Goodbye 2016

Yesterday, the day before the end of the year was a day that began with rain and ended without water. But that's another story.

To escape the water crisis that had me puzzled, my Landie and I decided to take a really worn and eroded little track I call Nyala road, through the lowest point and the deepest drainage line where a little water collects after good rains, a tranquil place I call Nyala pond.

As small as it is, there have been times that I have been able to immerse myself in it and it can be quite refreshing on a hot and humid summers day.

Once, whilst lying prone among the flooded grasses, dragonflies and damselflies filling the air like fairies, an ele came to splash and we had a bit of a stand-off as to whose pond it was on that particular day. We ended up sharing.

After the pond, I ventured to the riverbed in the hope that there was finally water after a week of heavy showers and soaking rain. The Ntsiri River is a dry watercourse for almost 360 days a year and only flows after heavy rains late in summer. 

And there was, though not the muddy flowing torrent that is often a result of flash floods. I didn't really expect that. Instead, a continuous stretch of slow moving surface water reflected the sky in a mirrored streak from as far upriver as I could see. It reminded me of the trickle that sustained so much life, so far up the Mwagusi River, in Ruaha.

I was just filming the green paradise that has emerged after so long a drought and was in such awe at the sight. The sun was blocked by banks of cloud and it was near sunset with the light fading fast. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, an ele bull stood next to the big Leadwood on the opposite bank and a herd of buffalo munched noisily upstream.

Nature gives us these perfect moments where so many factors come together to please and calm the soul and, invariably, it is impossible to photograph, film or capture but in the heart and memory.

And so I endeavor to share it here. Albeit brief.

Whilst focusing on this wonderful sight of a riverbed sunset with an ele, my spirits lifted at the sight of a large family of ele moms and their calves emerging from the riverine scrub and descending to the riverbed with that wonderful head-rolling, ear-flapping gait.

I was soon surrounded by ele's as they fanned out on my side of the river and slowly made their way up the rocky hillside around me.

Naturally, the younger Bulls were last to emerge and as they did so, the small herd of buff followed in their wake. One young ele bull, a teenager not much bigger than the biggest of the buffalo bulls, tried to intimidate a big dagga boy and his delight was evident as he strutted on the bank with his head high and ears held out, quivering with rigidity and defiance as the old bovid fled across the shallow water to the other side.

The second bull he tried it with, a notably large old crank, hesitated at first and then, like an animated cartoon, he huffed and puffed and arched his back as he began to buck like a bronco, thrashing at Spike-thorn branches that got in the way, trying his best to intimidate back.

Since the young ele bull was only marginally bigger and the buffalo's horns intimately more threatening, the young ele backed off and found safer ground closer to the herd.

As daylight faded and I sat in the dark typing my thoughts with the glow of the screen the only light, another large ele bull began to break branches right next to me, eventually standing in front of the Landie, peering over the front, only slightly visible on the edge of the glow.

Later today I may venture out to meet up with some humans. It is, after all, the end of the year.  A year I want to see close.

And if course the ele's couldn't give a hoot.

Happy New Year!

Love Ya Lots.

All y’all!

P.S. No photo's, lost my camera with the ele's in the dark!?! 

Went back to the river today to look for it and damaged the radiator, again! 

Took two days to remove it and fix it only 2 weeks ago.

So, 2016 has the last word!

Counting the hours to a new and hopefully better year.

Elemoments and Those "Circling Skies"

Wild Honeysuckle

Not too long ago I had days of grey skies, promising rain and uncomfortable wind.  Today is the same and it reminded me of some special moments I would like to share. Some evenings, bolts of lightning had overhead thunder shaking a fine dust from the thatch and rattling the windows, yet only a few drops fell. A couple of days ago there was a severe lightning warning for the area and I experienced a light show no 4th of July, Guy Fawkes or New Year celebration could compete with as the sky lit up from here to the Mozambique coast.

 It reminded me of when the wind finally died down and left an almost imperceptible breeze that barely moved the fresh new growth of leaves and blossoms on the trees and I ventured out to find flowers, to see what the lack of a scorching sun and a 40 degree heat would conjure to colour this world of grey skies, red earth and emerging green foliage.

Terminalia prunoides

There was a lot of colour to be found. The Terminalias were in full bloom; their cream coloured spikes hinting at their kinship with the Combretums and infusing the air with that mix of a sweet scent and a pungent aroma. Jasmine, where it can be found, added another, more pleasant perfume and one can only take deep breaths of its beautiful scent, to try to fill the senses with the memory of it for it will be a long time to flower again next summer.

