This post is part of my occasional series of photoblog posts about the wildlife and nature I see while living in South Africa.

I’m very happy to be able to resume these wildlife posts! One of the hardest parts of the last year was having no free time to enjoy the amazing opportunity I have here to get relatively close to animals you’d normally only see in zoos, if at all, in their natural habitat. But that’s all ended, and now I can experience natural wonders again, and share them with you… As I’m always driving, I don’t usually get to share scenic views with you – it’s hard to take photos with both hands on the wheel! – so I’ve conscripted Dave to take a few landscape shots on his phone en route so you can get a better feel for our future adventures.

After Christmas, we made our annual cherry-picking pilgrimage to Ceres. You just can’t beat sweet, juicy cherries, straight from the tree, and it’s well worth the 5-hour round trip during the short cherry season, not only for the cherries, but it’s also a lovely drive, through farmland…

…and mountains…

…and then more farmland. This was our third trip to Ceres, but the wonderful (and frustrating) thing about wildlife is its unpredictability – you rarely see the same animals twice along the same route. In this case it worked in our favour – I saw my first Blue Cranes!

The Blue Crane is the national bird of South Africa. It’s large and unmistakable, with its bulbous head, thin neck, and long wing plumes, and I’ve been hoping to see one ever since we moved here. Just look at that strange head shape!

The first one we saw was flying, but luckily, I spotted this one in a field from far enough away that I could pull over to the shoulder and stop right next to it to take some photos – perfect!

It always irks me when I see these ‘do not feed the baboons’ signs, because I’ve only seen baboons once or twice in my almost 3 years here, and I’ve never been able to take a decent photo when I have seen them – only shots of rapidly-disappearing baboon backsides (not the ideal angle for a photo…)

Yes, the Afrikaans word for baboons is bobbejane – teehee!

Half an hour or so after seeing these signs, when I’d long given up on actually seeing any baboons on this trip, we scored another wildlife victory – and this one was really special…

Sorry the photo looks wobbly – it’s due to heat haze

A whole troop of baboons, in the middle of the road! They were completely unconcerned about the passing cars:

In fact, the big male sat himself down right in the middle of the road for a few minutes – I’m not sure what would have happened if a car had appeared in his lane…

It wasn’t until I looked at my photos that I noticed that almost all the baboons (except the big male) had babies clinging to their backs or tummies!

You do have to take care around baboons, hence all those ‘do not feed the baboons’ signs; they can be dangerous, and the males in particular are very large and can get fiercely territorial. The dominant male was very impressive, and got within a few metres of my car – luckily he was feeling laid back and didn’t try to charge us while I had the window down to take these photos!

What an amazing sight, to see them all out in the open, in the middle of nowhere, like this – don’t you think?

I really hope you’ve enjoyed this wildlife post! Please leave me a comment if so – I do love to hear from you…

This post is part of my occasional series of photoblog posts about the wildlife and nature I see while living in South Africa.

Whale photography isn’t easy. Even though whales are huge, they don’t typically come close to shore, and they don’t often reveal more than a small glimpse of their bodies above the water. The best time of year for whale-watching in South Africa is around September-October, when the Southern Right Whales come into False Bay (the large bay to the east of the Cape Peninsula) to calve in the safe, shallow waters. But, even then, and even with a decent zoom lens, your best photos will likely look like this:

Yay – it’s a mummy and baby whale! (Yeah, you’ll have to take my word for that…)

They sometimes leap out of the water, but, by the time you have the camera ready, they’ve gone again. Even if they come ridiculously close, like this, you’ll have an amazing experience, but your photos will just show a dark grey blob in the water:

Is it a whale? A submarine? Driftwood?

You can see my first season’s attempt at whale photos in my previous post, but last year (our second whale season) we got very lucky with some very close-up views of the baby whales.

I could claim that these photos show a parent and baby, but I have no idea if that’s the case. Still, this is a baby whale tail:

…and this is a definitely a spouting blowhole!

