MARCH 2021

 MARCH 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FEBRUARY 2021

 FEBRUARY 2021

February, a nice short, wet month, flew by in a whizz! We had an average of 156mm rainfall over the estate during the month, bringing the average seasonal total to 904mm, which is our annual average already. The lowest recording was in the west from Patrick's gate at 106mm for the month and a seasonal total of 560mm. The highest measurement was from Pebble Creek in the north of the estate with 210mm for the month and a seasonal total, so far, of 1116mm. That is a vast difference considering there is only 6,3km between the two rain gauges, as the crow flies! Those of you who have visited recently will also notice that the roads have been repaired and are in great condition after our visit by Eloise in January. The estate is green and lush and life abounds! Below are some of the natural highlights of the month:  

A wet February is a super time to go on a mushroom hunt and, if you're lucky, in the depths of the moist forests on the estate, you may stumble upon these incredible little Fluted Bird's Nest mushrooms, Cyathus striatus. And yes, they look just like tiny (10mm X 15mm) bird's nests with eggs inside, don't they? Even though they belong to the Basidiomycota division of fungi that simply release spores in situ, they have a method of spreading spores similar to the more advanced Ascomycota that use water drops and other methods to disperse spores. The "eggs" are called peridioles and they produce spores within themselves. When it rains, a raindrop will hit the "nest" with force and the splash will eject the peridioles into the surrounds. The peridioles are attached to the "nest" by a thin cord with a mass of sticky mycelium at the end and so when the peridioles are ejected, the sticky end may attach to a piece of dead wood and, later, the surface of the peridiole will weather away and expose the spores which will then germinate. Besides being used in the production of certain antibiotics, in 2013 an Israeli professor, Prof. Solomon Wasser, patented a medicinal product derived from these little mushrooms that is to treat pancreatic cancer.

This massive, leathery caterpillar will one day become a beautiful Vine Hawkmoth, Hippotion celereo (see blog of September 2019). I found it on it's Impatiens host food plant in the forest around the Steenkamp's waterfalls. It hatched alone on the plant I found it on or perhaps one of its neighbours and began to eat voraciously to get to this size. It relies on it's camouflage to protect it from its many enemies but will regurgitate the contents of its foregut, together with toxins it stores there from its foodplants, as a defense from smaller predators like ants and other insects. I mention in that blog that many orchids rely on Hawkmoths, with their long proboscis, as specialised pollinators. Well, I learned an interesting fact to illustrate this: In 1822 a French botanist described a very rare orchid from Madagascar. The orchid has spurs (long nectaries) reaching as long as 29 centimeters. Darwin, knowing that the nectar of the flower is stored at the end of these spurs, predicted that there should be a moth on Madagascar that has a proboscis that can reach to the end of these spurs and his friend and colleague, Wallace, published a "wanted" article with a diagram of what the moth may look like. Twenty one years later, the moth was discovered and described and, yes, it's probiscis is 32cm long!  

This moss covered bracket mushroom is called a Cracked Bracket, Phellinus rimosus, and I found it on the lower trunk of a huge African Almond tree in the kloof forest near the Steenkamps waterfalls. The big differences between this fungi and the others I have been featuring on these blogs is that these are perennial, living for many years and adding a concentric ring each year as it grows, and that they are parasitic on their host tree, causing a brown heart-rot that weakens the tree over many years and finally kills it. Not very good for the tree but very medicinal for us; This bracket has been used in Japan, China, Australia (by the aboriginals) and Africa for thousands of years for many ailments but interest in its medicinal qualities was renewed after WWII when it was used on the Meshima islands to treat patients shipped there who were affected by the atomic bombings. In 2015 it was found that extracts from the brackets provided a significant protective effect against acute alcohol-induced lipid peroxidation in the liver, kidneys and brains of mice. It has also been found that ethyl-acetate and methanol extracts provide significant anti-tumor activity. Methanol extracts have also been proved to have successful activity against bacteria like Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium and others. Besides being a great pharmacy, the Cracked Bracket is rather beautiful with it's barky, moss-covered roof with a velvet rim and it's soft, skin-like sporangium below.

