the major predator of arthropods. This dominance attracts associations with other species in the same ecological system and, generally, positive associations between ants and other species, be they plants, fungi, molluscs, insects or other arthropods, even birds, are called myrmecophily, which means "love of ants". Most myrmecophiles benefit defensively from ants' aggression and numbers, be it out in the field like scale insects (blog of June 2021, also aphids October 2020), or within the ants' nest (This butterfly and more than half of the butterflies in the Lycaenid family) like, my favourite example, the Hoover mite. This little mite has been used by ants for so long as a vacuum cleaner that it only survives in ants' nests. They are provided with safe, warm and cozy accommodations, in return for eating up all the nests litter, unwanted bacterium and harmful fungi. Many of these associations are "facultative", meaning they are not necessary for the survival of the species involved, but are a benefit. Like with the wax scales and the aphids. The Lydenburg Opal, the majority of Lycaenids (and the little Hoover mite), are obligatory myrmecophiles. This means that they need the association with the ants for their species' survival.

This is how it unfolds: The female butterfly searches for a species of host plant, in this case a Quilted Bluebush, very common on the estate, but she does not settle for one until she finds it infested with Cocktail ants, Crematogaster genus, while they are tending to facultative myrmecophiles like aphids or wax scales, or the site of a Cocktail ant colony's nest (see blog of July 2020). Only then does she lay a single egg amongst the ants, and the ants immediately pick the egg up and carry it back to their nest where it will be protected until it hatches. 

Once the caterpillar hatches, it exits the ant nest during the hours of darkness, following the well-used ant trail, feeds on the Bluebush and returns to the nest by dawn. All the caterpillar has to do is produce a small drop of extra-rich honeydew for the ants when they ask (by stroking the caterpillar with their antennae) in return for the accommodation and protection from these normally extremely aggressive predatory ants!

The caterpillar repeats this routine until it has passed through all of its instars and is ready to pupate, which it does within the safety of the ant's nest.

Very cute little Warthog piglets who have temporarily lost their mother up on Majubane road. The piglets are born altricial (compare with precocial), which means they were blind and naked, and they had to spend the first two-plus weeks in a burrow, being fed and looked after by mom alone. Once their eyes had opened and they were able to run and keep up with mom, then they would leave the burrow and accompany mom on her daily routine, which is the stage I found them in here, and there are lots of them spread all over the estate at this time of the year.

From here, once they gather a bit of strength, Ma will join up with the sounder (which she had left to birth, suckle, and get her piglets to this stage. On her own), which consists of her mother, sisters and or cousins and aunts, whoever still remains. The sounder breaks up and separates as it gets too big, but females know who's who in the zoo, in their relatively large home range.

The males, on the other hand, stay with their sisters after being abandoned by their mothers, as a sibling group. After they mature, the females may join with others from another home range and form a new sounder or go back to mom's sounder and carry on. The males will form a little bachelor group, usually two to four boys, related or not, and become best buddies as they leave the sibling group and enter the big, wide world, which is filled with danger and adventure. They will wrestle and wrastle with each other and establish their dominance within the group. After a year or more, the more dominant boy will become less and less social and a lot more aggressive. 

He will leave the group, the home range, and enter new ranges, his testes will grow to massive proportions, and he will become a breeding boar. Unfriendly and unliked. But he will get all the girls, if anybody likes it or not. Well, not really, because he will have to battle it out with boars with similar intent. A tough life lies ahead of him if he wants to breed. 

Anyway, woe betide any predator that tries to mess with him! Big boar pigs have an extreme attitude towards enemies, and most of those enemies, including adult leopards, avoid them. 

The other boars will also become less friendly and more aggressive. And ultimately solitary, hoping the big guy dies sooner rather than later, so they have a chance to take over. They will venture into neighbouring home ranges and try their luck.

On the very western side of the Zebra trail along the high-altitude mountain stream that falls over the Troutkloof waterfalls, there is a nice little pool where I take a drink before ascending to the top of Goudkoppies. At this little crystal-clear pool, as with most others, if you look carefully at the bottom, you will most likely see strange little insects of differing sizes that resemble the one in the photo.

They are Mayfly nymphs which are also discussed in blogs of September 2019 (nymphs) and September 2020 (adult). As mentioned there, the adults are very short-lived and their only function is to find a mate and mate and lay eggs. Their short adult life is attributed to the fact that the mouthparts are fused and so the insect is unable to feed. Their tummies are filled with air which makes them rather buoyant and so when there is a "hatch" you will find a cloud of adult males dancing lightly in the air above the water. The egg-laden female detects these clouds of males and flies into it when a male will grab her from underneath with his long, double-jointed forelegs which bend awkwardly backwards and hold her wings closed and out of the way for the brief moment he mates with her in mid-air.

