Extravagant Beauty of Strandfontein

After awhile, all flamingo photos begin to look the same, I think as I edit. Ooh. This one's nice. And look at this one! This one's amazing! But at some point I must stop. 

If there is a more photogenic bird I haven't met it. Right out there dazzling me with every move. And in flight, well, I could spend a solid week shooting flying flamingos, never harm a feather, and come back with 10,000 photos easy. Whether swimming like odd, twiggy swans

listening to a drill sergeant only they can hear

or bursting into flight with tiny pink webbed feet splashing 

threatening to tread on each other as they go

reaching escape velocity

and finally taking to the air like flying umbrellas

flamingos, and the mountain backdrop at Strandfontein, enchant me.

 But there are other birds at Strandfontein. 

A gray-headed gull floats amongst the dancers

and a panoply of waterbirds (Cape teal, Hartlaub's gull and red-knobbed coot) makes for some fun sorting. One of these things is not like the others. One of these things just isn't the same.

Wait. How do you tell a flamingo from a coot again? Oh yeah. One has a white bill.

A little grebe floats in the serene ripples of psychedelia

a yellow-billed duck rockets over

 while greater crested terns, Hartlaub's gulls, white breasted and reed cormorants rest on a pier. 

A rufous-tailed scrub robin, thousands of miles off-course, thrills area twitchers

which bemused us. The bird looked pretty much like any other scrub-robin we'd seen, and since none of us ever see scrub-robins, whether the little thing as 7,000 km off course or not made no nevermind to us, but it was lots of fun to watch South African birders staking it out, talking about its habitat preferences, and even offering to flush it for us!

Scrub-robin is scratching its head, wondering what all the fuss is about. Wondering why five guys with scopes watch its every move. Now I'm going down into the grass. Now I'm hopping up. Now I'm cocking my tail. See how rufous it is! I'm a desert scrub-robin, lost at a sewage treatment facility. 

To be truthful, I was more thrilled with a great, close look at a reed cormorant in full breeding finery. That ruby eye! The polished gunmetal gray of its Sebright-bantam-spangled back! What a bird! and to think it simply looks black virtually every time you see it. Those who tout the virtues of "naked eye birding" are missing so much. You have to get up close to a reed cormorant to appreciate it. What a bee-yoo-tiful bird!!

and beneath our feet, flowers, and a painted lady!

To share it with fellow blossom-worshipping kneelers was so sweet.

 It was a magical morning at Strandfontein. 

 

And we took in sunset at Chapman's Peak, in awe at the majesty of these landforms, this light. 

A little boat cut the sunpath, and just as the sun disappeared it turned ever so briefly green, at least to my eye. Likely a trick of the afterimage, it was still a thrill, as was the whole day. 

Blessed and lucky, that's what we were. Are.

Wishing you sights undreamt of, and sunsets like this.

Flamingorama!

Strandfontein is a water treatment facility in the Cape region of South Africa. It's a series of manmade impoundments that serve as settling and purifying ponds for, oh, OK, sewage. 

Other than some low brick buildings, fencing and pumps, you'd never know it. The waters are teeming with food.

Flamingos don't care. Neither do the hadedas. 

These funny, stocky ibises wail like babies. They're found all over South Africa, their loud cries just part of the everyday scene from Cape Town to Kruger Park. It's neat to have an ibis be so common, a bit like the white ibises in Florida, grazing in everyone's lawn. 

We were here for the birds, and they did not disappoint. What a delight to have a still, sunny day for flamingo indulgence! I have soo many nice photos of them, and I'm torn. Do I show you all the good ones, or keep it to a dull pink roar?

I was so taken by the axillars--the long, filmy feathers in their wingpits, brilliant carmine, fading to blush--imagine how that would look in a hat! After it's been molted, of course. Part of me understands the millinery feather craze of the late 1800's when I look at these feathers. But they would soon fade to white; the color in flamingo feathers is pigment-based, and fleeting. Let's leave them on the birds.

Strandfontein is a sort of unusual setting for flamingos, because the water is so much deeper than what I imagine them choosing for feeding. They swim around like odd, bent-billed swans. You almost forget they have stilts under them when you watch them swim by.

They paddle like antic sternwheelers, their long pink legs making odd angles behind them. They even tip up like ducks and geese, feeding on the bottom, filtering sludge for tasty crustaceans. They must get some pretty good stuff here, because there are a lot of happy looking flamingos frequenting the settling ponds.

I could watch them swim, take off, and land all day long. And we pretty much did.

Like most larger waterbirds, flamingos must run across the water's surface, flapping like mad, for a distance before becoming airborne. 