Then we went for lunch, and somehow snagged an upstairs open-air seaview table, so I had a great vantage point when one of the babies started playing, leaping out of the water over and over again! As the photos don’t give the full effect, I’ve also assembled a couple of my photo sequences into looped animations for you, so you can get a better idea of the exciting whale-watching experience:

Baby whale animation

It looks a bit like an orca (killer whale) with that black and white colouring, doesn’t it? (Which is topical, as I’m just putting the finishing touches on my orca crochet design – it’s really nice to have some real-life whale experience to inspire me!)

The orca resemblance ends with the colouring – the Southern Right Whale is more than twice the size of a killer whale, at an unimaginable 15m/50ft long! In fact, these babies I’ve shown you are already about the size of adult orcas when they are born…

A little Southern Right Whale trivia: this giant of the sea is a baleen whale; it has baleen plates instead of teeth, and feeds by filtering seawater through the plates, trapping thousands of tiny krill inside its mouth.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get better whale photos than these, but I’m looking forward to trying again this year when the next whale season comes around: even if my next photos are terrible, having the opportunity to see whales up close is something to look forward to every year. They’re so unbelievably huge, it’s hard to comprehend it, and seeing these graceful giants in their natural habitat is a real privilege.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this wildlife post! Please do leave me a comment if so – I do love to hear from you…

I’ve renamed my nature photoblog series from ‘Cape Town wildlife’ to ‘South Africa wildlife’, to distinguish these new occasional posts from my previous month-by-month year of wildlife posts. It’s been a long time since I last posted nature photos (9 months!), so I have a lot of special things saved up to show you, when I have time to organise and edit my thousands of photos! I’ll ease back into the wildlife blogging with a study of one of my favourite local animals…

I like to play ‘spot the chameleon’ in my garden. It’s like a real-life version of Where’s Wally/Waldo, only with a much better reward: you get to watch the tiny adorably grumpy-faced lizard after you spot him, and, because chameleons don’t dart off in a split second like geckos do, it’s much easier to take good photos.

I have no idea how many Cape Dwarf Chameleons live in, or visit, our garden. My best guess is ‘several’, and I choose to believe that they are all babies of Kermy, the chameleon I used to watch every day last year (and even fed a grasshopper to, on one magical occasion). Look how difficult it is to spot the (full-sized) Kermy:

There he is! In dark colour mode:

And in bright colour mode, with my hand for scale:

Now imagine how much more difficult the chameleon-spotting game is when they are teeny-tiny babies like this:

Awww! And it’s not just the size that makes it tricky; they change colour like crazy! Here’s another baby (these are all the same species btw, Cape Dwarf Chameleons):

Look at the amazing colours!

I was even more excited though, when I saw this completely different type of baby chameleon…

(who, incidentally, has a pretty neat way of hiding when he sees you coming…)

Where did he go?!

…only to discover the next day that his grey colouring was just skin getting ready to shed and he was a regular green chameleon all along! I could hardly believe it, but I have proof: here he is with just the nose skin left:

And then I spotted this very skinny orange baby on the same bush, so I know for sure that there are at least 2 of them:

The next day, I managed to catch one of them napping! Awwww….

Then I didn’t spot any for a couple of weeks until yesterday, when I found this one – he’s much bigger now, and starting to look more like his daddy, my old friend Kermy 🙂

You can probably tell that I’m pretty smitten with these little guys…

I almost wish I hadn’t already designed my chameleon crochet pattern last year, because I’m just not getting over this fascination, so I settled on the next best thing: I’ve designed a different lizard pattern to indulge in my newfound appreciation for reptiles. (It’s a cute one, and I’ll be revealing it very soon…)

I really hope you’ve enjoyed my chameleon photos – please leave me a comment if so. I promise I’ll try not to leave such a long gap until my next wildlife report 🙂

This is the twelfth post in my monthly series on the fascinating nature I encounter here in South Africa.