To achieve this, the male has double eyes, a top pair to solely seek the female, and a lower pair for normal activities. The nymph in the picture is therefore a well-developed male by the presence of double eyes and wing buds. Anyway, the male dies immediately thereafter while the female will just have enough resources to develop her eggs, which are only a quarter of a millimetre in length, and then fly across the surface of the water depositing them one-by-one as she dips her abdomen in the water. These minute eggs sink to the bottom and rest for about three weeks before hatching into tiny nymphs who swallow detritus, extract the nutrients, and excrete the rest. The larvae moult about twenty times over a period of six months up to two years, depending on the species.

These are Leopard scats that we found on the Elephant path running east of Kliprots Creek. And, yes, they consist of porcupine quills almost entirely, just like their scats after consuming a furry animal consists of the fur of that animal almost entirely. Well, porcupine quills are exactly that: the animal's fur. It is just that porcupine fur is modified, by being hollow and rigid, for protection from predators, not just the environment.

I find it amazing that the hard, straight quills manage to navigate the animals' intestines without mishap! I remember, on a few occasions, finding lion scats in the bush that were filled with the longest of quills, and the same thoughts crossed my mind.

It is a risky proposition for a leopard to take on a porcupine, because it can become impaled by the porcupine's quills, which the leopard can often remove, but sometimes it is in a place the leopard can't reach. The big male leopard that killed Charlie Swart on the Matjulu river bridge near Berg-en-Dal camp in the late nineties was injured by the quills of a porcupine. After it was shot, the sergeant who shot it told me that there were maggots the size of his pinkie finger crawling in a hole in the leopard's head. It is believed that hole was a porcupine quill wound that had gone septic!

With lions it is a different story, though, because they live mostly in groups, so, firstly it is easier to kill a porcupine in a group because, while the porcupine is protecting it's back by always keeping its tail pointed at the potential threat, another lion can move around to the unprotected front of the animal and kill it. Secondly, the lions can remove hard-to-get quills from each other. In fact, the staple diet of the lions of the Kalahari are porcupines!  

Another stunning shot from Dave De Vos from "The Croft's" (unit 19)! This time it is of an Olive Bushshrike, Chlorophoneus olivaceus, caught in a rare, exposed situation, because they normally keep to thick bush.

This bird has two colour morphs, the true olive morph in the south of its range, a mix in-between, and the buff morph in the north of its range, like here on the estate. In fact, they were regarded as two different species until genetic analysis proved them to be the same species!

They may be hard to see, because they love to keep themselves in the thickest of bush, but they are very vociferous during early spring during peak breeding time. They also make a variety of sounds, unlike other bushshrikes, which can be quite confusing. Many visitors to the estate have sworn that they heard a Bokmakierie, while it was the Olive Bushshrike instead. Also, sometimes its call sounds exactly like the lower pitched call of an Orange Bushshrike, but the Olive Bushshrike is the only member of this family represented here on the estate.

These birds are monogamous and when a male and a female join up, they establish a small territory in forest and riparian thickets and spend the rest of their lives there, except in the Soutpansberg and the eastern highlands in Zimbabwe where they become seasonal altitudinal migrants, meaning that they will move to a lower altitude in the cold of winter. Now, many of our supposedly sedentary birds do this here on the estate because of our altitude, but the Olive Bushshrike does not seem to do it here.

The pair do not forage together but will forage on their own by gleaning arthropods like spiders, mantids, grasshoppers, beetles, wasps and ants, from leaves and branches in the thickets of the forest. They also eat small quantities of fruit like our Forest Num-num fruits.

After mating, the pair build an untidy and flimsy cup-shaped nest at about three metres from the ground and line it with fine grass. The nest is well concealed and very difficult to locate. The female then lays one or two eggs in the cup, and they share incubation duties for just over two weeks before they hatch. The parents again share the feeding duties until the chicks are fledged after another fortnight. They are single-brooded, meaning that they only raise on pair of chicks per season.

Aargh! Ugly as sin! This is a Sucking Louse that I found, with many others, on a fresh warthog carcass. I have narrowed it down to the Haematopinus genus for certain, but I gather that it must be the species Haematopinus phacochoeri since that species of louse is specific to warthogs.

Lice are six-legged insects from the Psocodea order, but are often mistaken for ticks, which are arachnids, related to spiders, who have eight legs as an adult.