Jeesh! I didn't see this little critter until it moved when I was trying to pick a leaf from an Escarpment Rice Bush high up above Kingfisher Lodge (unit 6) recently! It is a young Flower Mantid, Harpagomantis tricolor, and it uses the same strategy as the Crab Spider (see blogs of March 2018 and May 2020) to capture it's prey aside from two main differences: The Mantid does not have venom so it relies on its powerful "forearms" to subdue the insect prey before it chews it up; and the Mantid cannot change it's colour, like the spider, to the colour of the flower. Instead, the Mantid has to find a flower that matches it's colour or it has to wait in amongst the surrounding leaves for it's prey to land on the neighbouring flower. This has got to be one of the best examples of camouflage around. Even its eyes are camouflaged!

While working in the Kloof forests during February I noticed many blobs of white foam on the forest floor and on deadtree stumps and branches. Some of them even have slime trails behind them like a snail trail. No, they are not blobs of pollution. Or blobs of washing foam... They are blobs of Plasmodial Slime Mould. Not an animal or a fungi although it behaves like both. Slime moulds (see blog of January 2021) are single-celled organisms but this type of Slime mould, Fuligo sp. from the class Myxogastria is very different from the Physarum cinereum featured in that blog. I will give you a run-down on the life-cycle of this Plasmodial Slime Mould: 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 bee hive). These cells move around their environment eating bacteria and when they meet up with a mate they form a zygote and grow into a plasmodia as they split nuclei. A plasmodia is defined as a living structure of cytoplasm that contains many nuclei, instead of individual cells each with a nucleus. This pasmodia (white blob) feeds on bacteria and other microorganisms and grows 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 millimeter per hour, leaving a snail trail behind. When food becomes scarce, the slime mould's behaviour becomes more fungus like and dries, forming a crust to which the nuclei migrate from within the cytoplasmic mass. This crust forms fungus-like fruiting bodies that produce millions of spores that are released into the air. This is certainly the weirdest living organism that I have ever come across!

I took this photo just below Lone Tree Cottage (unit 3) in the reeds between the road and the cliff. It is of a male Thick-billed Weaver, Ambliospiza albifrons, constructing a nest that he will present to his mate once completed. If she is not entirely satisfied, she will reject it and he will demolish it and construct another one nearby. Interestingly, when he builds the nest, he constructs a cup first and then builds up from there into a ball. Most other weavers construct a vertical ring as a foundation from which they expand into a ball. Thick-billed weavers are polygamous and usually nest in colonies so the scene can become quite frantic as male birds construct multiple nests for multiple mates and mates reject and males demolish then rebuild! In this instance, though, there is no colony and the male has only one mate which infrequently happens and the pair then appear monogamous. Although the male still has it easy and does not contribute to the rearing of the young like a monogamous male would. If the female accepts the nest, she will line the nest and lay two to four eggs, incubate them and feed the chicks once they hatch all on her own. Another difference between these weavers and most other species is that the chicks are fed with regurgitated blobs of mashed insect or fruit where other species feed the chicks with whole bits of food. The chicks are fledged and ready to fly in eighteen days when they leave the nest and learn to fly and feed for themselves. The enormous beak allows this weaver to feed on fruits that others cannot consume because they are too big or hard. Here at Finsbury, the Thick-billed weaver's preferred fruits come from Wild Peach, Forest Knobwood, White Stinkwood and Buffalo Thorn trees. They also jump at the opportunity to feed on Termite winged alates when they take to the air in spring.

I encountered this little Cape Centipede Eater, Aparallactus capensis, in the thickets beside the path that takes one to the Majubane waterfall. With an impressive average life-span of twenty years this slender little snake does not get any longer than 40 centimeters as it moves about under rocks in grasslands and leaf litter in forests and riparian bush in search of it's exclusive food item, Centipedes (see blogs of July 2019 and January 2020). As mentioned there, centipedes are extremely common but usually well hidden in these environments. Also, as mentioned there, centipedes are venomous hunters and so the snake is also venomous and when it attacks a centipede, it bites and chews the centipede, like other rear-fanged snakes, until the fast-acting venom takes effect. Apparently this can become quite a violent affair and may turn into an epic battle. The snake appears immune to the venom of the centipede although there are records of small Cape Centipede Eaters being attacked and eaten by large centipedes! The snake is also prey to hunting spiders and scorpions and other burrowing snakes like the Spotted Harlequin Snake (see blog of October 2020) in whose family it also belongs. It sure is a dog-eat-dog world out there! 