The Xerophytes, those brown, drab, candle-like protuberances one finds on hilly, stony ground, had wisps of green, as their grass-like leaves began to grow and starkly contrasted with the mauve to lilac blooms that seemed to miraculously emerge from what appear to be lifeless husks.

Xerophyta retinervis

Then there are still the occasional Crossandras, little red to scarlet half-flowers that hide at the base of an odd tree here and there and are only noticed when their red stands out like shiny baubles among the creeping green carpet of herbs and forbs that appear out of bare earth and, everywhere, the Heliotropes pioneer their way with their rows of white stars and it is but a beginning of the splashes of colour on a canvas ravaged by drought that this summer will paint.

Crossandra greensockii

During my quest for floral fecundity, I came across an ele bull near Sibon Dam, a bull I am not sure whether I know or not. He seemed to subtly acknowledge my presence but mad no move to object to it. He was feeding on a small Knobthorn he had just felled.

Soon, the sounds of another bull pushing over a tree came from behind my left shoulder. He was well hidden by foliage and, at first, I couldn’t see him at all. He fed a while, I suspect a pretence to investigate my intrusion but he soon appeared, heading straight towards the back of the Landie. When he came level with my door, I began to film him and he made no effort to hide his inquisitiveness. He made a complete 360 of the Landie, showing only mild curiosity before returning to the tree he had originally felled.

As the other, older bull snapped yet another sapling, another bull appeared from the west, new to the party. He approached the older bull and lifted his head in greeting, prompting the older bull to do the same as they entwined trunks, then placed the tips of their trunks in each other's mouths in a formal greeting and clashed tusks playfully and briefly before continuing to feed.

Every couple of minutes they would face off and spar, loud cracks rang out in the quiet, late afternoon as their tusks knocked against each other's, not in aggression, but clearly a greeting of sorts and an enforcement of a bond and hierarchy that only elephants know and which we humans can only guess at.

Soon their antics brought them close to me, only metres away but behind some trees and it was when they were exposed by a small gap in the trees, that the late-comer broke off his sparring, turned toward me and tested my resolve by flaring his ears, taking a bold step in my direction and kicked some sand towards me. 

A ploy. 

A move to intimidate that I am quite accustomed to by now and as soon as he saw that I was unresponsive, he turned back to the older bull and they began to parry once again.

I lost sight of them as their antics took them into thicker bush, only the sounds of tusks hitting tusks, their flanks brushing trees and branches breaking with their frivolity fading as the sun sank behind the tree-line.

I so needed an elemoment!

An ele-fix.

I have been in such a box!

Calmed and grounded by the encounter, I moved on to the dam where I witnessed a marvel one might only see once a year. For this type of spectacle, time and place are everything.

On a scale of 1 to 10 for entertainment, it might not have been an elemoment or a pride of lion on a kill or even the mating ritual of two rarely seen skinks but  for me, the moment was exhilarating given the circumstances and would be up around an eight.

Swifts and swallows were arriving en masse. What at first might have seemed  an endless spiral of the same birds swirling over the rippled surface, diving and dipping for a drink on the wing after a turn or two over the water, became something else entirely as wave after wave of clans came and went.

As each wave of swallows circled and skimmed the surface for their drink, they moved off in different directions and as each wave disappeared over the trees, a new wave descended.

Looking up to the high ceiling of cloud that was breaking up into patches of blue and pink in the glow of the setting sun, out of thousands of feet, new clans dropped altitude and circled the dam.

This was the arrival of some of our regular European Summer migrants and this was the end of an epic journey, having spent weeks on the wing, flying across Europe and Africa and starting their summer vacation.

Eventually, the water’s surface stilled. All except for the hopeful terrapins that swam about and the frogs and aquatic insects that made raindrop-like ripples as they broke the surface for air. As dusk closed out the day, not a feather filled the sky, not a breath of wind stirred the trees and the night woke up with little knowledge of what the day had done.

Rows of stars!

Love y'all lots!

Skinky

Tails of Two Skinks

Today I sat for hours trying to capture two snake-eyed-skinks performing a mating ritual at my feet. Knowing how sensitive and secretive these little lizards are, I set up a cam amongst the leaf litter and hoped for the best and although I know that they live such fast and hidden lives, I also know how hard it is to catch them in action.

