This is a voluntary working relationship with the City of Cape Town and the Cape Bird Club since 1978.
Today the sky was blue, sunny and hot with a westerly wind blowing to help keep the temperature down. I did a recce to find where we should concentrate out effort today. There was an area with quite a lot of small Port Jackson saplings and seedlings in the centre section of this Reserve. While working I could smell a wood fire smoke being blown in the wind towards us. I eventually located the source, an elderly person was living under a bush and was cooking over an open small smoky fire. It had the very distinctive Namibian firewood smell to it.
It is very near the old water pipe which was tampered with and had a spout of water shooting into the sky and wasting many hundreds of thousands of litres of water before it could be contained in 2010. The water had cut a river channel into the side of the slope down to the road.
Notes from Nov 2010 – (we found the source of the water pipe which burst, and caused Old Boyes Drive to be closed during the week. The water has cut a 1 metre deep trench down to bedrock for about 50 metres down to the road. There are boulders and plenty of top soil blocking the stormwater drain next to the road. Further down valuable top soil has been washed into Zandvlei via the stormwater pipes). See some old photos.
We finished clearing this patch and will be moving to another area next month.
The Polygala garcini were the only flowering plants to besides the few shrubs. The top soil is very dry as there was very little rain during December and the SE wind has been blowing all month to dry the surface moisture away.
There were a few species of butterflies today the Gold spotted Slyph was present with the Citrus Swallowtail. There were brown grasshoppers with red under wings jumping about in the grasses too quick to photograph.
There were not many bird species to report today. 8 in total with the Brown throated Martin the outstanding one.
We do need some younger recruits for this job, so if any of you out there are interested in volunteering your help assisting the Nature Reserve staff please contact me.
See this link for the past reports of what we have done.
photographs by Gavin Lawson.
Gavin Lawson.