A field of Ribbon-leaved Nerines in a marsh that is the source of the High altitude stream that runs along the Zebra Trail on Goudkoppies. February was also the month when I partook in the annual four day MTPA (Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Agency) Bioblitz hosted by Mount Anderson Ranch next door. Herewith, MTPA's introduction:

One of Mpumalanga’s key characteristics is its vast grasslands, which contains various rare and endangered species, and serves as an amazing biodiversity asset. However, they are difficult to properly account for in environmental impact assessments, because of their localized distributions and short flowering durations (MTPA, 2014). In addition to that, specialist skills are also required to locate and identify them reliably. Mount Anderson intersects three biomes, namely grassland, savanna and small patches of forest, with grassland being the dominating biome. The grasslands are home to the majority of Mpumalanga’s rare, endemic and threatened species, including various irreplaceable wetlands. Grasslands are vital water-production landscapes, playing a critical role in maintaining the quality and quantity of water entering rivers, streams and aquifers (MTPA, 2014). In addition to their undeniable importance, grasslands occupy approximately 61% of the surface area of the Province and are presently considered to be the most vulnerable and least well-protected of Mpumalanga’s biomes (MTPA, 2014). The source of Mpumalanga’s vast array of species and ecosystems is underpinned by diverse and often uncommon geology (MTPA, 2014). The Province has a myriad of wetlands and numerous important river systems, including, amongst others, the headwaters of the Vaal, Olifants, Nkomati, Crocodile and Usuthu Rivers (MTPA, 2014). Consequently, the natural landscapes of are not only essential for the rich biodiversity they hold, but also because they are critically important for regional and international water security (MTPA, 2014). BioBlitz entails the sampling of an area’s biodiversity over a short period of time, in order to determine which species (rare/endangered etc.) are present in the specified area, and whether they require protection. The goals of the BioBlitz was therefore to pinpoint the level of biodiversity at MAWR as well as its distribution and to identify the amount of endangered/threatened or species new to the area. As part of the BioBlitz program 2021, the MTPA scientists, the MTPA interns and other trained individuals, visited the Mount Anderson Wildlife and Water Catchment Reserve (MAWR). Mount Anderson is a water catchment reserve gazette(d) before 1994, set on 7 300 hectares of dramatic landscape. Although the reserve is still undergoing the process of being approved under the new act- National Environmental Management: Protected Areas (NEM:PA) (together with the rest of us in the MACNR - Jimmy), it is recognized as a protected area and is the first privately owned water catchment (area with high rainfall) reserve in not only the province, but the country as well.

The gang. From left to right: Mervyn Lotter (Control Scientist - Biodiversity Planning), Vaino Prinsloo (Zoologist Terrestrial - Large Mammals), Gerrie Comacho (Zoologist Terrestrial - Large Predators), Jimmy Whatmore (Botany), Willem Van Staden (Botanist), Trent Sinclair (Host, manager of MAWR), Tommy Steyn (Botanist), Malcolm Baines (Sterkspruit Reserve Manager - Entomology), Ronell Niemand (Botanist), Eulalia Jordaan (Student), and Lientjie Cohen (Zoologist Terrestrial - Small Mammals).

A long-legged Sugar ant, Camponotus eugeniae (see blog of January 2020), enjoying the sweet nectar of a Heart-leaf Ministar flower, Alepidea cordifolia. The plant is one of the species that we searched for on the Bioblitz as it is endangered due to uncontrolled harvesting for the traditional muthi trade. Sold at markets as "Ikathazo", the dried rhizomes of the plant are used for the treatment of respiratory tract infections, asthma related issues, sore throat, gastro-intestinal complaints, fever reduction, rheumatism and more. The wild population of the plant has been reduced by 50% in the last 60 years and in 1988 it was estimated that at least 250 000 plants were removed from the wild each year for the muthi trade! This figure has increased although the average travelling time for the harvesters has increased dramatically due to local extinctions of the plant near populated areas.

This is Ronell's field plant pressing station in the back of her bakkie. She pressed as many specimens as she could while we were in the field and here she is preparing to press a Helichrysum reflexum which grows into a beautifully rounded bush with copious flowers in rocky situations at high altitudes. She cares for her pressings like her children and once she has returned home, she "changes their nappies" each day for the first few days until they are dry enough. By this, she means that she will change the moist blotting paper with dry, recycled blotting paper!