Also, despite a wide angle of view at ground level, I was hoping that a creature, barely 3 inches long would happen to play in front of the lens. That was in itself the height of optimism but I persevered and watched and waited and hoped.

Every time one of them emerged from the leaf litter under the raisin-bush, it was everywhere but in front of the camera. Once or twice, I managed to get a glimpse as one of them came up out of the leaves before diving back in again like an otter in a swamp. A couple of times they came out into the open of the concrete step,  but it didn’t last long and moving the camera around, in such close proximity, made them dive back under the leaves even more.

It had been a muggy day with high cloud cover and the air was still but for an occasional gust of wind. The residual heat of the 40+ day yesterday made it somewhat humid. The Raisin-bush are in full bloom and there is a noticeable lack of insects, so hunting for lizards must be quite hard.

I was contemplating all this when I looked down and the pair of skinks were lying together out in the open, his chin seemingly resting on her flank in a pose of marital bliss and likely post-coital exhaustion. But it wasn’t, it was a pivotal moment that I had never witnessed before. 

Amongst all the reptiles I live with, having been fortunate to live in their world for as long as I have and witnessed their intriguing lives as an outside observer, somehow it is only a number of species that have revealed such intimate moments. Some are so elusive, I may never get to see them at all so I just knew this was special.

They may have been exhausted after the all the activity I had been watching but I was sure that this was the moment he had finally convinced her/seduced her/subdued her and he was actually holding her in his jaw, a sort of a love bite, just strong enough to restrain, yet gentle enough to entice and convince her.

I managed a hurried photo and turned away, not having the heart to make any move that would spoil it or disturb them. I looked over my shoulder a few moments later and saw that they had soon changed positions and were indeed making baby skinks and I felt that the only way to record the moment would be to use this keyboard. As I sit and type, they dive in and out of their own little utopia, as bronzed as the drying Mopane leaves that make up the sea that they live in.

Living With Lizards (...and flowers for the ladies!)

Living With Lizards (...and flowers for the ladies!)

A Cassia flower

The dry landscape that is enduring the worst drought in decades is coming to life in splashes of colour as the bush acknowledges the change of seasons and the passing of the spring equinox. Days are warmer. Hotter even, with temperatures rising to 40 plus in the shade, in between occasional cloudy, windy days.

Knobthorn

The first trees to bloom were the Knobthorns, their creamy, pale yellow blossoms arriving much later than they have over the last few years. In fact, everything is happening later than the seasons following the 2012 flood that saw the Knobthorns blooming as early as the end of June and many others coming to life through July and August.

Bushwillow

Now, nearing the end of September, they are joined by the pale yellow spikes of Bushwillows and bright yellow flowers of the Grewias. However, nothing quite compares to the bright yellow, lollipop bursts of the Cassias; these little trees, dotted amongst the harsh Mopane veld, remain quite inconspicuous until they wake up in spring.

Grewia

Cassia 

The Cassias usually flower and then leaf at the same time, as with most trees who time blossom, bloom or leaf together. This year, these conditions are rather extreme and I guess it all depends on the soil, their roots and their reserves, which result in some trees yet to begin while some trees are in full leaf with the last of their flowers drying out in the occasional hot oven-like northerly wind. All in all so much is happening despite the fact that it has been so long since the last rain.

Giant Jackalberry

Fig trees and Jackalberry trees dominate the forests in the Blyde Botanical Reserve at the foot of the Drakensberg

Elsewhere, beyond this Combretum/Mopani veld with its stony ridges, where the mountain range looms and blocks the horizon from as far south as one can see to the curving tail of the Drakensberg bending into the bushveld of the Northern Limpopo, there lies land rich in soils and richer still in the rain that comes in from the South, moving up the escarpment. These lands are mostly farmland now but patches of wildlife areas are increasing and amongst these natural areas, especially at the foot of the mountain, are trees so old and so big, it is like travelling to another time or another world.

Here too are splashes of colour that tell the tales of other trees, the likes of which I don’t have close to home. 

Schotia

The Boerbean or Schotia, a weeping tree that, with its nectar-rich flowers, pleases the birds and the bees and a buzzing of so many other insects, as well as the eye, with crowns of crimson and rainbows of colours of its visitors, hooked on its honey.

There is Wild Pear, having mostly blossomed already, their dying floral show of off-white to pale pink fading to tan and brown.

Although inconspicuous, the Jackalberry flowers have come and gone and it is their fruits that are finding favour amongst dozens of birds and mammals. Their seeds from trees closer to home even finding their way here to Mopane Grove via the crops of go-way birds who regurgitate indigestibles when they sit around the tree above the birdbath.

