WINTER OF 2026

 WINTER OF 2026

Winter has come and gone, although it is still very cold when the sun is not up with frost in the mornings. It felt to me like a rather mild one with a lot of moisture around after a long rainy season.

The Kranz Aloes, Aloe arborescens, have been blooming abundantly this season with their bright splashes of red bringing joy and colour to the drab surroundings. In Lydenburg town they are definitely a feature in the wintertime, where they line the main road in the southern part of town and produce a dazzling display of colour that certainly cheers everything up somewhat.

They are extremely adaptable plants that can thrive in almost any habitat at any altitude from sea level to the tippy tops of the tallest mountains, in complete sun or complete shade. They are also very easy to grow from seed or from cuttings and require zero maintenance once established. 

Because of this, they are very popular garden plants throughout the world and have become naturalised in many of these countries, even becoming an invasive pest in Portugal. 

In the Orient, they are grown in gardens for their value as a treatment for burns. The sap was used to treat irradiation burns after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of the second world war. This practise also brought the healing powers of the plant to the attention of the west, where these powers were tested in the laboratory.

It was found that extracts of the flesh in the leaves contain anti-ulcer, anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, anti-carcinogenic, and hypoglycaemic activity. The leaf sap is also used to treat X-ray burns. In traditional medicine, it is a prized plant, being used for multiple ailments and sicknesses too.

Ecologically, they are an important winter food source, together with the blooming Tree Fuchsias, Halleria lucida, for nectar-eating birds like sunbirds and sugarbirds, providing quality nectar when very little else is available (see Southern Double-collared Sunbird below).

Together with about 130 other species, the Aloe genus is endemic (occurring nowhere else naturally) to Southern Africa, and they are all very beautiful when in bloom. The photo above was taken from the edge of the cliff right at the top of Spioenkop, south-west of the office, bordering Potato Seed Production, providing a spectacular view of the northern portion of the estate.

It is officially the end of the rainy season at the end of July, with the first day of the next season beginning on the first of August. We had two rather big rain events during our winter which is not at all normal, but with the high rainfall of the summer, it is no surprise either.

The final rainfall figure for the central area of the estate reveal that we experienced the wettest rainy season since we started recording rainfall in 2010, just over what was the previous record season (1141mm) in 2016-17 season. In the last sixteen years, there have only been six times that the rainfall has exceeded 1000mm in a season. The average for the central area sits at 920mm per season.

The figures for the estate are as follows:

Central                 1170mm

North (U25)         1433mm

East (U22)            1277mm

South (U17)          1086mm

West (gate)            935mm

Making the average for the estate 1180mm

As you can see, the northern part of the estate received the most, like usual, but this season it was particularly wet there. The western portion was again, as is also usual, the driest, but still received a lot more than usual.

As you probably know, a strong El Nino event has begun to form over the central Pacific Ocean, bringing predictions of an extremely dry upcoming rainy season. The advantage of this nice wet season prior to a dry one, as predicted, is that the soils have maintained a lot of moisture, so the effects on the vegetation will not be as bad as it could be.

Now I am a little confused, because we received a further 60mm rain a fortnight ago, on the 10th and 11th August! Would this be another winter storm or is it a nice early spring rain? It does, as mentioned above, fall in the new season. Whatever, it has moistened the soils nicely and I can already see some new green growth coming out. I'm going to celebrate it as an early, first-rain occasion of springtime!

Incidentally, the photograph above is one of my file photos. It was taken from the patio of Rainbow Creek (Unit 2) during a storm many, many years ago while having dinner with Grant and Karen Lotter. What a beautiful venue to spend time with such nice people!

This is a close-up, taken early on a dewy morning, of a resting Bee Fly from the Bombylisoma genus of the Bombyliidae family of flies. This individual has not yet been active for the day because it still has dew drops on its body.

They are called Bee Flies because most of them, unlike this species, resemble honeybees. A quick glance by someone who knows would let them know that it is a fly and not a bee, because a fly only has one pair of wings, while a bee, like most other winged insects, has two pairs (Flies belong to the DIPTERA order of insects, and diptera means two-wing, instead of the usual four wings on insects).

The second pair of wings in the Diptera have been lost and modified into a pair of clubbed stalks, called halteres. These are located behind the forewings (where the hind wings used to be) and act as flight stabilisers, allowing the fly to execute some amazing flight manoeuvres, making them the most agile insects in flight. The next time you see a fly, instead of swatting it, look for the halteres. They are quite easy to see.

