I NOTED the other day that spring had sprung, well, it may well have, but now where is summer? The weather really has been all over the place, from 10 degrees some mornings to 29/30 degrees at noon. As for the rainfall pattern, someone seems to have abandoned it, at least in our corner they have. We need rain, lots of rain. Having said that I must point out that we have had some glorious weather in between. We sat in The Hide until late one evening, with an appropriate beverage of course, and it was a most pleasant time. The next day over our early morning tea in The Hide and it was a particularly beautiful morning, with a sea breeze that was quite tangible (it should have been, the humidity level was 100 percent).
Whatever the weather, the birds seem to be particularly active. Earlier on during that evening just mentioned, we watched fork-tailed drongoes and swallows (we couldn’t see which ones, but probably barn swallows from Europe) swooping around after what must have been a feast of insects and, once it was too dark for them, the banana bats came out and took over.
The early mornings are also for the olive sunbird, the one that is now a daily visitor to the avian ablution facilities in The Hide. She ignores us completely and cavorts about in her bright red tin plate full of water as though it was a Roman bathhouse. The remarkable thing is that she will repeat the bath just before nightfall, which means she has to spend the night with wet feathers, but according to the experts this is not unusual in birds.
Staying with sunbirds, we had a very brief lifer the other day, a grey sunbird that flew into our glass French doors and killed itself. It’s a very sad business, but it seems to be a sunbird specialty. The olive sunbird frequently seems to attack the French doors and we have a pair of collared sunbirds that frequently take exception to the windows of my study, attacking them with vigour.
The YBKs, yes, the yellow-billed kites, are much in evidence as well. They really are among our favourite birds, wheeling and soaring as only they can. As far as we are concerned they are the finest aerobatic flyers in our skies, more agile than anything else up there.
Then we’ve had fly-pasts by a couple of fish eagles, obviously the ones from Mpenjati Nature Reserve on the other side of the sand dune, we’ve had regular visits from the golden-rumped tinker barbet, although he hasn’t started his summer call: poop-poop-poop, yet. Then the green pigeons have been chortling of late, it really is remarkable how they sound as if one of them has just told a slightly off-colour joke and they all chortle at it, slightly embarrassed.
And finally, I asked the other day why the cross berry tree is call a cross-berry (I assumed because it was naturally just irritable), but apparently it’s the berries – they are in the form of a cross. Well, ask a stupid question…. Cheers!