Against this backdrop of seasonal change, despite the dry conditions, some of the residents here at the Grove continue their lives oblivious to all this change around them; their worlds are so small that what lies beyond sight may as well be another galaxy.

Some of these little creatures that share my space (or I theirs) continue their daily lives as they have done for weeks or months, sometimes years.

In one case it has been months.

Timotee

One of the luckiest little lizards who discovered a way to get into the hearts of a couple of humans. 

More accurately, Tim is a gecko, A Dwarf Gecko of the Genus Lygodactylis and is one of the few diurnal geckos with a whole host of enemies.

Unable to compete with a variety of nocturnal cousins that are a whole lot bigger, dwarf geckos found their niche in a diurnal world and Mopane Grove has a healthy population of them. It is one thing to find a niche but another to have to deal with a far more diverse diurnal predator population but somehow they thrive. Their abilities to climb, to cling to any surface, even glass, with their almost prehensile tails that have the same clinging abilities as their toes, help them escape even the most determined of predators.

I see many of these little geckos in their little territories as I move about during the day. Some individuals who are always in the same place and although I can scarcely tell one from the other, it’s their consistency that tells them apart.

 Timotee appears on the table at the side of the daybed in the short time between me coming out to sit and actually sitting. We call him Timo for short. He obviously spends time elsewhere when I’m inside or elsewhere myself and, on passing by during my daily routine, he's nowhere to be found, so I have to conclude that he enjoys our presence as much as we do his.

Of course, his is a dual-purpose acceptance because my presence just happens to create more opportunities to fill his little belly with the increase in insect activity around me as well as our mutual appreciation of green tea and honey.

Not that I am smelly or anything although sometimes a day can be truly trying in a 45-degree heat and, in this drought, I do try to conserve water. It's just that I am just another large moving mammal that flies and mosquitoes are programmed to seek out regardless and I guess my appearance on the day bed means their appearance too.

And so it is that, whilst sitting outside, wracking my brain to a solution to a crisis, reading, writing my thoughts or playing Gin, I swat at these persistent antagonists and occasionally, accidentally, actually manage to hit one. Now, not one to waste, I usually have a spider that I give food aid to but sadly, since something (a wasp, I suspect), abducted Charlotte the only golden orb at mopane grove this last summer and the tent spider that disappeared from under the window, the next best candidate was a scrawny gecko, a dwarf gecko, I might add, that jumped on my shoulder one day and ran down my arm. On eventually landing on the bed he turned and looked up at me and held my gaze for a few seconds.

The next morning, having morning tea and biscuits with Fabienne and the resident impala rams, whilst we were playing another round of rummy, I noticed that it wasn't only the usual ants that came to the moisture where I accidentally spill tea on the table, a gecko was licking at the liquid too.

Shortly after that, I noticed that he would appear anytime I sat down and when it came time to dispose of a fly, he was there, on the table, looking up at me with a few wrinkles in his neck and a plea for a fly.

We were in a drought. We're still in a drought but this was supposed to be the height of summer with insects swarming the lights at night and hot nights abuzz with sound yet very few insects bugged us and nights were eerily quiet.

 Insect eaters, from birds to reptiles, frogs and fish and spiders and even insects, themselves, struggled to find food and populations were crashing. Insect eaters were hungry!

It was almost as if he knew my intention. As I leaned over to drop the fly on the table, he anticipated it and it had barely landed on the table when he slammed it in his jaws like a hungry croc launching at an impala. Then he looked up at me, expectantly. As he does every time I sit down.

He first started training me in February.  Being out of work and mostly confined to MG for most of the day, I have developed a routine of my own and I guess this coincides with the routines of the other residents amongst whom I am so lucky to live. No sooner was he aware that a fly was coming, he began coming closer to my hand and perhaps driven by hunger or simply opportunism, he eventually began taking insects from my fingers, sometimes running from the aloe next to the table, scaling the leg of the table as soon as he knew I had swatted something.

As months wore on, winter came along and I was once again at home alone. I was still having my daily tea and spilling it on the table. Timo and another gecko alternately licking the moisture and it was only Timo who waited for food aid. There were days of cold and grey when no self-respecting reptile would be seen outdoors, that I would find Timo on the inside of the window frame above my inside bed hiding from the weather. There were times when I couldn’t find the little thing for more than a week and became worried as each day the tea on the table would dry up and I would have to continue with my daily chores.