The Bombyliidae is a huge family of more than 4500 described species so far. One of the things they have in common is that the larvae feed on the eggs or larvae of other insects like solitary bees, cockroaches and wasps like the Thread-waisted wasp that I featured in my blogs of November 2019 and again in Springtime 2025. Remember that wasp digs a hole in the ground and fills it with worms before laying an egg on the ceiling of the hole before covering it up again, leaving the wasp maggot to eat the worms.

Female Bee Flies that parasitise these wasps have a special sand chamber at the tip of their abdomens which they fill with sand grains. They coat their eggs with these, now sticky, sand grains to make them heavier and to protect them from trauma and the elements. 

Why heavier? well, another nickname for the Bee Flies that parasitise these wasps is a Bomber Fly, because when the gravid fly finds a hole dug by the wasp, she hovers above it, lays an egg and coats it with a sticky mixture of sand grains, and with a flick of her abdomen, shoots the egg into the hole from as high as a metre up, like a bomber would with a bomb!

Once the egg lands in the hole and the hole is filled with worms, a wasp egg and the hole is closed by the mother wasp, then the larva of the fly hatches and eats everything in the hole, worms and wasp larva.

So, Bee Flies are not just "good flies" because they are important pollinators of plants, but they are also "good flies" because they are important in controlling other insect populations, often those of pests like cockroaches.

A tiny, about 5mm in diameter, ball of golden silk, attached to the underside of a rock. If you look carefully enough, you will see eggs inside. It is the egg-sac of a Horned Mimetus Pirate Spider, Mimetus cornutus, which the mother attaches to a hidden and protected substrate, in this case a small gap on the underside of a rock in the Majubane forest, close to the waterfall.

Pirate Spiders are so called because they capture and eat other spiders. They do this using a form of mimicry called "aggressive mimicry". This is when an animal uses deceptive tactics to fool potential prey that it is harmless, until it is too late. The most accurate description of this type of mimicry is: "Like a wolf in a sheep's clothing."

The pirate spider approaches the web of another spider species and tugs on the silk in the same manner that an ensnared insect would, inviting the resident spider to approach the pirate in order to immobilise it, thinking it is a victim. The pirate quickly bites the leg of the resident and retreats away from the web and waits for its venom to take effect on the resident. Once the resident is suitably paralysed, the pirate returns and sucks the juices from its body.

A lovely shot of a Southern Double-collared Sunbird, Cinnyris chalybeus, probably better known by the old name, Lesser Double-collared Sunbird, taken by Dave DeVos from The Crofts, unit 19, in the Majubane valley.

Unless you are able to look very closely, these birds are difficult, initially, to differentiate from the closely related Greater Double-collared Sunbird which is also found on the estate. Regarding the males, the Southern has a pronounced blue stripe running over its chest between the red chest band and the iridescent green balaclava, while the red band is narrower than that of the Greater, and the balaclava is green as opposed to a bluer balaclava for the Greater. The bill of the Lesser is also shorter and more curved than that of the Greater. Finally, if they are together, you will notice that the Greater is bigger than the Lesser, by two centimetres 

Their food consists mainly of sweet nectar, but about ten percent of foraging is for invertebrates out of breeding season. During breeding, they concentrate more on invertebrates, because that is what they feed the chicks with their massive protein requirements. Once, near Pretoriuskop in the Kruger Park, I saw them taking up to ten winged termite alates in their bills at once at a bird party attending the immediate area around the exposed termite tunnels where the alates are released from!

I also regularly see then hover in front of the spider webs on my patio ceiling and quickly pick the spiders out and then eating them or flying off with them, possibly to feed to a chick nearby. 

Here on the estate, they feed on nectar from a host of plants right throughout the year and probably wouldn't have evolved the strict nectar diet they have, and the accompanying benefits, if it wasn't for the fact that there is always a species of plant flowering with nectar-rich, red or orange, tubular-shaped, or brush-like flowers suitable for sunbirds to feed on and also, importantly, to pollinate. 

To access the nectar, they stick their long, curved bills into the opening of the fused, tubular corolla right until their forehead touches the rim, then it extends its long, spaghetti-like tongue until it reaches the sweet nectar. While performing this process, the forehead first brushes past the stigma of the flower, which receives the pollen from the previous flower, and then, when the forehead touches the rim of the corolla, it also rests against the stamen of the flower, which is loaded with pollen for the sunbird to carry to the next flower. Pollination complete! Everybody's happy. A similar thing happens with brush-like flowers, except there is no rim and tubular corolla.

