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.

Flamingos. Pinch Me Please.

One never quite gets used to the sight of a flotilla of flamingos planing into a waste water lagoon.
But for the backdrop of towering mountains, and a glimpse of the nearby Atlantic Ocean, it's quite an ordinary place

with extraordinary birds feeding and prospering there.

I quickly realized that shooting flamingos at Strandfontein Wetlands was a matter of judicious framing.

When they are coming in against the mountain, they create a vision of singular beauty.



You can see the city of Strandfontein in the haze beneath the birds. They're all busy making wastewater for the flamingos.



Not every shot is so poetic. I had to shoot this guy, nonchalantly preening in flight as he dropped into a lagoon. The backdrop, not ideal...



But that's what's such fun about bird photography. You can frame and crop and tell any story you want.


We were able to get out and walk at the wetlands, but we made a point of staying in the van around the flamingo flocks. It's only polite.

I shot this from the vehicle. There's a kind of tunnel vision that overtakes an avid photographer in pursuit of that perfect shot. This person is trying to get as close as possible to a resting flock. You can see that, while some are preening, one head has shot up, and a wing is out. That's like a neon sign flashing, "Back off!!"



Which, of course, he doesn't. Perhaps because he wants some flight shots. It's pretty arrogant, we thought, to put sixty heretofore relaxed flamingos to flight just to score yourself some photos.



This isn't a zoo, and these regal birds haven't been put there just for your amusement. It's easy to forget that the flamingos are busy trying to lead their lives,  even when they seem to you to be doing nothing at all. When they radically change what they're doing because of something you're doing, you're doing it wrong, sir. Seeing that he was going to press the birds until he got what he was after, I thrust my Canon into Leon Marais' expert hands and he got this beautiful shot as the birds fled right past us.

And this one. Just look at the splashes! Thanks, Arrogant Photographer. I guess.

photo by Leon Marais. He was sitting on the right side of the van. But he is that much better than I am.

I much prefer shooting flamingos that are ignoring us. Or mostly ignoring us. In any flock, someone's always got his eye on you.

Artist Mary Richmond, whose wonderful blog, Cape Cod Art and Nature, has been going as long as this one (making us both blogosaurs), has a great Instagram feed. She found this greater flamingo mount in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I thought you'd like to see what a flamingo does with the standard-issue 14 neck vertebrae all birds have. It uses them all, just stretches each one into a 2" tube. Look at the center bird. You can actually see the individual bones on the bottom curve of its neck. Looove it. You know what else I loved? Mary was on the South Africa trip! She'll be painting, writing and thinking about the million wonderful things she experienced for years to come.

Like the not so small miracle of flamingos at a wastewater treatment plant. 

Looking at this photo, I imagine that this bird is little more than the weight of its feathers, its bill and its long hollow bones. A supermodel among birds, living thin on her shrimp and spirulina protein shakes. 

Such a world we live in, that pink birds stiltwalk on water

fold into sines and graceful elipses

and steam off like a flotilla of sternwheelers on a September day

But this isn't the Ohio River, and it's not the Sternwheel Festival, and I am really seeing this, right over my head. Pinch me moments are what this trip is all about.

I'm going back to South Africa in September 2016. Wanna come along? Click here for details.

A Mighty Fancy Turd Tumbler

Any birder will tell you that the best birding is often in the weirdest places: dumps and the like. When I was 12, I spent a summer in the northeast corner of Montana, just south of the Saskatchewan border, where I observed at length my first blue-winged teal, shovelers, American avocets, marbled godwits, and long-billed curlews at the sewage lagoon for an Air Force base in Opheim. I had to be told it was a sewage lagoon, and not to wade in. To me, it was a wonderland. 

I feel the same about Viera Wetlands near Titusville, Florida. Magic. I'd happily spend a whole week there birding and photographing and sketching with zeal. 

Strandfontein "Wetlands" is no different. The birds are so magical you quickly forget that these lagoons have a not-so-beautiful function. 

There are black-winged stilts... (as above)

great white pelicans (different from our American whites)

black-headed herons

blacksmith plovers

Egyptian geese...well, those are everywhere, but still lovely to look at, delightful to hold

and lots of WHAT ARE THOSE?

PINK THINGS

In a SEWAGE LAGOON FOR PETE'S SAKE

Honking like geese and gangling all over the place??

OK. I'm not in Ohio any more. There are GREATER FLAMINGOS in the sewage lagoons here. 

Lots of them.

And one cool thing that happens here happens because the water is so deep. 

Flamingos normally feed in shallow water, not much above their ankles. Shallower than this. Their bills have that distinctive down-bend. That's because when they feed they turn their heads upside down (imagine if these birds simply dropped their heads until their heads were upside down). 

Then they sweep their bills back and forth, rapidly clapping their mandibles and taking up globs of mud. They use their strong tongues to squeeze the mud back out through comblike projections along the bill sides called lamellae, and by so doing strain out small crustaceans, shrimp, amphipods, insect larvae, bivalves--that kind of thing. The carotene in the blue-green algae and crustaceans they take in give them their rich color. And all those little wrigglers I listed, they keep and swallow. I would imagine they have to raise their heads to swallow...

Here, the water's so deep that the flamingos take off like so many swans or mini-sternwheel paddleboats and swim!

It is quite amazing. I like to imagine those long coral legs thrashing under the water.

And this time I got to see them! The flamingos were tipping up like so many mallards, probably to reach the muddy bottom of the lagoon, and all the delicious things living there. What a sight to see.  File all this under: Things I hadn't known flamingos do.

More flamingos anon. I know you love 'em. 

I'm headed back to South Africa, leading a trip for Holbrook Travel, in September 2016. Wanna come along?

Details HERE