The body is heavily armoured, feeling like hard plastic, and the legs end in sharp, curved claws. These adaptions allow it to cling tenaciously to the poor warthog, even when the warthog scratches the spot with its sharp hooves. When I tried to remove it, it crouched down and clung on for all that it was worth, forcing me to use my knife to finally pry it loose.

The eggs of these lice are cemented onto the mane hairs of the warthog and cannot be removed without removing the strand of hair. The eggs hatch and a nymph emerges and immediately begins to suck the warthog's blood, moulting as it grows. So, the entire life cycle of the louse is spent on the same warthog!

This is a Thread-waisted Wasp that I featured in my blog of November 2019. This is what I wrote:

When you walk down the footpaths of the estate, along the rivers or not, there is often a slim wasp that flies from the path before you at ankle height and settles again further along the path. Then takes off again as you approach and moves further on and settles until you approach and the moves further on and.... This is it, Ammophila ferrugineipes from the Sphecidae family of Thread-waisted Wasps. 

The females of these solitary wasps dig a hole into the hard ground (of the pathway) and construct a small chamber at the end, only a few centimetres below the ground. Once complete, she memorises the location of the hole and goes off in search of caterpillars which she attacks and paralyses with her sting. She then returns to the hole with her victim, flying cumbersomely (not a real word but descriptive) if it is small enough or dragging it if it is too big, and pulls the still-living worm down into the chamber. 

The worm was about 10cm away from the hole when the photo was taken. After she has deposited a suitable number of worms into the chamber, she covers the hole up and expertly camouflages it by sprinkling sand on top. In this instance, she even picked up the stone in the foreground in the picture and placed it on top of the covered hole. Afterwards, she then leaves and has nothing further to do with her offspring. 

After incubation, the maggot hatches from the egg and proceeds to eat the worms who are still fresh because they are still alive! Once the great meal is complete and the maggot is at full size, it pupates and emerges as an adult, ready to repeat the process for her offspring after she has found a male and mated with him. 

The picture above is not the one that I published (I published a nicer one of the wasp alone), but it was taken at the same time. This just shows the caterpillar and the hole (at the tip of her abdomen) just before she dragged the caterpillar down the hole.

Now, this photo was taken only a week or two ago, almost exactly six years after the one above! When I encountered this wasp, she had obviously deposited the worm/s in the hole already, because I watched her cover it up, plugging it with a relatively large stone (still visible in the hole), and kicked loose soil over the scar and then deposited another huge stone on top of that. Completely hidden!

I'll end off with another photo taken by a camera trap. This is from the camera that is set up at K24 where I always get photos of interesting things!

These two young male Bushbuck are definitely friends. The camera took at least eighty photos of the two of them together over a period of about a week. They remained very close in almost all the photos while they were foraging, and on two occasions, while they were wrestling like the one above.

Bushbuck are not territorial and tolerate other males in their home range. They will only resort to fighting if there is a female ready to mate and there are two dominant males in the immediate area. In fact, the available literature actually says that they are the most tolerant of other males of all solitary antelope and that they never fight seriously.

I disagree with that just because, a few years ago, I saw two males tumbling down the steep slope at the entrance to the forest leading to Steenkamps' waterfalls with their horns interlocked. They only disengaged and retreated because of my presence. It was very violent!

Although they are so tolerant intraspecifically (within their own species), they are quite the opposite interspecifically! They dominate over much larger animals at waterholes during droughts and defend themselves violently when attacked. They are notorious for killing gundogs, dogs used to subdue wounded animals during hunts by humans. In fact, I once watched a big male bushbuck walk, unknowingly, right past a cheetah that was stalking an ewe bushbuck with her fawn. The cheetah pretended that the male bushbuck was not there and waited for him to have passed sufficiently far before it continued its hunt, which was successful.

These two, however, are sparring or wrestling like friendly little boys do, with no intention of harming each other.

Springtime is over and we will reach midsummer soon. The estate is looking lush and verdant for the festive season celebrations. See you there! Remember, if you want a guided walk, hike, drive while visiting Finsbury, just let me know and we will arrange a nice adventure.

WINTER 2025

 WINTER 2025

Brrrrrrr! It sure has been cold here on the estate. Still beautiful, warm, clear, blue-sky days, but freezing in the mornings! Actually, not always warm with blue skies in the day, we had quite a few cold fronts move through that brought cloud during the winter.