Lientjie set up subterranean traps to capture moles and we eagerly joined her in the morning when she dug them up to check if anything was trapped. During the time, she managed to capture a Common Mole-rat (see blog of July 2020) and this special, very rare Golden Mole from the Amblysomus genus. The two are not even distantly related as the Mole-rat is a Rodent and it uses it's ever-growing front incisors to dig through the soil and the Golden Mole belongs to the mammal order Afrosoricida (formerly part of the Insectivora) and they use large, modified front claws to dig their tunnels. Anyway, DNA was extracted from the little chap and has been sent off to help identify the species. Can't wait for the results...

Malcolm Baines from Sterkspruit Nature Reserve next door is passionate about his arthropods. He set up pit-fall traps for spiders, scuttled through the vegetation chasing after numerous little critters and he became largely nocturnal as he spent most nights awake all night collecting moth specimens from his moth traps (above) where he attracted moths onto a white sheet for collection. I can't wait to see the list of species he collected.

Tommy, Willem and I spent a day searching for important plant species with mixed results. We found a lot we were looking for but missed some specials. Here Tommy searches for the illusive Heart-leaf Ministar (above) in it's habitat: Within a meter of running water beside high altitude streams.

About two years ago a new species of plant from the same monocot family, Colchicaceae, as Finsbury's valley-dwelling golden Christmas Bells and the high altitude, pyjama-striped Men-in-a-boat, was being described by taxonomists, the Mpumalanga PSG (see blogs of 16 Feb 2018, Feb 2020 and Nov & Dec 2020) sent me photos and some info on the plant and asked me to keep an eye out for it. Since then I have had this search image in my head and so, while walking with Willem and Tommy very close to where the earlier photo of the field of Nerines was, I immediately recognised the salt-and-pepper flowers for what they were: The recently described Wurmbea burrowsii, named after famous South African botanist and author couple John and Sandy Burrows, part of the PSG group. I am extremely excited about this. It is always rewarding to find something after a long search.

Well, that's it for February. Lots of rain have filled the aquifers in the mountain grasslands so the streams are burbling, the rivers are gushing and the waterfalls are splashing in full force. March should be special. See you then. Adios.

JANUARY 2021

 JANUARY 2021

I'm sure I remember myself whining last blog about the lack of rainfall and how wrong the long-term forecasters were.... One must be careful of what one wishes for. Here at my house, the very first day of the year 2021 started off with 65mm of rain. And so, with 13 days of rain during the month and being on the edge of Tropical storm Eloise's path, 444mm of rain fell on the central area of the estate during January. The picture of K9 and Vakatsha above was taken from the end of the Rock Kestrel trail the day after Eloise hit (notice the tall waterfall to the right and behind Vakatsha). The lowest monthly figure, 254mm, was taken from Patrick's gate and the highest from Pebble Creek on the northern end of the Kliprots road at 532mm (in one month!). That's a lot of rain! Even so, I was able to experience a bunch of exciting things relating to our beautiful environment and managed to capture some of them as follows:

Of course, all this rain has resulted in lots of moisture so the fungi of the estate are thriving. These rubbery little elf cups with a diameter of about a centimeter are the fruiting bodies of a fungus that is consuming a dead branch on the forest floor. The spores, for reproductive purposes, are formed on the shiny, pink interior of the cup and when it rains, the cup fills with water and the inner surface absorbs some of it, creating hydrostatic pressure. When it evaporates and dries out, this causes a negative vapour pressure resulting in the tissue popping outward and shooting the spores into the environment like a catapult.

This is Diploschistes muscorum, a Crater Lichen that I found adorning the high-altitude quartzite rocks exposed on the summit of Mount Anderson. If one of the spores released from the smooth grey, crater-like apothecia of one of these Lichens settles in a suitable spot, like a forest of Cladonia lichens (see blog of August 2020 - Lipstick Powderhorn), it will begin to grow. It is important to remember that the spores of a lichen are the spores of the fungal component of the association between a fungus and an algae and / or cyanobacterium. The spore has to, by absolute chance, combine with a compatible algae and / or cyanobacterium, from the onset, to survive and form an adult lichen. These fungal spores, however, begin to grow in a parasitic form on the Powderhorn lichen and slowly begin to incorporate the algae present in the host Powderhorn, within itself, effectively stealing the associated algae from the Powderhorn - leaving the fungal component of the Powderhorn, sans it's associated algae, to die! Once the host has died, the mature Crater Lichen continues to live in an un-parasitic form, as pictured above, with the stolen algae as it's associated partner. Wow! It sure is a dog-eat-dog world out there! 

