All the time I've been on the farm, I've been complaining that I haven't been seeing enough birds. Our yard, the former grounds for a cattle-dip against ticks, has only one small paw-paw (papaya) tree and the shell of a long-dead tree, providing very few branches for the birds of our territory. However, this week, amongst my marking of 400 term papers (including a grim 200 essays), I had many wistful moments staring out the windows at the cold morning beyond. The procrastination achieved from avoiding marking gave birth to the fiercest of bird-watching patience. A patience, I might add, that would have saved all my complaints from the start had I really given their winged flight the time of day. My old, telephoto lens in hand, I managed a number of identifications of some of the birds hopping about our yard. Since Johannes and I have spent our days at work, I almost missed out on these early morning sightings entirely.
There has been one other very important photographic capture: that of the warthogs. They march, they chomp, they rustle, they grunt, they crunch, they scurry, they bury, they grovel, they trot, they meander, they scamper. They are so quick to scatter at the slightest noise and so, I have never managed a photo. While far from brilliant, I have some evidence that they have been trimming the outside hedges of our yard quite sweetly.
Several months ago I found a felled giraffe on my road off the farm en route to school. It was devastating to see the great beast in stiff rigor mortise, as though it had been frozen in time and simply knocked over. Later I found out it had walked into an electric wire and toppled from electrocution. The body was removed and the wires have since been raised. Meanwhile, the giraffes stayed far from our quadrant of the farm but in the last months have begun to return. Now, we have a family of 5 that frequently visits with a loud munching on the branches just beyond our fence. We have even seen the male-head visiting the burial sight of the dead giraffe. Incidentally, Johannes and I happened upon part of that particular giraffe's lower jaw and now have in our possession 12 miraculously huge and well-formed tree-munching molars.
A few other notes for this section of photos:
** Some alarmed female nyala visited Johannes and I on our braai yesterday and actually grunted us!
** Kingfishers are some of the loveliest birds I've come across in South Africa. They mate for life and always travel in pairs. The Woodland Kingfisher male in this instance is blue and the female, as usual, brown and dull -- although she's quite sweet and yellow!
** Warthog males travel together while the females travel with the babes, as do most of the animal families. Warthogs live in dens, usually dug conveniently into the roads which create some interesting texture to the driving surfaces of the farm. When they run they scatter to the winds in a flurry, but always with what we call their "aerials" (aka tails) in upright position. An aerial here is what is known in the USA as an antenna.
**I've always noticed yellow birds visiting our fences and just mistook them for the very common weaver birds throughout the country. I was amazed to notice them right outside my window in the grass and could finally identify them as Yellow-fronted Canaries. Now I know why it always sounds so lekker (nice) outside our house!
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