In fact, we had quite a significant winter rainfall on the weekend of the 22nd of July, smack in the middle of winter, where we had a good ten millimetres of rain. Cold, but not a bad thing, because, even if plants are in a dormant stage, they will still drink when water is available, so this topped up water storage for our green friends.

As mentioned in Don's newsletter, the annual rainfall this season has been lower than normal, with an average of 830mm precipitation falling over the estate, where our average since 2010 is 920mm.

This year saw a little more preparation before the dry season to minimise the chances of a runaway fire like the two we had to fight at the end of the last dry season: Besides more thorough fire breaks, I burned a bit more last season than previously, so the fuel load is not as high as it has been, which decreases the chances of runaway fires as the dry season progresses

In the picture above, you can see the bland, smoky atmosphere that dominates our dry winters spiced up by this absolutely beautiful Cliff Aloe plant, Aloe arborescens, with its multiple blooms high above the estate almost on the tippy top of Little Joker Koppie.

Below is a gallery of a few of the things I encountered over the winter this year:

Oooh, hot lips!!! 

This is the spore-bearing apothecia of Lipstick Powderhorn, Cladonia macilienta, a type of squamulose lichen that is completely cosmopolitan, which means that it occurs everywhere. In this case in every continent, although not yet found on Antarctica but expected to occur there. 

The structure of the lichen is that of tightly packed, centimetre tall, pointed structures that develop these bright red apothecia (the structure that produces the reproductive spores) on the tips when it is time to reproduce. The lichen lives on rotting wood, often together with mosses, in the dark undergrowth in our moist forests. Check my blog of August 2020 for a photo of the lichen as a whole.

It is one of those organisms that is sensitive to atmospheric pollution, so it can be used as a bioindicator for air quality, like Old Man's Beard lichen, which is also found on the estate, especially at higher altitudes.

 Also, it 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 its close relative, Reindeer Cup Lichen, Cladonia rangifera, grows in such abundance in the arctic circle that it is the staple pasture for Reindeer, Moose, Caribou and Musk Oxen in the wintertime where these animals access it by digging holes into the snow!

Makes me think of Marilyn Monroe....

Peeter's Smooth Ringbum Ant, Streblognathus peetersii, carrying, not dragging, a large Hawkmoth caterpillar. If I had a very sensitive scale, I would love to have weighed the caterpillar and then the ant and calculated the difference.

How on earth do they manage to lift such heavy weights? Well, they have a few physical attributes that contribute to this amazing ability.

First, is the exoskeleton. It is found in (on?) all insects, but those that require this sort of lifting strength have had their exoskeleton modified by the addition of sclerotin, which makes it much more rigid, creating a perfect anchor for the muscles to use as leverage. 

And secondly, muscle strength is determined by the size of the muscle cross-section, and their muscles are a lot bigger in cross-section in ratio to the muscles found in vertebrates, making them an awful lot stronger.

Anyway, this, together with its close relative from the Karoo (S. aethiopicus) is Africa's largest ant species, reaching a length of twenty millimetres. I have previously featured these ants in my blogs, but under the latter's name. Streblognathus was always regarded as a monotypic genus (genus with only a single species), until recently, when that species was separated from the eastern grassland species, S. peetersi, which occurs here on the estate, by a few morphological differences. 

These ants belong to the most primitive of the ant sub-families, the Ponerinae. Most ponerines live in very small colonies from a dozen individuals to a thousand or so. The notorious Matabele ant from the lowveld is an example of the latter. They live in colonies numbering more than a thousand individuals. S. aethiopicus live in colonies with an average size of thirty-five individuals, while our Peeter's Smooth Ringbum ant lives in colonies with an average of one hundred workers. 

These ant colonies are different to most others in that 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, African Wild Dogs are one of the mammal species that do a similar thing. 

This poor stunned juvenile African Goshawk, Aerospiza tachiro, had no choice in allowing me to photograph it while it was trying to recover from its head-on collision with my office window. Fortunately, after a few minutes it managed to fly away.

It was most likely hatched and raised in a nest in the pine forest beside "The Croft's" (unit 19), that being one of the main reasons why that forest has not been cut down yet.

Unlike most other raptors, though, the monogamous breeding pair do not usually use the same nest over and over again but build a new one nearby. This pair, I believe, must have used the same nest again a few times because they have been nesting there for more than a decade and they would have run out of forest if they didn't use it again.

This youngster (I think a male because he was quite small, and the females are much bigger than the males) has been fully fledged for more than a month, because they do not leave the area of the nest tree for at least that long before venturing further away. After a maximum of three months they are self-sufficient and will go their own way.

