This is a voluntary working relationship with the City of Cape Town and the Cape Bird Club since 1974.
The weather forecast looked foreboding again this month, 33 degrees C and with not much wind. All week the humidity has been in the high 50’s to 60%. Fortunately for us the high overhead cloud cover arrived shortly after we started and a fresh SE wind picked up which helped make very pleasant working conditions for the afternoon.
Bert started off with the small trees and then progressed to the bigger stuff, some with diameters of 250mm. These trees are over 6 metres in places and made a crashing sound as they came down. Where Robin and I were working we came to the end of the first forest section and found a pathway through the shrubs to a small grassy “dell” (open grass space, devoid of any invasives and appears to be a dune slack area formed in a SE/NW alignment (prevailing wind directions), with indigenous shrubs all around and Buffalo grass (Stenotaphrum secundatum) in the dell. We did see a mouse run along a track in the grass when scouting about. The potato creepers (Solarnum africanum) are in flower and the new specie of Asparagus creeper is also flowering with bees in attendance.
See the amount of trees Bert cut down, the photos do not do it justice, one needs to be there to see. On the way home Robin collected specimums of the invasive hibiscus creeper with stems. buds and flowers to press at home for the plant collection.
We found some practice nests by Cape and Masked Weavers inside the forest which is quite dark inside compared to the outside. There were no butterflies or dragonflies seen this afternoon. There is an ants nest in a rhus shrub at the dell. We did not see any flies or wasps.
The Keysers River is choked with Kariba weed (Salvinia molesta) and at the edges with Azolla at the pipe crossing, see the photos.
The bird species seen today came to 14. The Knight Heron and Black shouldered Kite hovering above a grass patch searching for mice, being the highlights.
See this link for the past reports of what we have done.
photographs by Gavin Lawson.
Gavin Lawson.