I went through our Finsbury plant list to see which plants produced flowers that fit into this category and when they were in bloom and came up with the following list:

Spring:   Heath Grass Aloe, Aloe chortoliriodes

               Transvaal Bottlebrush, Greyia radlkoferi

               Sutherland's Bottlebrush, Greyia sutherlandii

               Fire Heath, Erica cerinthoides

               Northern Shadewort, Phygelius aequalis

               Silvery Sugarbush, Protea roupelliae

               Common Sugarbush, Protea afra

Summer: Foster's Spotted Aloe, Aloe fosteri

                Mount Anderson Aloe, Aloe andersonii

                Salmon Poker, Kniphofia galpinii

                Rock Lion's Paw, Leonotis ocymifolia

                Northern Shadewort, Phygelius aequalis

                Zigzag Montbretia, Crocosmia paniculata

                Silvery Sugarbush, Protea roupelliae

                Common Sugarbush, Protea afra 

Autumn: Common marsh Poker, Kniphofia linearifolia  

                Northern Shadewort, Phygelius aequalis

                Silvery Sugarbush, Protea roupelliae

                Common Sugarbush, Protea afra

Winter:    Kranz Aloe, Aloe arborescens

                Spotted Aloe, Aloe longibracteata

                Tree Fuchsia, Halleria lucida

                Vark Oor, Cotyledon orbiculata

                 Silvery Sugarbush, Protea roupelliae

                 Common Sugarbush, Protea afra 

Well, that is plenty. It must be taken into account, though, that not all these plants occur in the particular habitat the sunbird chooses, and that many of the food plants bloom in more than one season. Still, that is quite an impressive list of food plants available to the Finsbury sunbirds throughout the year.

My research also tells me that these sunbirds are known to pierce the corollas of flowers just above the nectary when they cannot reach the nectar with their tongues because of the design of the flower, to access the nectar. An example of this type of flower on the estate would be our many species of Gladiolus, although I have not witnessed this act myself.

In the very southern parts of the country, the Southern Double-collared Sunbird is the exclusive pollinator of a plant called the Firecracker Creeper, Microloma saggitatum, a stunning sight when in full bloom.   

A close-up of a Pill Millipede from the Sphaerotheriidae family, with one of its compound eyes visible. This is one of the big differences between our Pill millipedes and the Pill millipedes in the northern hemisphere, who do not have eyes at all. 

With our winter being so wet, I managed to find this chap in the open in my rockery. Normally they are only seen in winter when they are exposed by scratching under leaf litter, because they need to remain moist. Why? Well, because they are very primitive and cannot retain their body moisture efficiently.

Millipedes, during the Silurian period, were one of the very first animals to occupy land (443 million years ago to 419 mya), making them amongst the most primitive of land animals, and by the middle of the Carboniferous period (359mya to 299mya), the largest of all arthropods was a millipede, reaching over two meters long! 

In fact, there were also very large insects around at that time, and this was achievable because the atmosphere was rich in oxygen at the time, caused by the massive earthquakes that covered millions and millions of hectares of forest. The vegetation of the covered forests, lacking oxygen, could not decay, and so massive amounts of carbon dioxide, the by-product of the decay process, did not enter the atmosphere, and the massive amounts of oxygen to drive the process was not used. This dramatically increased the oxygen levels at the close of the Carboniferous, allowing these huge arthropods to evolve. Incidentally, these massive deposits of undegraded vegetation eventually solidified and formed the gas, oil and coal reserves that we have today. This is why it is so bad to burn fossil fuels....

Now, insects' size is so limited because they do not have a circulatory system to carry oxygen around their bodies, so the distance the air must go cannot be far. Instead, they rely on a tracheal system, which consist of little openings called spiracles which can be opened and closed that allow oxygen into the body via a network of trachea, fine chitinous tubes that convey the oxygenated air directly to the bodily tissues.

 

Myriapods (Millipedes and centipedes) are more primitive and evolved this system in a more rudimentary form, where these spiracles cannot be closed to reduce water loss. They also had not yet evolved the waterproof waxy covering that insects enjoy, so they are susceptible to desiccation. This is why I was so surprised to find this Pill Millipede out and about in the middle of winter when they are normally resting in a dark, moist place during the dry season.