When a male and female bond and enter courtship, the male will catch a prey item and deposit it on a branch for the female as a gift. If she is willing, she will alight on the given branch and begin her meal. He then comes down from above her and mates with her while she is eating.

They then choose a tree to nest in and then establish a territory around it. Bothe sexes advertise this territory by flying above it, wing-snapping and calling a soft "CHIT-CHIT-CHIT" sound while in flight. Once the territory is well established, both sexes proceed to build a nest on a lateral branch, high up in a big tree by springtime.

The female then lays two to four (usually two) eggs in the nest and incubates them for about five weeks while the male actively supports her with food that he brings for her. The nesting period lasts up to six weeks with both parents sharing nesting and feeding duties before the chicks are fledged and ready to take their first ever flight.

Their main prey item is birds, ranging in size from the tiny Bronze Mannikin to the much larger francolins and spurfowls. The hunting strategy is to sit on a perch and wait for a bird to fly (or walk) past, when the Goshawk actively pursues it until it catches it.

These lovely birds are most commonly seen by us while walking on the river paths, because they like to fly along the river paths only a few meters above the ground, often almost colliding with an unwary human. 

What a stunning little ball of flowers, of all ages, belonging to a scrambling shrubby creeping plant called a Warty Grape, Rhoicissus tridentata, from the grape family.

The Warty Grape is very common on the estate, but only smaller ones are noticed because the larger ones are only noticeable by their stems because their main body is high up in the canopy of trees.

It is a useful plant for man and beast, with the flowers attracting many insects and even sunbirds; the red to black, edible albeit very sour grape-like fruits are eaten by man, other mammals and birds; the trifoliate leaves are browsed by many different antelope and the beautiful Silver-striped Hawkmoth caterpillar (see blog of September 2019 for a feature on the adult Hawkmoth, and blog of February 2021 for a feature on the caterpillar)

A more important use, though, is medicinal. Ethnobotanically, it has been used for a few ailments, but particularly to induce labour. The University of KZN did a study to validate this, and they found that treatment with methane crude extracts from the root evoked significant increases in the rate and force of uterine muscle contractions in mice. Go sangomas!

In my previous publication, I featured a group of Firefly larvae eating a Giant Land Snail. Well, this time I can show you what a wingless adult female looks like. Excuse the blurred picture, but I had to switch my flash off so that I could capture the beautiful green light that she was emitting.

It is very easy to establish that she is a wingless adult, because she has large compound eyes, whereas the larvae, as mentioned in the previous article, have small, simple eyes.

From that article, we know that all the species with wingless females belong to the single genus Lampyris, and that these are the species where a female uses her light to attract males, who will fly down to her and commence their courtship.

We also learned that in some of the species the female has the ability to change the frequency of her flashes to attract a male firefly from a different species and that, when alighting beside her, the female will quickly grab the male and eat him!

Now, the insect produces light by the process of bioluminescence, where the insect allows a chemical called luciferin to mix with an enzyme called luciferase within a cavity at the tip of the abdomen, in the presence of oxygen, so that it oxidises and a soft green light is created. The light is extinguished easily enough by stopping oxygen from entering the chamber, and lights again when the insect allows oxygen back into the chamber.

I have featured the Silver Vlei Spider in my blogs in the past. It is a very common spider found in our dark forests. This is a close relative, the African Masked Vlei spider, Eucage festiva. Unlike the Silver Vlei spider, the African Masked Vlei spider is not as common and occurs in our open grasslands.

But look at the patterning on the dorsal part of the abdomen: It looks just like an African mask that one buys from a curio shop! Exquisite!

The web is not constructed vertical to the ground like most orb weavers but at an angle of about sixty degrees, making them easy to identify. 

It is up to the male to find the female and approach her on her web to mate with her. The black widow syndrome is very apparent with this species as the female almost always eats the male after they have mated! 

The main prey of the spider are grasshoppers, and the spider constructs the web at the height that these insects normally jump, about a meter-and-a-bit off the floor. Once the grasshopper is caught up in the web, the spider approaches the prey and injects a venom into the struggling insect to subdue it. Once subdued, the spider immediately begins to chew the body of the prey, breaking it up. It then vomits an enzyme onto the chewed pieces which begin to liquidise. 

Once liquidised, the spider sucks the fluid into its mouth by pumping the stomach muscles and tiny hairs around the mouth filter out the indigestible pieces that it discards afterwards, together with the crumpled shell of the victim. This pumping stomach action is also what spreads the nutrients around the body of the spider. 

