My family enjoys taking vacations to outdoor destinations. Our holiday cottage in Pearly Beach gets visited frequently for weekends or festive holiday breaks. We also have access to a plot of land in the Kouebokkeveld called Onderboschkloof, which if you ask any member of our family must be a contender for the best place on earth. However, every couple of years we try to get away to a nature reserve or national park. In the past we have done Kruger National Park a handful of times, Etosha in Namibia, and the Kalahari. This year in June we decided on something a little closer to home than those far-flung destinations, although that's all relative considering it was still a 2000 km round trip, without even counting the kilometers done inside the parks on game drives! Our first stop was at the Stormsriver Mouth Rest Camp, which forms part of the greater Garden Route National Park. I had never stayed here before, and I was most impressed with the setting. The log cabins were only a stone's throw from the ocean, and had great views for seabird and whale watching. We managed to spy a number of Humpback Whales out at sea. We took a walk on the road that snaked alongside the water's edge, before watching the Springboks scrape home against Ireland 19-13 in the Test series. The accommodation is very comfortable, and I would have liked to stay on a day or two more to explore the numerous trails and walks in the area. We did manage to walk to the suspension bridge the next morning, however we had to be on our way soon afterwards. I will stay there again if I have the chance! From Stormsriver we drove through to Addo Elephant National Park. Because my brother and I went to school in nearby Grahamstown, my family has frequented this reserve a number of time either en route to visiting us, or as a break. While on the road I got word via the South African Rare Birds Alert (SARBN) that some Temminck's Coursers had been spotted near Humansdorp. This is well south of their regular distribution, with the nearest occurring birds in the central Free State. I convinced the family to attempt a twitch for these birds since it was only 10 km off our route, and would be a new bird species for everyone in the car except myself. I had other motivations, as I had not yet seen it in 2016! After around 10 minutes of growing frustration I managed to find 3 birds a fair distance from where they were originally seen. They weren't great views, but even as small specks in the spotting scope they are still beautiful little birds to behold. We headed on then to the southern entrance to Addo near Colchester. Coming up through the park we spotted our first of many Elephants, plenty Warthog, a Cape Buffalo cow with calf in attendance, some small herds of Kudu, and Red Hartebeest. Other mammals we were to add over the next few days included Black-backed Jackal, Vervet Monkey, Eland, Burchell's Zebra, Meerkats, and Yellow Mongoose. A large Leopard Tortoise was a special find too. We stayed two nights at the Addo Main Rest Camp in a family cabin, which was not as comfortable and spacious at Stormsriver, but had everything we needed. We enjoyed two nights of braaiing out in the crisp winter air under the brilliant night sky. Chris visited the camp waterhole one night and reported back the next morning of a Spotted Hyena sighting, which I thought after previous experiences would have been a certainty on one of our drives. We had bad luck with all the predators in the park, missing the Lions too, much to my mother's chagrin. From a birding perspective we had better luck. Highlights included a Secretarybird sat atop a tree preening, African Firefinches, Red-throated Wrynecks, Black-headed Oriole, Peregrine Falcon, and Denham's Bustard. Addo is a stronghold of the threatened vegetation type called Albany Thicket. In undergraduate lectures we had an enigmatic Professor William Bond, who is one of UCT's highest-rated scientists. He has done some research in the area on this vegetation, looking at how the vegetation retards fire and supports herbivores. After many hours trampling around in this rather spiny and fierce mixture of forest and thicket he declared a new name for the vegetation: "Focket". The dominant plant here is spekboom, which literally translates from Afrikaans to 'bacon tree'. This is a rather special plant for a number of reasons. It provides significant fodder for elephants (one study showed that a single elephant may ingest over 200 kg of spekboom a day), and has been shown to have superior carbon storage ability than most other plants. There are a number of climate change operations that are looking to plant large plots of spekboom in order for South Africa to earn what's known as carbon credits. The species used to grow over most of the Albany region, however it is now restricted largely to the national park. So while people have the idea that the park is primarily protecting elephants, the larger value is for the vegetation that sustains them. This value is often ignored by keyboard activists who vociferously advocate against elephant population control in the park. Unfortunately without some kind of reduction in numbers, the current elephant population is too large and is already overbrowsing this area, the effects of which may become irreversible if not rectified soon. From Addo we headed to Mountain Zebra National Park, which abuts the little town of Cradock. This area is semi-arid, and has an interesting mix of Karoo and more xeric Eastern Cape fauna and flora. Here we stayed in a cottage, which was almost luxurious compared to Addo. The house had two bedrooms, unlike the single room in Addo, both en suite, with a large screen TV, air-conditioning, a fireplace, and a stoep (verandah for those non-South African readers) with a weber braai. The camp is nestled in an alcove surrounded by huge, smooth, red cliffs. It was reminiscent for me of Leokwe Camp in Mapungubwe National Park. The tourist roads in the park are fairly limited, so we managed to cover each route in the two days that we had to explore. Here