That’s a whole year of photos, and so I think this is a good point to take a step back and make some changes…

I really enjoy sharing my photos with you, but the monthly deadline has added too much pressure to my overly-busy life, so, after today, I’m changing the format to an occasional series instead of a monthly one. That means I’ll be able to do a post when I have something amazing to show you and have the hours necessary to first choose and edit a handful of photos from the hundreds I’ve taken, and then research and write the accompanying text.

I know this decision will disappoint some people, but writing these posts has become more of a burden than a joy, and continuing like that makes no sense. One post a month doesn’t sound like much, but my business has me working through most of my waking hours at the moment: I need to do less, so I can reclaim my life. With the deadline pressure removed, I’ll be able to write my nature posts when I want to, and they’ll be better for it.

For my final monthly post, I’ve selected the most interesting photos I haven’t had a chance to show you yet, starting with one from today! We checked in on the penguin colony (see my previous photos here) and the first babies are hatching – African Penguins are endangered, so this is wonderful to see:

A fluffy African Penguin chick emerges from his burrow (left) into the rain, to be fed by one of his doting parents.

A couple of months ago, I saw, in the distance, a tiny antelope cross the road I was driving along, and noted where it had disappeared into the bushes. I pulled over when I reached that point, and discovered that it was grazing in full view a couple of metres back from the road! We’d have driven right past it if I hadn’t happened to see it and known where to stop and look:

This adorable mini antelope was easy to identify as a Cape Grysbok (male) – it looks exactly like all the Cape Grysbok photos I’ve seen online, which makes our Christmas mystery antelope even more of a mystery, as it’s clearly not the same species as this cute little guy…

Okay, now scroll down quickly if you hate giant bugs…

This grasshopper (in my garden) is absolutely enormous – at least 3″ long! Very interesting at a distance, but the time it flew directly at my face was not fun…

Okay, you’re safe, we’re back to cute now:

At first sight, we thought this was a chipmunk, but it’s actually a striped mouse (there aren’t any chipmunks here). Very cute!

We have access to such a variety of wildlife here, all within a couple of hours (or much less) from home. Both of these photos were taken less than half an hour’s drive from our house:

Not the greatest photo, but I hope you can just about see an adult (left) and 2 baby dolphins (back, front) in this photo.

And this is a terrible photo apart from the content: a real wild zebra! We’ve seen them a couple of times before, but only from the road, so this weekend I had my first opportunity to capture one with my camera (from a great distance, hence the photo quality), on the slopes of Table Mountain.

I’ll be aiming to get some better photos of both dolphins and zebras in time. If you’ve been avidly reading these posts, you may remember the sub-standard kingfisher photos I showed you a year ago. A tiny, lightning-fast, nervous bird is not easy to photograph, but, thanks to a bird hide, some patience, and figuring out the manual focus setting on my camera, I was finally able to take some good Malachite Kingfisher photos:

I think this is my favourite – not the most dignified shot, but I love how the tiny striped feathers on his head are blowing about in the wind!

Putting these posts together has been a lot of work, but also a nice record of our first year in South Africa. I’ll obviously never stop appreciating and photographing wildlife – both for fun and as inspiration for future designs – so I’m sure I’ll have more photos to show you soon as time permits.

At a bird sanctuary, I stroked a little wood owl! It was incredibly soft and fluffy.

As a grand finale to this year of nature appreciation, I thought you might like to see this time-lapse video I recorded of a spectacular sunrise over the city of Cape Town. I recorded it exactly one year ago today, but hadn’t found the time to edit it until now. This was taken from the apartment we lived in when we first arrived in South Africa, which, although cold and inconveniently situated miles from the observatory, had a spectacular view out over the city and harbour:

Maui liked the view too

Now we’ve exchanged the commute and the view for our own little house in the suburbs, a garden full of wildlife, and a beautiful river just down the road. It was a good trade, but I’m glad I have this video to remember the city sunrise by, and I hope you’ll enjoy watching it too:

Click through or full-screen it to see the full size version

Thank you for accompanying me through my year of nature photos – please leave me a comment if you’ve enjoyed this series!