It's harder to get started when the water's so deep.

Taking off into the wind gives them lift. They throw little rooster tail tracks out behind them.

When the water's glassy, the reflections are incredible. Glassy conditions are rare on the Cape, which is known for its near-constant winds. We were very, very lucky with the weather on our trip--only one day of occasional drizzle and clouds in twelve! There's a severe drought going on, so it was a mixed blessing--more on that later.

 I particularly like this shot of grace going airborne. Don't forget to take in its reflection!

I found myself holding my breath until that magic moment when the feet lifted off the runway.

These are all greater flamingos, which are larger and paler than lessers, also present in the Cape Region. That jet-black melanin in their flight feathers strengthens the feather for the inevitable wear of flight. Many otherwise white birds have black or black-tipped flight feathers, because these are the hardest-working feathers, and subject to the most wear, scraping against the air.

I was so focused on the birds that I kept forgetting to get a longer shot of the mountain background around Strandfontein. Behind that mountain is a large bay of the Indian Ocean.

With these flying umbrellas against a filmy blue backdrop.

Every once in awhile, the water would be still enough for mirrored reflections. I tried to stay conscious of them while composing.

I couldn't resist putting some words on this shot of one bird taking to the air. Might as well add to the inspirational memevalanche.

You were. Me too. Try not to waste a minute.

Pretty Ducks, Edible Flowers and Birds, Birds, Birds: Strandfontein

I have so darn many photos from my South African safari that it's easy to miss some real goodies in trying to throw a lasso around the whole thing. Flamingos are real lens hogs.

With those Vargas girls in the foreground, it's hard to look at anything else, but there are so many other things to see at Strandfontein!

The marshy dikes were rich with bulbs, all in frenzied spring bloom.

We saw these enormous caterpillars in several places on the Cape. All I could do was enjoy them, without being able to put a name other than "Roscoe" on this creature.

Glorious thing. And don't miss the beetle halfway down the stem.  You'd swear it was a hummingbird-pollinated flower, but it's probably after sunbirds.

Her name is Ruth, but we were all calling her Rootie, as her family does, halfway through the trip. She has the same tendency to go plunging in after things that I do. So we were up to our necks in wild gladiolas. Fantastic!

Rootie set this shot up and I poached it. Sour figs, as purchased, and the ice plant flower that becomes a sour fig when it goes to seed! The plant, Carpobrotus edulis,  also known as sour fig, highway ice plant, Hottentot fig, or pigface, creeps prostrate across sandy dunes, and it's quite common. We saw  chacma baboons eating the flowers and developing fruits. I was concerned about the sour fig harvesting until I saw how many of the plants were on the dunes. Reading a bit, I learned that it's a horrid invasive in California and the Mediterranean, creating ice plant deserts on dunes. It's given to invading on disturbed sandy soil. I still think it's cool that somewhere back in time, somebody figured out you could dry the seedheads and get a delicious treat out of them. Wonder if anyone eats them in California? Perhaps we need to graze more.

Wild pelargoniums reminded me so very much of my wooly rose-scented friends of yore. They were aromatic, but nothing like the scented ones I grow. 

It's not hard to see why Strandfontein has such fabulous bird life. That's a bay right there, and the wetlands are the silver line inland, near the horizon.

 The fillymingos don't have far to fly to get to the rich lagoons.

Those vertebral bumps again! I love seeing skellingtons under all those feathers. 

 And the sudden spread of brilliant salmon wings,

which seem somewhat modest for the size of the bird, until you remember this bird is all neck and legs and featherlight hollow bones. Try this: cover up the neck and legs with your finger, and those wings are in perfect, gooselike proportion to the body size. Plenty.

Greater crested terns, Hartlaub's gulls, and Egyptian geese rest on a platform seemingly built just for preening and roosting.

Levaillant's cisticola sings monotonously from a shrubby lookout 

while his mate hauls cattail fluff to a hidden nest.

The little marsh warbler (yes, its name is little marsh warbler, and no, I'm not capitalizing it) who eluded us for minutes on end finally and inexplicably popped out for a portrait!

Everywhere, yellow-billed ducks (sort of the Cape equivalent to a mallard) sprang quacking from the reeds.

Like the mallard, a supremely beautiful bird to be so common. Lucky, we are.

And out in the lagoons, the pink showgirls preen. We bade farewell to Strandfontein and headed for the southernmost point on the African continent, to gaze out over the southern ocean and dip our toes in it, too. You have to do that when you're in South Africa!

I'm going again in September 2016, and I'd love to have you along. 

Click here for details.