The bane of Lucy’s life

I haven’t had the energy to write much this week. So today is another photo day. The little bird below (a Fiscal or Common Shrike) is the bane of our cat’s life. It lives in a tree in our front garden, and often Lucy just needs to set a paw outside in the front, and […]

More notes on venom

A comment by David Robertson on one of my recent posts, reminded me of a passage from one of my favourite books: Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams.  If you missed my previous post on this book click here. I think everybody should read this book at least once! It’s educational and it’s funny. […]

An African Christmas tree

On our morning walk the other day, I noticed this rather sad looking palm tree in front of our local gym. I normally don’t look up at the tree, but this morning there was a lot of noise coming from it. A colony of weaver birds has strung their nests from the fronds like ornaments […]

What happens if you obsess about something just before Christmas?

Well, if you’re me and you’ve been obsessing about spiders, spider webs, spider identification and spider photography (and not just on your blog!), you get these as Christmas gifts: Wonderful! How did you guess this is something that I wanted, and more importantly needed?! 😉 So in case you can’t see in the photos, I […]

Finding a vacant toilet in the bush

To most outdoor enthusiasts that is going to sound ridiculous. After all, nature is one big bathroom . . . for everyone and everything. Not so in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park in the Kalahari. There, a very strictly enforced rule states that you may not get out of your vehicle, or dangle any part of […]

Cowrie collection

I am not really an ornament collector, but I do love shells. Every time that Willie goes fishing in Mozambique, he brings back with him a couple more of these Cowrie shells. Some still are bright and colourful, others have been dulled by the sea. Some more background from Wikipedia: Cowry, also sometimes spelled cowrie, […]

Unpacking books and memories

Willie recently had the brilliant idea of turning our front sitting room into a little library/reading room. We weren’t using it much and it’s a lovely room, with great natural light. So he had bookshelves made which stand along two sides of the room. This meant that after many years and two house moves, we […]

Pitfalls in spider identification

So I’ve found another thing I’m not particularly good at . . . spider identification. And, since we have 2000 plus species in South Africa, I’m not even trying to identify down to species level. Species identification was never my strong suit. Not birds (at least not the ones that fall into the Big/Little Brown […]

Spider photography

So besides practising my photographic skills on the birds in our garden, I’m also using the many spiders in our house to develop my bug photography skills. The Spider Club photographers make it look so easy (CLICK HERE for The Spider Club Gallery). Well, it isn’t! Most spiders are tiny. Then there’s the problem of […]

Preening Doves

Yesterday afternoon we had a couple of drops of rain. This pair of doves felt that this warranted half an hour of preening to get their feathers all dry and in place again. I hadn’t realised until I started taking photographs of them how pretty their feathers are. (You can click on any of the […]