This is the eleventh post in my monthly series on the fascinating nature I encounter here in South Africa.

It’s hard to believe, but we’ve now been in South Africa for a whole year! Table Mountain, recently voted as one of the 7 new wonders of the world, towers over Cape Town and the entire city is arrayed around its base. When you live somewhere (as opposed to visiting on vacation) you somehow never get around to doing the major tourist attractions, so we’d never been up it. Then we had a visitor, which meant we also got to do lots of sightseeing around the city, including a trip up the mountain. It’s pretty spectacular, and I thought it deserves its own post, so you can enjoy it too…

Table Mountain is named for its 3km long flat top, which means once you get up the mountain, you can walk along the top without having to do any climbing (yay!) There are paths to walk up the mountain, but we opted for the cable car.

The cable car is torture if you, like me, hate heights and get motion sickness, as it has big glass windows and rotates as it climbs. It’s worth it though…


Hello Cape Town! The mountain you can see here is called Devil’s Peak and I can see the other side of it from my kitchen window 🙂

The Cape Peninsula has its own ecosystem and a massive amount of biodiversity. The plant life is called fynbos and occurs nowhere else on Earth.

Beautiful flowers sprout from cracks in the rocks

Naturally-occuring bonsai trees

Lovely succulents

And there’s lots of wildlife up here too…

Speckled Pigeon

Red-winged Starling

Black Girdled Lizard

Southern Rock Agama

My favourite, a dassie! (Click through if you didn’t read about them in my October post.)


I included this dassie photo so you can see how sure-footed they are climbing and running among the rocks – those feet really are adapted for mountain climbing.

Hummingbirds are native to the Americas. The African equivalents are called sunbirds and they are similar in size and colouring to hummingbirds. This is a female (hence the drabness) – I hope I’ll be able to show you some photos of a more colourful male at some point!

Although they don’t really hover like hummers, sunbirds do have similarly adapted beaks so they can reach down into the base of flowers for the nectar.

We spent 3 glorious hours walking around on the mountain top, looking at all the different views and unusual plants, watching the wildlife, and taking in the unspoilt atmosphere. We all managed to get very sunburnt despite our sunblock, but it was well worth it – I definitely agree that Table Mountain should be known as a wonder of the world!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s photos – please leave me a comment if you liked them.

This is the tenth post in my monthly series on the fascinating nature I encounter here in South Africa.

Today I’m going to show you a very special type of bird, and one with a crafty connection! Weaver birds are found throughout Africa, and what makes them special is that the males weave an intricate nest to impress the females. Each species of weaver has different colouring and also builds a differently-shaped nest – isn’t that cool? In my area, we can see two types of weaver (Cape and Southern Masked).

This is a male Cape Weaver (Ploceus capensis). He’s in breeding plumage, with a reddish cast around his face:

The male weaver picks grasses and begins to weave them together around a hanging tree branch, usually over water:

He continues until he completes a beautifully-woven nest, with the opening at the bottom for security:

If a female is impressed with his nest-building skills, she moves in and lines the nest with softer grasses and feathers:

After a couple of days, the grasses turn brown and, if the nest is still empty, the poor male has to start building another nest to try again. But don’t feel too sorry for him – he’ll build more nests either way, and can have several breeding females in his flock!

These Cape Weaver nests were high in a tree, and not over water, so I could get a shot from below. From this angle, you can see the beautiful shape of the nest, with a short off-centre entrance tunnel:

This is a male Southern Masked Weaver (Ploceus velatus):

Their nest shape is different – more pointed at the top and with just a hole at the bottom (no entrance tunnel):

Here’s a fallen nest so you can see the inside and the beautiful craftsmanship!