Once enough has been consumed, and the spider feels its body growing, it will return to the middle of the web and hang there upside down again. But this time its skin will split down the middle and the spider will climb out of its smaller, older skin and leave it hanging there like an old piece of clothing. Certainly, the biggest enemy to Masked Vlei spider are Spider-hunting wasps from the Pompilidae family (see blog of March 2020), who will easily locate the spider as it rests in the middle of its web. 

One of the three places where one is almost assured of spotting a Rock Hyrax is just beyond the crossing east of S7 on the Steenkamps' road. So, when I saw this Verreaux's Eagle, Aquila verreaux, while driving my Landrover near this spot, I assumed it was eating one of these little mammals. 

I stopped the big, noisy vehicle a mere four meters from the eagle, and couldn't believe that it didn't fly away. A truly magnificent raptor it is!

We have been sighting a pair of these massive raptors over the estate for the entire winter, whereas in the past, they were only sighted once or twice over a month or more. I did see them perched on rocks on a cliff face in Emoyeni property between Bulldozer Creek (unit 22) and Whiskey Creek (close to the brewery) about six weeks ago, and the larger female definitely seemed to be inspecting a nice shelf on this cliff face. Perhaps they were planning the shelf as a nest sight.

Needless to say, I have not returned to that area for fear of disturbing them if they decided to construct a nest but will go soon on a recce mission to find out. If they did decide to settle there, they would have constructed a large, untidy platform of sticks and small branches over a period of about two months on the ledge. The larger sticks are snapped off a tree with the eagles' feet while the bird is in flight (Gee, that must be quite a sight!), with the smaller picked up from the ground.

The monogamous couple usually have four or five nests in their territory which they use over and over, with the birds adding new sticks each time it is used, until the nest can be as wide as three meters and as high as four meters! If one of the sights is threatened, usually by human action, the couple will abandon it and build another elsewhere. This is what may have happened to this pair, or they are newlyweds and are establishing their first or second nests.

An average of two eggs is laid, four days apart, in the middle of winter and the hatchlings emerge eight or so weeks after laying, with the female incubating through the nights and, at least, half of the day. The male supplies food and incubates for the remainder of the days.

One chick hatches four or so days before the second and almost always kills the younger sibling, as do most eagle chicks, even if the mother tries to intervene. The survivor is raised by both parents until it is ready to leave the nest after just over three months after hatching. After another month or so, the parents chase the youngster out of their territory, forcing it to fend entirely for itself.

I was busy perambulating the Majubane waterfall path recently, when I encountered a sedge bush crowded with Stalk-eyed Flies, Diopsis stuckenbergii, hundreds of them, resting and interacting.

I mentioned these odd flies in my publication Winter 2023, but, because they are so bizarre, I have to feature them again. The nice thing this time was that I knew what they were and what they were doing and so managed to observe their behaviour a bit.

They roost on hanging roots above the water during the night. Then, in the early morning, they gather on the bushes near the stream and the males establish a lek, a gathering of males for the purpose of competition for females. The males face each other with front legs splayed wide. They then push their faces up against each other, and the one with the longest stalks (largest space between the eyes) dominates and moves on to the next male. The females watch this and are attracted to the male with the widest eyes. Very sexy!

Once mating is complete, the female lays her eggs in and amongst rotting vegetation on the forest floor. The larvae hatch and consume the rotting vegetables and then enter their pupal stage. Once emerging from the pupa, the newly adult fly's stalk eyes are squished up against their bodies, so they gulp air in through their mouths and pump it up into their faces and inflate their stalks, like balloons, until they are fully extended!

This, like the extraordinarily long tail of a male peacock, is a great example of "sexual selection", where the female's preference for, in this case, wide-apart eyes, results in the males evolving physical traits which may even actually hinder survival. As long as the male can still breed. 

The flies on the extreme bottom-right of the photo are literally peaking around a corner :) 

These tiny little things are the fruiting bodies of the Carnival Candy Slime Mould, Arcyria denudata, and are only about one millimeter tall. You've gotta love the common name!

When it comes to classifying living things, the highest level of classification is the Kingdom. For example, animals belong to the kingdom Animalia which includes earthworms, spiders, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, birds etcetera; plants to the kingdom Plantae; mushrooms to the kingdom Fungi and slime moulds belong to the kingdom Protozoa, together with Amoeba proteus, the amoeba you studied in biology class at school; Plasmodium falciparum, the protozoan that gives us cerebral malaria and many others.

 

A single spore finds itself in a suitable environment, it germinates a few flagellated (have a tail for movement) protoplasts called Swarm Cells (not to be confused with a beehive). These cells move around their environment eating bacteria and when they meet up with a mate, they form a zygote and grow into a plasmodium as they split nuclei. 

