Bug hunting

Pilot Fineliner Black ink sketches with W&N watercolour done in my Moleskine Nature Journal

Hopper: It's a bug-eat-bug world out there, princess. One of those Circle of Life kind of things. Now let me tell you how things are supposed to work: The sun grows the food, the ants pick the food, the grasshoppers eat the food...
Molt: And the birds eat the grasshoppers. Hey, like the one that nearly ate you, you remember? You remem- Oh, you shoulda seen it, okay?
Hopper: Molt!
Molt: This blue jay has him half way down his throat, okay? And Hopper - Hopper's kicking and screaming, okay? And I'm scared, okay, I'm not going anywhere near, okay- Aw, come on! It's a great story.
[Hopper grabs Molt by the antennae]
Molt: Ow! Ow! Ow!
- From "A Bug's Life"

Something I haven't done for a l-o-n-g time is to go bug hunting. There again, haven't needed to, as I haven't had anybody in my "animal hospital' recently that needs feeding bugs! But this morning I decided to specifically go and look for something to sketch. It was quite a job - thanks to my chickens, my garden seems to be devoid of insects! However, I did manage to find quite a selection at my pond, which is in a fenced area and rarely gets visited by the chickens.

One of my most exciting finds, was a Water Beetle or Diving Beetle in the pond. These insects only visit a healthy water system and I was ecstatic to see him. I let him be, because I know better than to try and catch him! - they deliver a VERY painful, stinging bite, which lingers for ages! So I did a quick sketch while he sat quietly next to a rock just under the water surface.

My next exciting find was a little thin-tailed scorpion as I over-turned one of the rocks. These little fellas are fairly harmless and non-venomous, but I definitely wasn't going to risk a sting, so he was also quickly sketched before I coaxed him to a new hiding place.

My third find, besides a grasshopper I managed to catch, was a dead wasp lying on the lawn. Her I could bring inside and sketch at leisure. It was a Mud Dauber, and one of my favourite wasps. I've never found them to sting, not even when caught, and I let them be in the house while they dart in and out collecting mud for wherever they're building their mud nest, usually in a corner up against the ceiling, and every now and then it's removal time when I haven't seen any activity near the nest for some time.

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Kei Apple

This is Dovyalis caffra, the Umkokola, or Kei apple, growing in my garden. It is a small to medium-sized tree, native to southern Africa. Its distribution extends from the Kei River in the south, from which the common name derives, northwards along the eastern side of the continent to Tanzania. The ripe fruits are tasty, reminiscent of a small apple.

It is a usually found in dry types of woodland when it grows to 6m tall. In moister types of open woodland it reaches its greatest size of about 8–9 meters. It is a rather straggly tree, with sharp, 3–6 cm long stem spines in the leaf axils. Buds at the base of the spine produce clusters of alternately arranged simple ovate leaves 3–6 cm long.

The flowers are inconspicuous, solitary or clustered, with no petals. It is dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate plants, though some female plants are parthenogenetic.

The fruit is an edible, bright yellow or orange globose berry 2.5–4cm diameter, with the skin and flesh of a uniform colour and containing several small seeds. Production is often copious, weighing down the branches during the summer. They are juicy, tasty and acidic. I found a lot of them lying under the trees and, to my surprise, untouched by my tortoise. I would have thought that she would like them, as she has a real feast when my peach tree drops the peaches.

Torti - she's a Mountain Tortoise (or Leopard Tortoise - Geochelone pardalis)

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Rhino horn myth

I believe that there is a special place in hell for people who de-horn Rhinos...

Ink sketch and colour wash on Bockingford 300gsm

All we ever read in the media is statistics of all the Rhino atrocities, and nothing as to what can actually be done to stop this. Education is and always will be the best tool.

With today’s network of communication tools, such as social media, it is now possible for scientific studies to reach a global audience like never before – and we can move closer to busting these persistent myths about rhino horn, which are indeed the root of the rhino crisis. By raising public awareness and educating others about the truth behind rhino horn, we can make a difference.

As part of continued efforts to set the record straight on rhino horn’s so-called curative properties, three scientific studies were re-introduced, confirming that rhino horn has no medicinal value. The studies were conducted by different teams of researchers at separate institutions. In each case, the results were conclusive: There is no scientific evidence to support claims of rhino horn’s usefulness as a medicine.

The studies “found no evidence that rhino horn has any medicinal effect as an antipyretic and would be ineffective in reducing fever, a common usage in much of Asia.” Testing also confirmed that “rhino horn, like fingernails, is made of agglutinated hair” and “has no analgesic, anti-inflammatory, anti-spasmolytic nor diuretic properties” and “no bactericidal effect could be found against suppuration and intestinal bacteria”,. And medically, "it’s the same as if you were chewing your own nails”.

When there were still at least 15,000 black rhinos on the African continent, WWF and the IUCN commissioned a pharmacological study of rhino horn, hoping that science would trump cultural myths. Tragically, by 1993, ten years after the study was published, Africa’s black rhino population had plummeted to just 2,300.