As the weavers usually like to nest over water, we see them by the river near our house, and near ponds and lakes when we’re out adventuring. But I didn’t realise that weavers eat seed, so, when I put up a seed feeder at Christmas (in the hope of seeing a canary or other type of wild finch), we got a lovely surprise – weavers in our own garden!

Male Cape weaver:

I thought this was a pair of Southern Masked Weavers, but, looking closely, I see the female is actually a Cape Weaver. (The females look quite similar, but the Cape has a longer, pointier beak and the Masked has a whiter tummy and red eyes):

And, best of all, fledged babies in our garden! I’m reasonably sure these are a pair of baby Southern Masked Weavers:

(By the way, I’ve just discovered that the tree with the wicked-looking thorns the babies are sitting on here is a Bougainvillea. I’ll have to remember to take a photo when it’s in full bloom – it’s stunning!)

Aren’t the weavers amazing? It was hard narrowing down my pics to just these few – weavers are so interesting, I seem to have taken a couple of hundred photos of them, but I think these selections have captured the essence of weaver-ness for you 🙂

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s photos – I know I’ve enjoyed sharing them with you! Please leave me a comment if you liked them.

This is the ninth post in my monthly series on the fascinating nature I encounter here in South Africa.

This post should be subtitled What I Did On My Holidays: over the Christmas holiday, we decided to have a stay-cation and explore the area around Cape Town with a few day trips. There’s really no point in paying to go away when we have beautiful weather and such a variety of wonders yet to experience within an hour or two of home! Here are some edited highlights of the wildlife we saw, with a few scenic shots for context…

First, we paid a visit to Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden. Nestled against the side of Table Mountain, it is vast and spectacular (and impossible to capture in one photo):

Although we saw lizards and a mongoose, they were too fast for my camera. But I did manage to snap this pic of a strange large bee in flight. It looked like a bumblebee, except the colour markings were all wrong – you can see it’s all black with just one wide yellow band:

On Christmas Eve, we went to Rondevlei Nature Reserve. We’ve been here before, but this time we managed to spot some different wildlife, although the hippos still eluded us! These Three-banded Plovers were constantly flying overhead, calling, and diving at us – presumably trying to distract us so we wouldn’t find their nests:

And I saw my first ever wild antelope! Our best attempt at identification is that it’s a Grysbok, but we’re not quite sure – it doesn’t look much like the Grysbok photos on Google. It was cute anyway, and quite small (about the size of a large dog):

After Christmas, we followed the Cape Peninsula all the way down to the Cape of Good Hope, the most south-westerly tip of Africa. This area is part of the Table Mountain National Park. It was a beautiful day:

We picnicked by those lichen-covered rocks, under the watchful gaze of lots of sunbathing Black Girdled Lizards, like this one:

We stopped briefly at a beautiful white-sand beach:

And we were floored by this sight – wild ostriches!

There were a whole family of them, casually crossing the road and pecking through the succulents along the sand dunes by the ocean. Don’t miss the baby ostrich in this picture, visible between Daddy’s legs:

And here’s how unconcerned these completely wild birds were at our presence: this is a juvenile ostrich stopping to drink from a puddle at the edge of the road, barely a metre away from our car (you can see the edge of the car in this photo):

We didn’t think we’d see anything to rival that and were taking a scenic drive along a completely deserted road in the park before heading home, when I had to brake for this:

Yes, that’s a tortoise crossing the road, right in front of our car! We stopped the car to take a better look – here’s a close-up (it’s an Angulate Tortoise):

We stopped for several more tortoises along the same road. This one looks from its shell like a different species, but I haven’t been able to identify it (yet):

And, as if that wasn’t enough excitement, we squeezed in one more 2011 adventure: cherry picking in the fruit region near Ceres. To get there, we had to cross a vast mountain range. On the way there, we took the 4.4km tunnel under the mountains (a bit scary) and on the way back we took the longer, more scenic route across the mountain pass. The mountains are huge and imposing up close, but don’t look like such a big deal from a long way away:

