At 35’C, I feel far too hot to write much. Pictures can express more than I can in this heat, so enjoy the patterns below:
Moth on a curtain on a hot summer evening.
Escutcheon on a door of an old building.
Knitting paused in the heat.
Light shining through a wine glass.
Raindrops on nasturtium leaves.
Ceiling rosette in an old building.
If I hadn’t been waiting at the back gate for a lift, I would probably never have seen it. This flattie – Common Wall Spider – is so well camouflaged on the trunk of a tree I was standing next to. They hunt mosquitoes, moths and flies … and we have several of them in our home too.
This unidentified green caterpillar fell out of the tree I was sitting under while watching birds in the garden, and landed on my arm.
I was unpegging the dry laundry from the line when I spotted this bright insect against the fabric of one of the items of clothing.
This Fork-tailed Drongo is one of a pair I have taken to calling The Bandits. Over the past few weeks, the two of them have ‘taught’ me to give them each a tiny piece of cheese whenever they perch on a cable above the kitchen door and chirp at me (or should that be for me?). They con me out of several bits of cheese every day – more than once!
An unidentified moth on an outside wall.
Cuckoo Spit – spittlebugs among the Canary Creeper.
Insects form an important part of the environment I move around in and can be seen both indoors and out. This tiny praying mantis dropped out of a tree and landed on the boot of my car:
The more usual ones we see are much larger and are green, such as this one on my wash line – I often find one there for some reason:
An insect we need to be wary of is the wasp. This one was clinging to a curtain in our kitchen. Now there is a whole nest of them high above our kitchen door!
Much more pleasing is this bee on a daisy in our back garden:
Then there was this (I think) type of rose beetle finding its way through a succulent:
Lastly, we tend to get bombarded by moths whilst reading in bed at night. This one sat still only just long enough for me to snap its picture with my cell phone:
It is often the small things that attract my attention when I am out and about and these do not happily fit into a particular category or are sufficiently interesting to turn into a story of their own. So, here are some of a number of things that caught my eye during November. The first is one of several millipedes one sees at this time of the year. In South Africa they are colloquially known as a songololo or shongololo – a name apparently derived from an Nguni word ‘ukushonga’ meaning ‘roll up’, which is what they do when they are alarmed. They grow to be about 15cm long and can give off a most unpleasant smell when they happened to be crunched underfoot.
Moleheaps, such as this one, are the bane of the lives of perfectionist gardeners who like a smooth and untroubled lawn. We call them moles, but they are actually Cape mole-rats (Georychus capensis) which are endemic to South Africa. These herbivorous creatures feed on bulbs, corms and tubers – you can see why they are loathed by some gardeners.
I found this interesting looking moth on some concrete steps and was taken aback by its attractive colouring.
This metal door handle opens the door to the Church of St. Johns Anglican the Evangelist in Bathurst. The screws look a lot newer than the rest of it.
This is a detail from a metal railing surrounding an historical grave.
Apart from old stone forts dotted around the Eastern Cape, loopholes such as this can also be seen in fortified farm houses dating back to the 1820s.
Things are not always what they appear to be at first. William Osler reminds us that the value of experience is not in seeing much but in seeing wisely.
I am used to seeing the large webs of social spiders covering the vegetation in the Addo Elephant National Park.
When I saw trees and shrubs covered with extensive web-like nests along the roads and edges of forests in Norway, I automatically assumed they had been made by spiders.
How wrong I was: these ‘webs’ are actually spun by the caterpillars of the Bird-Cherry Ermine moths (Yponomeuta evonymella) which are found throughout Europe. Their Norwegian name is Heggspinnmøll – roughly translated as Hedge Spinner Moth.
These silken webs protect the caterpillars against avian predators – and having poked at them with a stick, I can attest to them being tough – which allows them to eat the leaves of their host plants unhindered.
Something Over Tea 