Sundews on Table Mountain

Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa
01.11.2011

In the boggy areas I spotted some bright rosettes. Some were about to bloom, see below. 

These plants are probably the Cape sundew Drosera capensis, but this needs confirmation

They are carnivorous plants. Below is a close-up of  the rosettes of another sundew species.

Close-up of  the Peninsula Sundew Drosera cuneifolia  

Visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosera_cuneifolia

Wild banana trees

Cape Town,
01.11.2011

Wild banana trees are not bananas, at all. They belong to different families and are only called like that because their leaves are fairly similar.

These trees caught my eye because a) they looked like a very inferior kind of the traveller’s tree Ravelana madagascariensis, a very handsome native of Madagascar which is planted as an ornamental in the tropics, b) they were in bloom. As you can see in the above photo the flowers are huge and similar to the bird of paradise Sterlitzia; but not so elegant. They belong to that same family, Strelitziaceae.

Bird-of-paradise flower

 

Banana flowers aren’t in the least like that. Also when after they fruit they soon die, which is not the case with the so called wild banana. They belong to the Musaceae family.

Caterpillars

Western Cape, South Africa

28.10.2011

Aggregation of Cape lappet moth caterpillars

We found these amazing caterpillars during one of our rest stops along the road from Knysna to Cape Town, they were at the base of a gum tree. Some were on their own but others were in a cluster with their heads down like in the picture above.

I have sought expert help for their identification and thanks to Marin Villet, Steve Woodhall, Kristin Williams and John Joannou, I now know that it could be one of two species: Eutricha capensis (Linnaeus) or E. bifascia (Walker).  The genus was formerly Pachypasa. See below.

Photo courtesy of John Joannou

They belong to the Family Lasiocampidae which has many examples of caterpillar sociality - some are tent caterpillars. And this might explain my observed agregations. Their larvae have been found feeding on 24 species, indigenous and exotic, including various acacias, pines, and eucalyptus. See http://www.afromoths.net/species/show/48754

All this makes kind of sense because at the base of that Eucalyptus there was a lot of their frass. See below.

Frass from the Cape lappet moth caterpillars

Sunbirds

Kirstenbosch Botanical Garden, Cape Town

31.10.2011

Male red breasted sunbird on a pincushion

The pincushion is a Leucospermum conocarpodendron, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucospermum_conocarpodendron, a Proteacea, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leucospermum, the plants that I so much wanted to see!

The birds were nectaring just hummingbirds do in the Americas.

Later, on Table Mountain, we saw them feeding on insects, see a female below.

Female red breasted sunbird on a Proteacea shrub

Grey squirrels in Cape Town!

The Company's Garden, Cape Town
02.11.11

Grey squirrel and pigeons

One could well believe that this photo had been taken in the UK instead of South Africa. In fact, it was rather shocking to see grey squirrels so far south!

The Company’s Garden has some very large oaks and they go for the acorns when in season, otherwise they were daring little beggars, one of them even climbed up my leg!

Later, we saw them again in the Kirstenbosch botanical garden. Apparently, there they are very fond of the seeds of Strelitzia regina ‘Mandela’s Gold’, a yellow flowering strelitzia. This variant from the normal orange flowers took 20 years of selecting and hand-pollinating to develop. There they have to cover up the seeds with a cap of fine-mesh wire, otherwise the squirrels will eat the lot.

Knysna dwarf chameleon

Male Bradypodion damaranum

In Knysna, Western Cape, South Africa, local people have a superstition about owls and chameleons; they believe that they bring death so when they find one, they kill it.

Our cousin, Andrée Masdoorp, who is quite good at rearing chameleons, has an arrangement with her gardener: when he finds one he brings it to her; that is he pops it on plant by her pond. So she checks it daily. The male below was a fresh arrival. Sorry that I left out its tail…

They can measure up to 18 cm, rather large for a dwarf chameleon.

Then Andrée adds it to her menagerie and eventually releases their offspring back into the wild. 

Below is a pregnant female.

Pregnant female Bradypodion damaranum

 For more about this highly localised species visit

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knysna_Dwarf_Chameleon

Arum lily frog

Arum lily frog in its favourite day perch

This arum lily frog , who spends the days looking like a pebble which has somehow got into a white arum lily flower, and (we are told by Andrée Masdoorp) runs up and down the window panes at night on little red feet.
 It could be Hyperolius horstockii.

Arum lilies Zantedeschia aethiopica are, of course, indigenous in the area. They are one of those South African plants which have established themselves in various continents.