Cherries galore at Klondyke Cherry Farm! Hundreds of trees, laden with thousands of sweet and juicy cherries, with more varieties than I knew existed. My favourites were the sweet black cherries, but these bright red ones were more photogenic:

So that was our Christmas break – nothing like any Christmas I’ve ever experienced, but I think you’ll agree it was pretty amazing! And the crazy thing is that we’re nowhere near exhausting the local sights we can see with a day trip, let alone if we ventured further afield. We still haven’t even been up Table Mountain yet – you can expect a wildlife report from there some time this year 🙂

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s photos! Please leave me a comment if you did.

This is the eighth post in my monthly series on the fascinating nature I encounter here in South Africa.

My biggest problem right now is deciding which photos to show you this month – between our adventures over Christmas and adding a birdbath and a new bird feeder to our garden, I have enough wildlife pics for at least three posts! But I’ve decided that this month I want to talk about the lizards in my garden. (Please don’t be squeamish; these little guys are totally harmless, and they’re really helpful to have around because they eat bugs and stop my garden from being overrun with insects.)

It’s hard to believe there’s such a variety of wildlife in one small back garden – I’ve found three completely different types of lizard, and and they are all very small (5″ long or less) and non-threatening. I love having them around – it’s fascinating to be able to watch them.

PS – keep reading to the end; I’ve saved the best for last!

Geckos

There are lots of little geckos in the garden, although we usually only see them when we move something they were sitting behind or inside, and then they run like lightning to escape to safety! That makes them very difficult to photograph; these are the best photos I’ve managed so far.

As you can see from the pics above and below, their colouration is quite varied, so I’m not sure if they’re all Marbled Leaf-Toed Geckos, or if we actually have a second species too.

Skinks

Our Cape Skinks are a little more scary looking – they have long smooth snakelike bodies and flicky tongues. It’s only when you spot their tiny legs that you know you’re not looking at a snake! They also move lightning fast, but if you sit still for a while they get braver and come out to sunbathe or look for insects. Of course, they only do that when I don’t have my camera handy, so even in my best photos, they are half-hidden in foliage…

A Cape Skink – or is it a snake?!

No, it’s definitely a lizard – you can see the leg more clearly here.

Chameleons

You can’t imagine my excitement when I looked at our wild peach tree one day and saw a bright green Cape Dwarf Chameleon looking back at me! Completely different from the other lizards, the chameleon’s camouflage involves moving veeeeeery slooooowly and swaying, so their motion looks like a leaf blowing in the wind. And it works! It’s very hard to spot, even when you know it’s there, but once you do, it’s great for taking photos. Just look at these:

How amazing is this?! Look at his two-toed feet.

Colour changing from bright green to blackish green (yep, it’s the same chameleon in both pics!)

Tongue shooting out to catch food – his tongue is as long as his whole body, with a suction cup on the end…

Perfect accuracy with the tongue grab – tasty insect acquired.

This pic just made me laugh – I feel like he’s about to reach for his top hat and cane and break into ‘Hello, My Baby‘ 😉

I still can’t really believe I took these photos in my own garden – it’s like having my own private zoo! I think it’s partly because we have an older house (1920s) so the garden and our big tree are very established, and there are lots of wildlife habitats. And it’s partly because I go outside most days and actually look for wildlife in the garden – I bet that, if you have a garden, there’s more interesting wildlife in it than you realise! (Although you probably won’t find anything as cool as a chameleon, sorry…)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this month’s photos! Please leave me a comment if you did – I’ll stop posting if/when you get bored with seeing my pics, so I’d really like to know that you’re still interested.

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In case these pics have inspired you to crochet a lizard of your own, my Gecko pattern might be just what you’re looking for. And I’m pretty sure there’ll be a PlanetJune Chameleon coming at some point in the future! 🙂