As I've said, it's hard to tell who is who with little things that all look alike but Timo is so distinctive; there are asymmetrical spots at the base of his tail whereas with all others that live here, their spots line up. And so it was quite easy to find him again after he must have had an encounter that made him shed his tail and it was with huge relief that the tail was lost on the vertebra just below these very unique spots.

This was a wonderful opportunity to watch a gecko regenerate its tail and I looked forward to the ensuing months especially since spring was on its way.

I mentioned that there was another gecko, albeit a bit less adventurous that visited the table with Timo. He was quite distinctive as he had already regenerated a tail after losing his original so he was quite distinct in his own right.

Recently, after months of interaction and spilling tea and catching flies, Timo moved and seldom visited the table but we did see activity close by. You can imagine our surprise when we found the two of them together and they weren’t exactly fighting! Timo was clearly not a male but suddenly it was evident that she was indeed Mrs. Timo and so the other is now known as MR.

They were in a lover's embrace. Well, as reptiles go, he was. She could hardly do anything about it  as he gripped her hard with his forearms and wrapped his body around hers. I felt guilty about photographing them but I wanted a record and it’s educational.

After this ordeal, she rarely visited the table, spending her time on a makeshift pole bench that has been at the door since the bungalow was built sometime in the middle of the last century. We occasionally saw her there and there were no more tea parties but if a fly interrupted the morning game of gin and we could catch it, it became more imperative to give her a treat since I believed she was going to be laying eggs pretty soon. The tail stub began to grow and instead of a blunt and red end to her stump, a little pointy protuberance began to show.

Then she disappeared. For the longest time ever. Perhaps more than two weeks. We were having a sunset drink on the patio with my friend Nelson when she appeared on a log at my feet and looked up at me with that reptilian smirk. We were happy to see her again and happier still that she was not dependent on the supply of flies that had been coming her way.

A couple of days later, I was alone on the day bed, tea and cards were done, I was reading  a novel and Fabienne was working inside. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye on the log I had last seen her. I jumped up with camera in hand and was stunned to see that one of the resident skinks had just caught a dwarf gecko.The gecko was fighting back but could do very little as the skink had it by the neck. My presence and my angling to see better made the skink run under an aloe and deeper into the Euphorbia and out of sight. The incident was so quick and, although I managed to get a couple of really bad shots with soft focus, it was very clear that the little gecko that was caught was missing its tail. Whether that was a result of the attack that I witnessed or whether it was our friend Timo, it is hard to say. I am still trying to focus on the blurry image and the spots on the tail just above the break!

I will also look at every gecko that is regenerating its tail to see if there are those two irregular spots where new tail meets old.

 Larry a friendly fireless dragon

There's another lizard that is a resident here at Mopane Grove, we call him Larry. He, on the other hand, has no concept of a name and thus is unmoved when I say "hi Larry!" every time I see him out of his cave.

His cave is a hole that has been excavated underneath a small pond that I built about 30 years ago. Over the years vegetation has come and gone but the dominant feature now is the huge euphorbia that we planted in the early nineties. The pond is dry and full of leaves and is protected by the overhanging, thorny branches of the Euphorbia. It provides a lot of cover for the many residents that shelter under it .

Larry is a Rough Scaled Plated Lizard, which is a mouthful. So he's Larry. He's quite a remarcable reptile with dragon-like features and a very secretive nature.

He was here on my return to the Grove in 2008, after an absence of almost seven years and therefore don't know where he came from or when he took residence. I remember filming him eating a millipede in the summer of 2011 but it is only over the last year, that I have been able to share every day of every season with him and at times I get quite worried when he doesn't show his scales for days on end. Usually it's weather related. 

There have been times when he has allowed me to be close and quite by accident, I discovered that he is rather fond of fruit. Certain types of soft fruit.

I eat papaya as often as I can for breakfast and I hang the skins on the spines of an old sicklebush for the birds. Mostly grey louries, the go-way birds, who are not only clumsy but can rival lion in the way they squabble and fight for a bite and in the process, tend to drop a lot to the ground where Larry finds easy pickings. But then a drought has gripped life pretty hard at the moment so there’s a lot of squabbling over scraps.

Anyway, I noticed Larry helping himself to the fragments that the birds were dropping and so began to inadvertently drop some near one of his entrances to his kaya.