we again missed the Lions, despite reception insisting that they're always on the Rooiplaat Loop, however this was more than made up for when Chris spotted two Aardwolf foraging for termites in the long grass. They were too far from the road for photographs, but through binoculars we could enjoy them going about their business, interacting and squabbling. To spice it up, a Black-backed Jackal decided to see what was happening, which made the Aardwolwe rather nervous. The Aardwolf would make a semi charge at the Jackal each time it came too close, but it was not too perturbed. The Aardwolf is a unique and grossly misunderstood creature. They subsist almost entirely on termites (apparently up to 250 000 a night!), and not on small mammals or carrion as many people think. In fact, many Aardwolf are wrongfully killed by farmers who believe they are livestock predators, which couldn't be further from the truth. Although it is thought that the Aardwolf is a distant relative of the hyenas, it is the only extant member of the sub-family, Protelinae, and is very different to its larger and more aggressive cousins. Aardwolf are mostly nocturnal, which made our sighting all the more special. We had a rather different suite of mammals in the park, including the endangered Cape Mountain Zebra, Gemsbok, Blesbok, Springbok, Grey Rhebok, and Black Wildebeest. Chris and I got ourselves onto a night drive, of which the highlights were a group of Bat-eared Fox and a single Aardwolf, along with the ubiquitous Cape Hare and Springhares. Birding-wise I was pleasantly surprised. There are a lot of more arid-type species than I expected to find, including Scaly-feathered Finch, Yellow-bellied Eremomela, Chestnut-vented Tit-Babbler, Cinnamon-breasted and Golden-breasted Buntings, Gabar Goshawk, Ant-eating, Trac-trac and Sickle-winged Chats, and White-browed Sparrow Weaver. My personal highlight was two Blue Korhaans striding through the veld - a new bird for my southern African list! It was strange for me to find a single female Black Cuckooshrike in the fairly atypical Karoo-type habitat, but this species apparently has a small reporting rate from the area and was not new to the reserve. It always astounds me how waterbirds manage to survive on these very small, isolated Karoo wetlands, but we tracked down some African Black Ducks, Brown-hooded Kingfishers, Yellow-billed Ducks, and Little Grebes. Birding the large kloof on the southwestern loop can be very rewarding too. We found a small group of Buff-streaked Chats and Ground Woodpecker there, however we missed the African Rock Pipits which were my real target. We reluctantly left Mountain Zebra, which I really want to return to in summer, and drove through the nothingness of the Karoo to Nieu-Bethesda. My parents last visited the weird and wonderful Owl House when they were on school tours as young kids, so we had to take the small detour to visit again as Chris and I had never been. The Owl House is one of the most (if not the most) enigmatic tourist attractions. Situated in the middle of absolutely-bloody-nowhere, it offers something different to every visitor - some find it spiritual, some melancholy, others just plain weird. Helen Martins found herself as a middle-aged, unmarried woman in an isolated Karoo town with no prospects, and destitute. In an effort to prevent depression she decided to start crafting owls and other figures out of cement and glass to brighten her surroundings. Desperation sparked passion, which grew into an obsession, and the rest, as they say, is history. One of the features in the sculpture garden is a procession of religious and secular statues to a nativity scene. This religious assemblage is beset on all sides by surreal figures of mermaids with double heads, birds with arms, and other such contrasting pieces. I wouldn't go so far as to say the experience was transformative, but you do get the feeling as you walk around and observe that you are a visitor into someone else's psyche, and that something is very wrong, but they are conflictingly brilliant at the same time. I snapped a few shots on my phone which I share here. After a beer tasting of Karoo, Roasted and Honey Ales and a delicious cheese and charcuterie platter at the 'Brewery and Two Goats Deli', we got on the road again to the Karoo National Park for our last night. Unfortunately when we arrived the wind was blowing a gale, and this really hampered our birding and game viewing. However we made the most of it, and headed out immediately after setting our things down in the late afternoon, and again in the early morning before heading home. The evening drive was rather unspectacular apart from the scenery, but the morning's action took less than 20 meters to kick off. We crossed the cattle-grid threshold into the game area, Chris shouted, the car jerked to a stop, and within a minute of game drive we were looking at a collared lioness lazing about next to the camp fence. I imagine there were many cars before us that missed the cat, as one isn't usually expecting to see anything that close to the only hive of of human activity for kilometers, but there she lay. And she didn't move, because after 3 hours of driving we found her in exactly the same spot when we reentered camp. We did the mountain loop, which offered up some amazing Karoo scenery. From up high it seems as if the flat plains are endless, and the koppies dotting the landscape look like anthills from that altitude. Despite the incessant wind we did see some interesting bird species, including Karoo Korhaan, Layard's Tit Babbler, Pale-winged Starling, and Karoo Long-billed Lark. By late morning we called it quits, trundled through to Beaufort West to stock up on some delectable Karoo lamb and springbok biltong, and hit the N1 back to Cape Town.
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AuthorI am a birder, biologist, and nature blogger. I post about my trips, informative tidbits, and things I think are interesting. Archives
July 2017
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