Still on lichens, These light maroon discs are the apothecia of Frilly-fruited Jelly Lichen, Leptogium sp. This foliose lichen is formed from jelly-like rosettes of wavy lobes that attach themselves to twigs and branches in the shadows of the dark, moist forests found in the steep gorges on the estate. The jelly-like texture is because the associated partner of the Leptogium fungus is a cyanobacteria from the Nostoc genus, whose bacterium form colonies of dark-green jelly, usually found on lawns. Cyanobacteria are the ancient living forms that started to pump oxygen, a by-product of  photosynthesis, into the atmosphere around three-and-a-half billion years ago, paving the way for all the other living things that we know today.

I snapped this tiny little fly, less than 8mm long, supplementing it's diet on the nectar from an equally tiny flower of an, as yet, unidentified cucumber vine I found in the gorge running from the bottom chain of the Razorback road up to Black-hawk down. It is a dagger fly, Empididae, so named for it's long, piercing proboscis that it uses more for sucking the juices of it's insect prey than sucking up nectar from flowers. In fact, it is like a miniature, fragile version of a Robber Fly, one of my favourites (see blogs of 9 January 2018 and 7 November 2016). It feeds on other small, flying insects like Mayflies which it captures in flight. In fact, the larvae, which live in moist conditions like leaf litter and debris on the forest floor, are also carnivorous and eat the larvae of other insects, particularly beetle grubs. This is a male, noticeable by his bulbous eyes meeting in the middle, like with male Horse Flies, and when he wants to court a female, he will capture a prey item, wrap it in silk and present it to the female so that she can feed while he mates with her. Unlike other flies but like spiders!

These stunning violet-like flowers peeking out from gaps in the sheer cliff face below Potato Seed Production are a sight to behold! The plant is called a Galpin's Nodding Violet, Streptocarpus galpinii, and it is in the same family as the African Violets which are  widely cultivated as pot or garden plants. The plant boasts one large, quilted, felty leaf in enclosed places or, as in more exposed places like this individual finds itself in, one large leaf with a few smaller ones in a rosette. What makes these leaves special is that an abscission line forms part-way across the leaves when conditions are too dry, and the leaf withers to this point, conserving water. In other plants, abscission lines develop at the base of the leaf or it's petiole, allowing the leaves to drop off, usually at autumn time. The specific name of the plant is in honour of Ernest Edward Galpin (1858-1941), a South African banker and serious collector of plants dubbed "The Prince of Collectors" by General Jan Smuts. He collected and pressed plants throughout South Africa and is fondly remembered for donating more than 16 000 pressed specimens to the National Herbarium in Pretoria.

Talking about Nodding Violets, I found this Harvestman or Daddy-long-legs (Family Phalangiidae) on the massive leaf of a Elephant's Ear, Streptocarpus dunnii up high above Hidden Valley. A Harvestman is an arachnid and although it looks just like a spider, it is only as closely related to spiders as a scorpion is. The biggest differences are: that it's body parts are fused together so it looks as if it has only a single body segment with a single pair of raised eyes in the middle of this, while spiders have segmented bodies with three or four pairs of eyes on the front and / or sides of the cephalothorax; spiders have booklungs, lungs that work like a concertina while Harvestmen have trachea like those found in insects; unlike spiders, Harvestmen have no silk glands and therefore cannot produce silk; Harvestmen also have no venom glands that all but one family of spiders possess; and unlike spiders that are pure hunters, Harvestmen are omnivorous, eating insects and other invertebrates, plant material and fungi, which it bites and swallows, unlike spiders that liquify their prey outside of their bodies with enzymes and then consume the juices; Harvestmen also have glands in the joints of their legs that emit foul-tasting chemicals that they use as a defense. If this fails, as a last resort, they can even detach a leg which have a pace-maker-like organ at the joints causing the detached leg to twitch for as long as an hour after it has separated from the body, holding the attention of the predator while the Harvestman escapes. This is very much like what happens when a lizard loses it's tail to a predator but a harvestman must be more careful of this because it cannot regenerate it's legs like a lizard can with it's tail. And finally, unlike spiders, Harvestmen males clean and protect the batch of eggs laid by the female after she has left. Depending on the time of the season, this could take from twenty days right up to six months...

