This is a voluntary working relationship with the City of Cape Town and the Cape Bird Club since 1974.
Blue skies and no clouds from horizon to horizon. There was an icy SE wind blowing quite hard, when we were behind the vegetation out of the wind it was very pleasant in the sun.
Barry and Bert carried on in the lower section and Robin and I in the upper section. We cut mainly copsed Port Jackson stumps with blue dye markings and pulling seedlings and small saplings. While doing so we were “Welcomed to MacLarens Circus” a number of times at about 15h00 down below on the lawns in the picnic area next to Zandvlei. By then many more cars were parked below with the occupents “off to see the show”. From our vantage point we could see the mouth of the estuary was closed and the sand banks exposed down below between the 1st and 2nd corners from the mouth.
There were Autumn Widow butterflies and we saw a Silver bottom Brown. I took a photo of a small straw coloured mantid. There were grasshoppers about flying up as we moved through the grasses. The odd shrub had yellow flowers blooming. We found a bee hive and fortunately the bees were not aggressive today and we could move past easily.
We saw 8 species today, the Red wing Starlings were the most prolific in small flocks flying very close to the tops of the shrubs to keep out force of the wind. All flying from north to south into the wind. One flock crossed just in front of us on a steep slope at about 1.5 metres above our heads. We saw a small flock of White backed Mouse birds flying from shrub to shrub.
The shadows are growing longer in the afternoon sunlight at this time of the year.
See this link for the past reports of what we have done.
photographs by Gavin Lawson.
Gavin Lawson.