A plasmodium is defined as a living structure of cytoplasm that contains many nuclei, instead of individual cells each with a nucleus. These plasmodia (white blob) feed on bacteria and other microorganisms and grow in size as other zygotes "swarm" to join and become an interconnected network of protoplasmic strands, with each strand's cytoplasmic contents streaming back and forth within itself. 

When this mass of single-celled organisms, that now behave like a multi-cellular organism, wants to move, the strand's contents stream in the required direction while protoplasm is withdrawn from the rear, allowing it to move at a top speed of about one millimetre per hour, leaving a snail trail behind. Search for my blog of February 2021 and there you will see I featured a different species of slime mould, but the photo of the plasmodia will give you an idea what the plasmodium of this species looks like. A white, foamy blob.

Once food becomes scarce, the plasmodium breaks up and migrates to a drier, lighter area and they convert into the spore-bearing structures like in the photo above. These structures produce spores very much like mushrooms do, and release these into the environment where they are spread by insects, wind or water. 

We emerged from our nice warm houses one cold morning only to noticed masses of winged Aphids everywhere. There were millions of them on all surfaces from the ground to the exposed cars, but they were unable to move from the cold. Some of those who settled on the lower areas were frozen in the morning frost. This individual and surrounding friends began stretching limbs once the ice had melted and they were able to move.

Aphids are sap sucking bugs from the Aphididae family of true bugs (Hemiptera). They are those tiny pests you see crowded around the twigs and branchlets of your garden plants.

They are fat and soft bodied, slow moving and gentle with no defences except two chimney-like tubes, called cornicles, at the end of their abdomens that extrude a quick-hardening waxy fluid that deters a few of its enemies. Sometimes.

The only thing that makes them so very, very successful, is their fecundity, their reproductive prowess. Let me explain:

As usual, it all starts with an egg. In the weather extremes of the northern climes the egg is laid by a female in autumn, after which she dies and the egg over-winters with the nymph hatching in springtime. In warmer climes, like ours, the egg may be laid in times of struggle, like insufficient food supply and the nymph hatches when conditions have improved.

The hatched first-instar nymph (aphids are true bugs which are hemi-metabolic, so there is no pupal stage and metamorphosis) is a female and she immediately pierces the host plant with her sucking mouthparts and begins to feed. Aphids pierce the phloem most of the time to access the plant's sugars, produced by photosynthesis, but when they're thirsty, they will pierce the xylem which carries the water up into the plant from the roots.

Interestingly, when the aphids are eating, they require no effort because the sugars are produced in the plant and therefore have a positive hydrostatic pressure while, when drinking from the xylem, they are required to suck with a little pump located in their heads because the water is being brought up from the roots via transpiration.

When food is abundant, she will moult a further four times and become an adult within a week. She then begins to birth two or even three daughters each day for the rest of her forty or so days of life. After a week, those daughters, too, are birthing their own young, live, in the same way. There is no parental care. The mother continues feeding after giving birth and the nymph immediately begins feeding on her own. If there were no enemies and food remained constant, this single female aphid, that hatched from that egg, will have produced two-hundred-and-ten to the power of fifteen clone daughters over a year! That number is beyond comprehension. To me, at least. I calculated it and the answer is a scientific notation 6.812e+34. I know someone out there knows what that means :) 

Fortunately for the rest of us living things (especially plants), aphids have an entire army of enemies, from exclusive aphid-eaters like ladybug, hoverfly and lacewing larvae that eat aphid after aphid until they are fully developed, to minute parasitic Ichneumid wasps whose gravid females pierce the aphid with their ovipositor and inject an egg within. The egg hatches and the larva slowly consumes the living aphid until it is ready to pupate. The aphid perishes at this stage and the hardened body becomes the pupa where the larva can metamorphosise into an adult

Interestingly, one of the greatest advantages of a holometabolic insect, meaning it has an egg, larva, pupa and adult stage, is that the larvae do not compete for the same resources as the adult, so the population can be much bigger. The exception to this is the ladybug, they are rabid aphid-eaters as larvae and as adults!

Anyway, back to the life cycle: Once the population of aphids on the plant gets too big, or the plant is too severely damaged by the aphids themselves, then hormonal changes triggered by these factors change the morphology of the new offspring. They are slimmer, more rigid and they have wings! This enables these females to fly in search of another host plant to colonise. Once on a suitable host plant, she will feed, and her offspring will be soft-bodied, wingless clones like her mother was on the previous plant.