When a female Pill Millipede is ready to mate, she releases a trail of pheromones which is detected, sooner or later, by a male, who follows the trail until he finds the female. After mating and when she is ready, she will lay a batch of sticky eggs in a dark, moist place and, in some species, the female guards those eggs until they hatch.

The hatchling looks like a miniature version of the adult, but with less segments and legs. Each time it grows and its skin gets too tight, it will shed that skin, and a new, larger skin begins to dry and harden in place. This happens about six times until the Pill Millipede reaches adult size.

Pill Millipedes are detrivores, meaning that they eat dead, rotting vegetation and, with the help of gut microorganisms, break these down to their basic components so that they can enrich the soil when excreted, making these animals an important mineral recycler for healthy soils.

Everything about them is good: They do no harm, are not dangerous and are good for the environment. They apparently even make good pets, because I found guidelines on the internet on how to raise them as pets!

I featured this little chap in a blog six years ago and was recently reminded of it when researching moles on Wikipedia, because the Wiki photograph for this species is this photo and another one of the same individual, taken by me up on Goudkoppies! (I have no copyrights on my photos on iNaturalist, so anybody can use them)

To recap, my team and I were working on the Pine along the northern parts of the Zebra trail when we encountered this Common Mole-rat, Cryptomys hottentotus. A very exciting encounter because they spend their time under the ground and the only sign of them we usually see are the little mounds of loose soil after they have cleared it from their subterranean tunnels. 

Although their eyes are extremely small and their eyesight very poor, this chap still saw us and when it did, it immediately lifted its head and began grunting (pretty loudly!) and snapping those massive incisors together. Made me think of a miniature Hippopotamus! 

I wanted to pick it up to deposit it where I could photograph it easier but realised that it uses those incisors (unlike the insectivorous moles that use their forelegs) to bite through the rocky soil when searching for food or building underground tunnels and rooms. Indeed, I found out afterwards that their skulls are specially adapted to house extra-large muscles to enable this... good thing I didn't let it bite me... could've lost part of a finger. 

I did pick it up with my shirt and it immediately spun around within its skin to face me which I also learned later it was capable of to enable it to move around in its limited space underground (Honey Badgers can also move around within their skin). 

Another physiological feature of this subterranean mammal is that its incisors are situated on the outside of its mouth, so that it can close its mouth while it is digging with its teeth, helping it avoid getting mouthfuls of soil during this process. 

The social structure is also abnormal and is the genesis of eusociality: They live within a system where only one dominant male and one dominant female breed while the rest of the colony support them. The rest of the colony is usually made up of older offspring helping to raise their newer siblings (like in Porcupines and Jackals and many bird species - it is called an extended family), but immigrants are also accepted into the colony and depending on their experience and attitude, will become casual workers or breeders while blood youngsters will be workers. Workers work about 20% harder than casual workers in the colony. 

The nest is made up of a system of permanent, maintained tunnels and chambers used for food storage and resting. They radiate out from this nest in tunnels to find food, which is the roots, bulbs and corms of a wide variety of plants. They can even drag shallow-root plants through the ground into their tunnels and feed on the leaves and stems! Smaller food items are eaten in situ and larger items are carried to storage chambers and stored for later consumption. 

One colony studied in the Western Cape had a network of tunnels exceeding a kilometre in length! 

I guess the mole-rat I found must be an individual that has left his/her colony in search of another in which it hopes to be accepted as an immigrant. 

This odd, boat-like insect is a beetle in the Dineutus genus from the Gyrinidae family of beetles. It is commonly called a Whirligig beetle and is found on the surface of running water either alone or in large aggregations called "rafts".

They are streamlined, smooth wax-covered beetles with the second two pairs of legs modified into efficient oars that propel it across the water with a two dimensional velocity that would match the three-dimensional velocity of a fly! The forelegs are long, with grasping hooks to grasp prey or the river bottom while submerged.

They also, amazingly, have a pair of "double-lensed eyes". The smaller half of the eye peers above the water level, while a larger underside half sees perfectly underwater!

But that's not all! They can also fly! Those sealable elytra (that's the hardened forewings that cover the body and hindwings in a watertight canopy, in this case) can open, like in most beetles, to reveal a second pair of wings that can, somewhat laboriously, take them to flight. Especially at night, when they might be attracted to our artificial lights.

Although the photo looks a little blurred, it is the only one that came out nicely from about fifty shots! This is because they swim in very fast, circular and zig zag patterns, as mentioned before, and never sit still for a second. This is one of their strategies to avoid predation. 