I was eating a banana one day and I always leave an inch or so for the birds and especially the butterflies and moths that are drawn to its minerals. As I approached the old dead Sickle Bush that has the fruit station, Larry was outside his northern cave and I bent down and offered him a bite of the last of the banana.

One can imagine how astounded I was that this plated dragon, who usually slides back into the darkness of his cave if I approach, stretched up to accept my offer! Needless to say, it hasn't happened again and so, instead, I leave fruit on a rock at his entrance and I hope the rains will soon come, bringing millipedes and frogs and insects and a more varied diet for him. 

My days here at MG are pretty routine. I mean, irrespective of what I do during the day, I am in and out of the bungalow and alternate between being inside or being in only a handful of places outside, the main resting place being the day bed outside, which happens to be just opposite two of Larry's entrances. His main cave entrance is beyond my feet, when on the bed, and there are times when he is sunning himself in the late afternoons that I have a one sided conversation with him. A sort of self-administered therapy for, well, myself. Larry just sits and listens. Like a good therapist.

I know he hears, I can't tell if he's listening or not but he doesn't hide and that's always a good sign that I can go on ranting.

One day, after I had spent most of the day indoors because of a cold front that had a strong southerly blowing a cold gale in from the snowy peaks of the southern Drakensberg, I finally ventured out in the late afternoon as clouds cleared and the wind dropped under a pale blue sky that had the remnants of cloud burning orange as the sun sank onto the escarpment. I noticed that larry wasn't interested in this fading glow and had a startling realisation as I started thinking about our similarities.

We are no different in some respects.

To him I am another creature that hides in my hole and comes out for periods during the day to laze around a stare into space, retreating to the sanctity of my cave whenever any human presence is detected or when the wind blows or the rain comes or it gets dark and it's time to curl up and sleep. 

Only to emerge with the new day or the sun or the departure of humans.

I'm living like a lizard!

Basking in sunshine.

Retreating from the world when it ventures too close to my space yet mostly at one with the day-to-day world around me.

And yet the world around me carries on regardless of me.

The birds, the reptiles, the mongoose clans, the squirrels, sometimes elephants, the nocturnal regulars like Cyril the civet, the as yet unnamed genets, porcupines, hyena and hares.

I could be invisible.

To us, this little island of Mopane, in a sea of drought-stricken bushveld, is home and the lives of those of us simple things that inhabit it continue to interact and we are all comfortable in our space, regardless of seasons and weather. 

Mopane Grove

Elemoments

August 11 2016

Under a magical milkberry. 

A very bright first quarter moon dims the pinks of sunset into a silvery monochrome that helps to make out shapes yet fails to be bright enough for definition. Under an ancient Milkberry, the moonshade is so deep that I have to imagine what is happening based images in my head from daylight and on the sounds of bone-crunching and heavy, powerful jaws, tearing through one of Africa's largest herbivores.

A big male lion has dragged his prize under the dense foliage and, after many hours of sleep and attempts to woo an accompanying lioness, he's hungry again, and feeding. They have been here for two days now.

The lioness has her own agenda and has had for the

couple of weeks that I have seen them together. She is asleep, not far away, content.

Playing him.

Sitting here under these circumstances, it is hard to believe that 13 years ago, on this date, a Monday, after not doing anything in particular that was out of the ordinary for most of the day, a phone call late that night set me on a course that made the impossible possible and allowed me the chance to even be here in the first place.

I was living in a little cottage in the coastal town of Hermanus, a town known for its botanical heritage as well as the visiting whales that calve in Walker Bay every winter, offering some of the best land-based whale watching spots in the world. 

I had resigned myself to the fact that I was not likely to ever see Mopane Grove again, nor the elephants whose land it is and the very essence of what drives me as a human. It was not an easy realisation, the bush was my life, my love, my passion.

The phone call was from my Nephrologist, it was regarding blood tests that I had had the previous week and he offered me both good and bad news. The bad was that, after thirteen years of a degenerative kidney disease, I was finally going through renal failure. In some respects, my worst nightmare, in others, possibly my wildest dreams come true.

For thirteen years I managed to do everything I ever wanted to do, in case things went sour; from running a camp in the Okavango Delta, skiing and ice-climbing in Austria, exploring the wildlife of California, to Overnight walking safaris and thousands of square kilometres of exploring in The Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania, the time had finally come to face this life-changing and challenging moment.

The good news he had to offer was like a dream in itself. After more than a decade of expecting the day that it would happen, the circumstances were overwhelmingly simple and I was extremely lucky. He said that a kidney was available if I wanted it?