At the end of the growing season when resources and weather become less attractive, the aphids give birth to male and female offspring who fly off in search of mates, mate and then the females' lay eggs in safe places to hatch when conditions improve again.

This must have been what we experienced that very cold winters morning: a mass of winged male and female aphids en route to their new host plants, or finding a mate, or both.

While I was observing the Stalk-eyed Flies (above) I saw this Ichneumid wasp land on the same bush and begin searching for a prey animal to inject her eggs into. She walked up and down the bush's leaves tapping both the upper and lower surfaces with her antennae. 

I thought I was going to see some action when she encountered a Stalk-eyed fly, but they simply ignored each other when the time came. I know that caterpillars purposely spend more time on the underside of leaves particularly to avoid being found by one of these wasps, but this wasp seems to have got the memo.

The word "ichneumon", from Greek "footprint" to Latin "tracker", has been applied to this family of wasps because they have to track down a larva of a holometabolic insect to parasitise with her offspring. 

Most female wasps have a stinger which they use in self-defence or, primarily, to paralyse mostly worms and spiders which the wasp feeds to her offspring. The female wasps from the Ichneumonidae, however, have an ovipositor instead. If you look carefully at the photo, you will notice the (blurred) ovipositor sticking out above the folded wings). 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. By the time the host dies, the wasp maggots have developed fully, and they will drill a hole through the skin of the now dead host and construct a silken cocoon in which to pupate themselves, making the dead host look a little like a porcupine with quills (cocoons).  

Amazingly, in those species, like this one, only a single egg is laid within the caterpillar, but this egg "reads" the victims species, size, age and how long until it goes into its own pupa and then divides the egg the requisite number of times so that there is enough food for the number of eggs that are formed! The most recorded splits are over three thousand splits! So, one egg decided that there was enough nourishment in the parasitised animal to feed over three thousand wasp larvae without dying before they were fully developed! That is simply incredible! 

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 Woolly 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.

And finally, there are some caterpillar species, who had fallen victim to these wasps in the distant past too regularly, that have evolved a pattern on their bodies that looks so very much like these cocoons sticking out, that the ichneumonid wasp avoids it, apparently convinced that the caterpillar has already been parasitised (an example being the caterpillar of the Dice moth, Rhanidophora ridens, common in the Kruger Park)!

A little while back, while my team was working in the area of Little Joker Koppie, one of the team told me they saw a large, white antelope up there. I was stumped. That weekend, Ryan Steele from Rainbow Rivers (unit 17) sent this picture of an Oryx, Oryx gazella, that he took, while hiking, from the plains above his place and below the top of Little Joker Koppie.

There's always a surprise in store for us here on the estate, and this was no exception. An oryx, here on the estate? Very odd. I was told that Mount Anderson Ranch had an oryx at a stage, so this must be it, then, since they are not naturally found in this sort of habitat and this is surely the only one here. Must be very lonely.

The exciting thing about this sighting, is that it increases our antelope species count on the estate from thirteen species to fourteen species. That's a good count anywhere!

Grass Orb-web spider, Neoscona moreli, sitting in a web designed similarly to the webs spun by Garden spiders, including a stabilimentum, a zig-zag line of silk running from the centre of the web to the bottom edge.

 

There are many theories to the function of this zig-zag of silk, from reflecting UV light to attract insects, to making the web visible to larger mammals so they don't walk through it. But as its name suggests, it may just be there to stabilise the particularly flimsy web.

Although the web and the habitat, open grasslands, compare with the Garden spiders, the Grass Orb-weaver's behaviour is more similar to the bark spider (blog of November 2019), where the spider hides away during daylight hours, and then spins a web from scratch as dusk approaches, uses the web to catch food during the night, and then dismantles the web again in the morning before hiding away again for the rest of the day.

The male, half the size of the female approaches the female in her web, at night, and if lucky, mates with her and escapes with his life before spinning his own web, similar but smaller than the females', the rest of the time.

The little spiderlings hatch in mid-summer and disperse soon afterwards when they are only a few millimetres in size and immediately build their own webs. If prey items are regular enough, the little ones reach adult size within two months.

To get a photo of one, in its web, in the daytime, is apparently not a common occurrence, so bully for me.





That's it for this winter, which, thankfully, is coming to an end because I felt colder this year than usual and it has been difficult some mornings. But, as usual, the estate delivers good fishing, cycling, birding, hiking and those other lekker outdoor activities. Remember, if you want a guided excursion, be it a drive, walk or hike, just let me know. See you soon.