While they're spinning around franticly, they're actually quite sorted. They form a raft and the composition of that raft is suited to the current condition of the individual beetle, be it hunger, seeking a mate, stress levels or other competitive social behaviour. Whatever happens, those that occupy the outer reaches of the raft are most in danger of predation, but also the most likely to encounter a feeding opportunity.

This is because they are omnivorous insects that eat drifting detritus, dead or wounded arthropods, that they quickly subdue if still alive, or anything else that arrives on the water current that they can overpower.

They can also dive. They can store a bubble of air under the canopy of their elytra and dive down to the bottom of the stream to, either escape predation, or inspect and devour a potential meal.

It is definitely not all! These interesting beetles also have another defence available to them. In this case against underwater threats, like fish. For this, they have a pair of pygidial glands on their abdomens that emit noxious volatile substances that repel fish particularly, and this defence is enhanced by the formation of a raft so, the more the merrier. 

In these rafts, the better fed and fitter individuals home in on the centre to find a mate and pair off. Once accomplished, they mate and the female, once ready, lays her eggs on drifting twigs and leaves, a great way to disperse your progeny.

The larvae hatch and drift to the bottom of the habitat. They look a bit like worms, constricting towards the head, with gills on the sides of their bodies. They are ferociously predatory and will consume any living thing they can overpower. They are, however, an important food source for fish like, in our case, trout.

Once they have reached their quota, they crawl just above the waterline, spin a cocoon on any available vegetation, and pupate therein. The adult eventually pops out and resumes the cycle.

Very nice find!

I have featured Snouted Harvester termites in previous publications, especially since they are the mainstay diet of the elusive Aardwolf, which I recently confirmed is present on the estate (they have been sighted by the Stuarts and others in the past), but it has always been the snouted soldier termites protecting a breach in the colony's mound. This time I got them, particularly the workers, active in the predawn, while I was returning home after extinguishing a controlled fire up near Spioenkop. I was super excited!

If you look carefully at the photo, you will see the smaller soldiers, with their pointed noses that expel a noxious substance that repels ants particularly, the ones I've featured before. The bigger ones, with the almost transparent bulbous heads, the workers that cut the grass and haul it back to the mound, I had not seen before this occasion.

By the time I managed to get a photograph, there was a bit of a consternation because of my interference, but all those workers were carrying a perfectly cut piece or two of straw in their jaws. Some, in the photo, are still carrying them, but one can see many that were dropped on the floor.

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....

These terpenes, however, do nothing to deter the main predator of these termites. The Aardwolf, which I spoke about in my Springtime 2025 publication.

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 in the darkness of night. Aardwolves have very acute hearing, enabling them to pick up harvester termites harvesting 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.

At the end (or beginning in this case) of the day, if I was an Aardwolf, I would have had a lovely meal that morning!

A stunning example of a Brittlewood, Nuxia congesta, high above the Steenkamps southern waterfall, in full bloom while festooned with Old Man's Beard lichens hanging randomly from the branches. This beautiful individual resides on the forest edge, high up above the Steenkamps' southern waterfall, close to our boundary with Emoyeni and the presence of so many lichens in the area is an indicator of clean, unpolluted air.

It is a frost-resistant winter flowering tree that reaches three to five meters in height and is a super garden subject, especially smaller gardens. The abundant inflorescences of small cream flowers are very showy and exude a lovely, perfumed scent, which is very attractive to bees. So much so, that these trees are used as honey trees in Kenya and Tanzania. 

As you can see, the tree has a very artistic manner of growth, and it is also a fast-growing tree that will get you about seventy centimetres per year. If that's not enough, then add the fact that it does not have an invasive root system which makes it suitable to plant near pathways and walls without lifting them later on. This feature also makes it a great candidate for large pots although it also happens to be a sought-after bonsai subject!

These very variable (the leaf size and shape, and even fleshiness and margins are extremely variable) trees are found on rocky situations and on forest edges. A close relative, the Forest Nuxia, Nuxia floribunda, is a big tree found in our forests, and also, quite often, poking out of mining holes and shafts where they are protected from fire in the grasslands.

The specific name, congesta, for the former refers to the very compact flower heads, while the specific name floribunda for the latter tree refers to the abundant flower heads, which are much bigger than the former's. They also flower in the winter, and if you gain a bit of height by the Majubane waterfall towards the end of winter, and gaze back over the forest you will see many of them standing out in their glory with their huge blooms dominating the landscape.