By mid-afternoon the next day, August 12, I was waking up in ICU in the hospital in Cape Town. Snow covered the Cape mountains and it was a very cold and wet winter. I remember my mouth was parched from the lengthy op and in a semi-conscious state I was fighting with a nurse because I wanted water and all I was getting was ice. 

Despite the tubes and monitors and wires, I was awake. 

Anew. 

August 12 2016

We were sitting in the dark, last night, with the big male eating in even darker shadow. I think the lioness had crept away to find the pride whilst he was eating and after what seemed like hours, a roar started up somewhere to the North. As his brother's calls grew in intensity, he stopped eating and came out into the moonlight to answer. With barely a breeze and cold winter conditions, sitting ten feet from a roaring lion in the darkness of the middle of one of Africa's biggest National Parks, there is an awe and an excitement that is hard to articulate. It is a sound that one can feel vibrating in every organ, in every muscle. The Landie rattled in places the rockiest of roads couldn't reproduce.

Not long after the other male arrived, the big-bellied male left the remains to an obviously hungry brother and began walking away to the North. We met up with him again a little while later on another road and I proceeded to the next ridge to sit an listen and wait.

Switching off the lights and engine, filled with the excitement of lion on Mansimvula, it was an enormous surprise to suddenly see the huge silhouette of an ele, half hidden by mopane, right next to us. Deeper in we could hear other bulls stripping leaves and snapping branches. It was a moment with some ele's on the eve of my anniversary and quite fitting that the same day is now International Day of the Elephant.

So, here I am, thirteen years down the line, my life a bit of a mess but for the privilege of living where I do and making a point, as often as I can, to spend time with elephants. Today in particular.

It's funny, this feeling I get.

It comes from a need to reconnect, to plug back in after running without ele power for too long even though I live where I do, surrounded by wild Africa.

It's amazing, sometimes, when I break out of a funk that has descended after being cocooned in Mopane Grove for too long and I need to head out in the Landie (on the rare occasions these days that we do venture out), with the specific intention of finding an ele and I manage to recharge in a single moment at the sight of a silhouetted dark form, just crossing my path, oblivious of my presence or existence yet sharing my space and time. For even just a single ele moment is a milestone in my existence, one that I take from moment to moment.

These are what I call Elemoments!

An unpredictable thing, really, never knowing when the next ele moment will be. It’s just a feeling I get. A need to fulfil.

Here are two of those moments from the last week or so.

Argyle rd. Looking East from Mansimvula

The wind suddenly dropped away from a blustery and cold few days that were covered in cloud. Even the solar system was complaining; the fridge draining the batteries with no chance to even charge the laptop. I had been couped up, reading, writing and generally escaping the intrusive noise of visitors to Mansimvula and was desperate to get out. So, dressed up in layers and longs and even socks inside my moccasins, I headed out for one of my much-needed ele moments.

I had stopped at the Mansimvula sign and was about to turn in to follow up on a herd of impala I had heard alarming, probably from an Ingwe that had been calling at three this morning that was still hanging around.

On the main road looking East, down into the Nhlaralumi River crossing, I saw an ele calf run across the road and, on my arrival, found the matriarch and the calf that had already crossed moving deeper into the bush. To my right was another  youngster that had yet to cross, he was just the typical teenager, hanging back to show his growing independence.

I watched him cross the road and pick at a few things until he stopped at a particularly beautiful and well pruned little Knobthorn, no doubt at least a few decades old and obviously cherished by giraffe and kudu alike. Only, they don't over extend their welcome as eles are wont to do and, with its stunted dense little canopy, it must have been home to more than just the social spider's web that was swinging like an erratic pendulum as he plucked at the dense crown. Then he looked at me and put his head into the crown and began to push, using his weight through his left arm to stand on the trunk and push it flat. 

So he flattened this beautiful tree and I realized that perhaps I need to stop admiring trees and putting my love for them out there because they are the ones that the ele's target. Like a small Rain Tree that met the same fate a couple of weeks ago.

He made a half-hearted attempt at digging up the roots, flipping the tree over to try to reach the other side, bending down on his wrists to lever a root up with a tusk, ultimately not doing much before walking away. One of the most wonderful moments throughout the demise of this pretty little tree was the ubiquitous presence of a pair of drongos. although only one of them appears to photo bomb the proceedings, there was a pair that was never too far away to miss that arthropod either dug up by the ele or scared into flight.

