Explore the nature at the Melville Koppies
The Melville Koppies are open on Sundays from 8am to 11.30am.
Due to the pandemic, the usual calendar of guided tours and hikes at the Melville Koppies is temporarily suspended.
There will also be secure parking at Marks Park and security on Melville Koppies.
Entrance fees are R80 for adults and R40 for scholars (please try and bring exact amounts).
If you are a group of 10 or more, EFT beforehand and email names and cellphones numbers of your group to wendavid@mweb.co.za
For more information, contact 011 482 4797 or visit www.mk.org.za
Look out for the European bee-eater
Many of us don’t know if we’ll have a job next week, if our business will recover from lockdown or if we’ll be able to leave Joburg in December on our annual pilgrimage to the coast to enjoy our summer holidays.
Looking up at the sky at Melville Koppies can bring some certainty and tranquility back into our lives. It’s October, the beginning of Spring on the Koppies, the time when migratory birds like the European bee-eater reappear.
There are no lockdown restrictions on their passage; just the normal dangers of predators, wind turbine blades, power lines, storms or strong winds that can knock them off course.
Stand on top of the Koppies and listen out for their preep, preeps. Often they’re flying with swallows, also recently back in town.
They’re easy to distinguish from the swallows by their distinctive flight pattern: several staccato-like flaps of their wings and then a long soar and glide, preep-preeping all the time. This flight pattern helps conserve their energy, enabling them to fly up to 500km a day in their journeys south to Melville Koppies for the summer and north again when our winter beckons.
If you’re lucky you’ll see them settle so you can admire their sun-yellow throat, turquoise underparts and russet-brown head.
It’s likely the one you spot was here last year and will be back here with her life partner and offspring every summer in her six-year lifespan.
Bee-eaters need an abundance of insects to sustain them the whole year-round. So they enjoy summer holidays here, soaring, gliding, snatching bees, flying ants and other insects on the wing.
They don’t worry about making nests and giving birth.
That’s a job that takes place in the other half of the year in burrows in mud-banks north of us in Africa.