A female Drakensberg Crag Lizard, Pseudocordylus melanotus, gives me the evil eye before retreating into a narrow crack in the rocks high up on the KLF road above Hidden Valley. The male Crag Lizard, during the mating time, is easily recognisable by his contrasting colours of dark grey above and bright orange on the sides (see blog of December 2019). These lizards are well adapted to live among the rocks with their flattened heads and bodies and long thin fingers enabling them to get into, and hide in the cracks found in rocks. Once they are lodged in these cracks, it is nigh impossible to pull them out because they wedge their tails, with rings of spines, into the cracks which act like an anchor. Another adaption to living in the temperate climate that exists in it's mountainous range, is that they can tolerate temperatures up to minus five degrees Celsius. which is about as cold as it can get in these mountain habitats.  

I found this massive moth. a False Emperor, Pseudobunaea epithyrena, from the Emperor moth family, with a wingspan of 120mm, resting on the bark of the huge Willow tree just behind the office. This family, Saturnidae, contains the world's largest moths, the Atlas moths from the forests of Asia, with a wingspan reaching 300mm, bigger than a dinner plate! The larva is a massive worm hatched from a cluster of eggs that were attached, by the mother, to the food plant of the larvae. Once hatched, the larvae radiate out from the egg cluster in different directions and become solitary feeders that undergo 6 moults before spinning a cocoon around itself and developing into a pupa. If the daylength is still long enough, meaning it is around mid-summer, the pupa will develop into an adult moth within a fortnight. If the daylength is short, indicating the approach of winter, then the pupa will develop and then enter a stage of diapause which will last until the following summer before the adult moth emerges. The larvae, in their final instar, eat extra food and build up and store lipids to supply the adult with energy when they emerge because the adult moth's mouthparts are only vestigial and the digestive tract is non-existent, allowing the adult moth only a short life-span of a week or less. The adult male moth, with his broad, comb-like antennae, immediately takes flight on emerging from the pupa and uses these antennae to seek out a female (see blog of December 2019). The adult female moth emerges from her pupa and, before she takes her maiden flight, sits beside the cocoon and releases airborne pheromones which the males will, hopefully, detect from up to two kilometers away! The male moth dies soon after mating. Only after she has mated does she take flight to lay batches of eggs on various foodplants in the vicinity before she too dies. 

I'm sure everybody knows the ubiquitious but delightful Cape White-eyes, Zosterops virens, that forage through the bushes, in groups, along all the river paths and in all gardens throughout the estate. Their diminutive size and soft, trilling contact call often only revealing them when they are an arms-reach away. Because they are so small, nestlings only have about a fifty percent chance of fledging because they fall prey to smaller predators as well, like Common Fiscals, Fork-tailed Drongos, Southern Bou bous and Olive Thrushes. They normally leave the nest by twelve days old but sometimes precocially at ten days old! Those precocial ones are usually eaten by a predator because of their inability to escape, like this one that I could have easily captured on the Loop road just opposite Pebble Creek (unit 25), although the parents sure let me know how upset they were about my presence! These tiny birds are the usual victims we find impaled on an Acacia thorn (Common Fiscal) or ensnared in the huge web of a Golden Orb-weaver Spider. High chick mortality aside, adults forage in groups and so enjoy herd protection and so are quite long-lived with a ringed bird recovered twelve years and eight months later. They are monogamous breeders with pairs roosting together in separate roosts. Just before sunrise, they move from their roosting site to a meeting tree where the groups will gather before foraging together through the bushes for insects, fruits and nectar. As the day progresses, the groups splinter into smaller groups until, by late afternoon, only pairs remain. They take part in allopreening and are among only a few species of African bird that take part in anting behaviour. This is when they pick up an ant in their bill, usually a Pugnacious ant (see blogs of March 2019 and August 2020), without killing it, and stroke it through their feathers. The ant, in deep distress, releases formic acid as a defense and this acid helps kill tiny mites and other parasites that live in the bird's feathers. The birds have also been observed using a stink bugs, and their toxic excretions in anting behaviour.  

Finally, a close-up photo of a Plume moth, Stenodacma sp., in the Pterophoridae family. I captured a photo of one with it's wings unfolded in my blog of May 2019. The ability to fold their wings allows them to move easily through their grassland habitat and when at rest, the narrow wings and spines on its legs help camouflage it against the grass. 

Well, that's it for January. As mentioned at the beginning of the blog, January was a very rainy month. Above is a photo of the crossing at Whisky 6 after the water subsided somewhat! This is pretty much what all the crossings look like right into February, which seems like it is also going to be a very wet month. So far the roads are in a very poor condition but, fortunately, most other infrastructure seems to be holding up. We will keep you updated...