Speaking of tusks, his were quite impressive for such a youngster; he might carry a gene long thought lost that will eventually add him to the tuskers hall of fame. Since he's only a kid, 13 or 14 at most, he has a future ahead of him if the humans don't mess it up.

By this time the mother and calf were slowly melting into the mopane scrub and I turned around to see if there were any others that I had missed. That’s when I noticed a Tawny eagle sitting in a dead tree, backlit by the afterglow of a wintery sunset. Reversing a bit for a clearer view, I noticed its kill clutched in a talon, dangling precariously from the branch it sat on. The carcass was that of a fairly large bird, plucked bare and headless like a chicken ready to roast. I guessed it must have been a guinea fowl by the size of it. We weren't far from the Tawny's nest and judging by the full crop the eagle had, I guessed the prey was destined for the nest but, like a leopard cub's inexperience at grappling with the remains of a kill and then losing it, the eagle momentarily lost its footing, dropping the kill in the process and disappeared from view as they both fell out of sight.

And I hadn't expected anything when I left Mopane Grove. I just wanted an elemoment.

Another moment, alone in my universe happened a couple of days ago.

A Sunday evening in the cool air coming from snow-blown mountains way down in the South with the cloud of the cold front dissipating, condensing, opening up for a moonless sky that the night would bring.

There is a line of planets on the ecliptic, from Venus setting in the West just after the sun, Mercury a bit higher, Jupiter up even high and Saturn and Mars teasing the Scorpion straight up at the zenith. Perhaps it's quite fitting that the trio of Venus, Jupiter and Mercury are hanging around Leo with all the lion activity of late and Mercury, being quite an inconspicuous little planet, is most noticeable now because it is sitting next to Regulus. The little king and a bright magnitude star of the constellation of Leo.

But I digress.

As I so often do.

I have been doing some much-needed work on the Landie. I have given her new this and new that and even a few extra bits that are once in a Landie lifetime replacements and despite the chronic exhaust problem, the engine's purring. Kinks in the electronics are ironed out, timing is sorted, plugs are firing.

This Sunday evening, with clearing skies proved to be a perfect time for a test drive and a perfect time for another much-needed elemoment.

It was my second attempt at a test drive.

The first was cut short by the exhaust suddenly blowing again and I knew that my chances of finding anything would be diminished entirely by an exhaust that sounded like a tractor without a manifold.

My second attempt, after hasty repairs, about two hours later and closer to sunset, proved, once again, that timing is so important. Not only that of an engine but the universe in general.

I headed South, past the airstrip of Ntsiri but caught a glimpse of an ele bull crossing the road some distance way behind me. However, by the time I turned around and covered the distance, he was already walking deeper into the bush, perpendicular to the road.

He was a very impressive ele, might I add, missing a right tusk and with an immaculate left, but his incisors were his least impressive feature, he is simply a magnificent mature bull and he walked up to a large Marula tree, stretched his trunk up the trunk of the tree as high as he could reach, with his tusks, just wide enough to slide up on either side of the big tree's girth, pointing straight up as he rubbed his chin.

The backs of the ears were next and then a shoulder until it was time for a bum rub of note. Left cheek, right cheek, left again until he was satisfied. He eventually just strolled off into the rust coloured Mopaniveld, himself dusted with the iconic rich red soils that are as much a part of Africa as are the ele's themselves.

Watching him walk into his wilderness, disappearing from view, my day was made. I had taken out the Landie for a test drive and an ele of note was all I needed to put some of a confuddled life back into perspective.

I found myself bound to record my thoughts and stopped at the Mansimvula sign to type them up on the small screen of an iPhone. The ele I had seen was moving East and that meant parallel to our southern boundary, the main road, and I didn't expect he would suddenly turn North and visit Mopane Grove.

A deep red sun set beyond the ridge as I headed for home along the Sibon boundary, bringing me East of Mopane Grove as I arrived. Standing between myself and camp was another ele bull, a bit younger and strangely enough, missing the bulk of his left tusk with a break very similar to the older bull's right tusk.

He was digging for something, kicking up very little dust but moving mounds of rich damp soil that matched the colour of the changing and dying leaves of the Mopane trees as they shed for the new spring growth only weeks away.

As he ambled off, I parked the Landie and could hear him for a long time as I busied myself with the end of day chores.

I'm sure the two bulls were talking to each other, planning a rendezvous somewhere in the vast Mopane forests in the East.

It is now late afternoon, sunny and a blue sky from horizon to horizon. It is time. 

Ele-time.

See you later.