This chubby little insect with bubble eyes comes from the Trichdenotecnum genus of the Booklice family, the Psocidae. They are very small, measuring a mere two millimetres in length, and with its effective camouflage, is invisible against its preferred habitat of lichen-covered rocks unless it moves, and you are looking very closely indeed. 

It is a Barklice or Booklice from the Psocodea (previously Psocoptera) order of insects. These small, primitive insects are called Booklice when they are found, as tiny brown insects, running over stored books feeding on the paste and glue of the book bindings. They also feed on stored cereal products and can therefore become a major pest. 

The insects are known as Barklice when they are found on the lichen-covered bark of a tree, although this species spends its time on lichen-covered rocks instead (perhaps it should be called a Rocklice then). 

Beneath the huge jaws of the insect is an extended mouthpiece consisting of a rod on each side that moves forward and backward with a forked tip. This tool is used to scrape pieces of lichen off the substrate so that it can then be shovelled into the primitive pestle-and-mortar type mouthparts to be masticated and swallowed.

If you go right to the top of Goudkoppies, on the Zebra trail, and carefully search the lichen-covered rocks around Nosey Point, you are bound to find a few on almost every rock, grazing away like cows in a field.

At the end of autumn and the beginning of winter, you may encounter this bizarre purple plant growing very low to the ground. It is called a Northern Vampirecup, Cytinus visseri, and it is a rare fully-fledged parasite that produces no chlorophyll at all (which is required for photosynthesis) and so relies entirely on other plants, particularly the White Everlasting, Helichrysum reflexum, of the Daisy family, for food and water. They also, but more rarely, parasitise the Northern Hardleaf, Phylica paniculata, and the Escarpment Rice Bush, Cliffortia repens. All of which are pretty common on the estate.  

The parasite also produces no aerial vegetative structures and the only parts seen above ground are the maroon flowers which are enclosed in their petals. The petals have hinges, though, that enable the petals to fold right down at ground level (like I have done with my finger in the photo) exposing the flowers that contain copious amounts of sweet nectar (+30% sugar!). 

The plants are dioecious (male and female flowers occur on separate plants) and the exposed flower in the photograph is a male. The pollinating process of the plant is also quite a shocker: The plant produces a scent (plasticky and yeasty to humans - not so attractive!) that is extremely attractive to small mammals like the Striped Field mouse, the Pygmy mouse, a Dormouse and the Short-snouted Elephant Shrew. 

These small mammals tend the flowers at night by folding the petals down with their little hands and lapping up the sweet nectar, and at the same time collecting pollen on their faces to deposit on the next flower and complete the cycle of pollination. 

This is the ONLY dioecious plant, in existence, that is pollinated by mammals! There was a study conducted between 2002 and 2006, very close by at Mauchsberg in the Sterkspruit Nature Reserve (just on the other side of the Long Tom Pass road, where the largest known population of the plant is found, where these and many other interesting facts were established about the plant and its pollinators. 

And finally, we've needed to declare war on the rats around the central area, because they were starting to nest in the TLB and other vehicles parked near the garbage disposal building near the office, resulting severe damage to the wiring in said vehicles. 

The reason they enjoy a healthy population is because of the food waste in the garbage, which is sustaining them.

As most of you know, we have supplied a white food waste bucket to each house and have asked members to please separate their food waste from other waste by putting it in the bucket. We mix the contents of the buckets together with leaves and water and seal the piles off under a plastic tarpaulin, resulting in a luxurious compost after a while.

Now, if the food waste has been removed from the other waste, then it is not so important for you to separate the normal waste, because we can do it at the garbage disposal room instead.

The system is working, but I estimate that only about 60-70% of the members are complying so far and, unfortunately, it is one of those things where, as long as there is any food in the waste, we will not be able to get rid of the rats.

I therefore implore you to separate your food waste from the other garbage and help us get rid of these exotic pests for once and for all.

We also now have a lot of compost available, so if you need some this springtime, come take as much as you like. It might be risky, though, if you do not have a fence around your garden. I say this because I spread my first batch of compost on the lawn surrounding my house, and it was so nutritious that the grass turned a lush, dark green.

This proved to be a problem, because the warthogs visited my lawn five or six times a day, not giving the lawn time to recover from the grazing pressure!

Well, that's it! Springtime is here and it is certainly my favourite time of the year. Remember, if you want a guided excursion while you are here, just give me a call on the radio, or contact me via WhatsApp, and we will arrange something. See you soon!