Conducted by Hoffmann-LaRoche, the research was published in "The Environmentalist"

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March gifts

"It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade."
- Charles Dickens

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Echeverias taking in the early-morning sun

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A metal Lizard on a rock

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A feather resting on an air-plant

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If you listen...

... Not to the pages or preachers
But to the smallest bird
Singing on a branch
In your heart,
You will hear a great song
Moving across a wide ocean
Whose water is the music
Connecting all the islands
Of the universe together,
And touching all
You will feel it
Touching you
Around you
Embracing you
With light.
— John Squadra

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A Weaver in my garden, eyeing out the mincemeat on the bird feeder - another favourite is Suet, which they can't seem to get enough of...

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Caught in the act!

THE GAMEKEEPER'S REVENGE

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The hedgehog is welcomed by the gardener, but not by the gamekeeper; it is viewed as vermin, accused of eating the eggs and nestlings of ground-nesting birds. Some gamekeepers feel it necessary to control hedgehog numbers on their estates, sometimes killing hundreds of animals in a single year. In the 18th century, some parishes paid a bounty for each hedgehog killed.

The hedgehog only occasionally takes nestlings or eggs from the nests of pheasants and partridges. Research has shown that the major mammalian predator of game birds' nests is the fox, while domestic cats and dogs and farm machinery are just as serious culprits as the poor old hedgehog.
Info from "Everything You Want To Know about Hedgehogs - Dilys Breese"

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Return to me....

“To fly as fast as thought, to anywhere that is,” he said, ”you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived…”
- From Jonathan Livingstone Seagull

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Watercolour in Moleskine Watercolour sketch-book - 8" x 5"

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I've just returned from a short visit to the North Coast in KwaZulu Natal (South Africa), and one of my favourite past-times is watching and feeding the seagulls. Something I didn't know, is that Seagulls are most closely related to the terns (family Sternidae) and only distantly related to auks, skimmers, and more distantly to the waders. But whoever they are related to, I personally would categorise them with Crows, one of my favourite, most intelligent birds!

The same as crows, most gulls will take live food or scavenge opportunistically. And their love for man-made "junk food" defies belief! They will go to ANY length for some tasty hot potato chips with tomato sauce, and are VERY diligent in their pursuit of these tasty snacks. This chap managed to grab my bag of potato crisps right out of my hand, flying off to settle on some rocks not far from me to enjoy his prize. But it was short-lived, he was soon flocked by all the other seagulls, relinquishing his prize to return to me for an easier snack!

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Insectilicious

I wanted to know the name of every stone and flower and insect and bird and beast. I wanted to know where it got its colour, where it got its life - but there was no one to tell me.
- George Washington Carver

Leucocelis rubra - or Amethyst fruit chafer (Identification kindly supplied by Joh - see comments below - thank you Joh!)

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We don't have the same problem today as what Carver had, if we want to know something, we just Google it. But no amount of Googling got me to identify this beetle. At first glance I would've thought it's a Christmas beetle, but the tapered body at the back and iridescent colour leads me to believe that it's a fruit beetle of sorts (besides the fact that it's obviously enjoying this orange I put out on one of my bird feeders!)

We all know the big, yellow and black fruit beetle often found on our fruit trees and this little chap is about half their size.

African fruit beetle - Pachnoda sinuata (Pic from Wikipedia)

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Fruit beetles are strong fliers and can cause fruit and flower mayhem during the course of their day's foraging. At night, they repair to special 'sleeping trees' or else bury themselves in the soil at the foot of the very plants they have been ravaging.

The larvae of fruit beetles feed on decaying vegetable debris and on plant roots. The female of Pachnoda sinuata takes a trick from the dung beetle: she makes several little balls of dung (or compost) and then lays an egg in each of them. The tiny larvae that hatch feed on the contents of these balls, before transforming themselves into pupae. You may find up to a dozen of these little dung balls attached to one another within the warm, moist intimacy of an aromatic manure heap or pile of compost, or in a well-fertilised flowerbed.

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Sometimes...

... I need only to stand wherever I am . to be blessed.

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Every morning I get woken by the chatter of my Greater Striped Swallows as the parents and their two off-spring sit on my bathroom wall in the early morning sun. They have gotten quite tame and will now allow me to get fairly close.

Sunrise and my swallow glides above, keeping an eye on me

Home-made security on top of my bathroom court yard wall

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February gifts - Light

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As a citizen of sunny Earth, it's hard not to take light for granted. Light is at once both obvious and mysterious. We are bathed in yellow warmth every day and stave off the darkness with incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

However, I often sit on my patio at night, switching off the garden lights and lighting my old paraffin lamp, sipping a hot cup of coffee by its soft glow, revelling in the insects and night creatures that appear after dark - huge Emperor moths, weird, unmentionable creepy crawlies, excitement as an Hedgehog snuffles around and, if I'm lucky, the joy of hearing one of my resident Eagle Owls settling on the roof.

I salute you, light, for a lightless world would be a gloomy place indeed!

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Picture taken in my garden in Tarlton (Gauteng, South Africa) - Camera Kodak EasyShare C195 - Back-ground texture by Kim Klassen

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