50-something shades of blue

Forget about 50 shades of grey. I am confronted with 50 shades of blue, at least 50, every day. Sometimes it seems that I have seen all 59 shades of blue (that’s apparently how many there were at last count) in a day. 

A symphony of blues ... a selection from a couple of days of taking notice

The names are delightful. Try “zaffre” for a deep moody blue, “electric indigo” for a pulsating purplish blue, and “phthalo blue” for a strong blue that makes me think of loyalty.

I’d never seen a blue like the one I saw on board a catamaran near an island of Mauritius once – perhaps it was “Egyptian blue” – and I’ve never seen it since. And from that rich jewel-like hue, shoals of flying fish emerged. It was the stuff of dreams.

Right now, I can see a “baby blue” sky, fading to “powder blue” as it reaches the horizon. The sea, at the horizon, is “tufts blue” now, gradually blending to “Bondi blue” closer to shore. Yesterday, I noted a definite “tiffany blue” in the breaking waves. Often, there are various tones of grey or green, or both, woven into the blue.

In any hour, I can be confronted with an entire symphony of blue. And I bet that if you looked, you would see blues that I can’t begin to make out.

It’s a good colour to be confronted with. Blue, they say, encourages calmness and serenity (can always do with that). But, careful, blue is said to also create feelings of sadness or aloofness. Hence, the saying, “the blues” – although I think that this gives this magnificent colour a bit of a bum rap.

Musicians seem to have a bit of a penchant for blue, and it is, of course, the name of a genre that is a lot about sadness. 

There was that Elton John song, “I guess that’s why they call it the blues”. “Time on my hands could be time spent with you” … mmm, definitely “the blues”. And did you know (I didn’t) that there was a band called The Shades of Blue, whose 1966 song, “Oh How Happy”, was something of a hit?

Let’s not even get started on green: there are 64 known shades of green. And there are 15 shades of white  (“honeydew” could describe that paleness just above the horizon).

It’s enough to make your head spin, in the nicest way.

A fish and fowl affair

Maybe it is happening at last: two days ago, I watched a thick smudge of frenzied activity slide past in the sea. The gannets – must be thousands of them – were crazy, and the sea was foaming.

One of the dikkops in the aloe garden

It had to be the sardine run, this “greatest shoal on Earth” that passes our south-eastern shores in winter as the fish make their way north. This usually happens between May and July, but it has skipped years when the sea has failed to cool to below 21C. Some of us started thinking this was one of those years (See Strange days indeed). 

Last year’s eggs ... so well camouflaged in the nest in the grass

This year’s showing – well, what we’ve seen – has been far less of a spectacle than in previous years, when the sea has positively boiled. And it was also a lot further out – close to the horizon, in fact. The shoal is never close to shore in these parts – that happens when it reaches Durban – but I’ve never seen it this far out at sea.

But it’s still hugely exciting to watch. It has turned out to be the first of several shoals that you can identify by the great flocks of gannets settling on the water. And I’ve noticed an increase in whale and dolphin activity. In fact, I can see one spewing water out there right now.

Are the dikkops back?

Cape gannets on the sea, as seen from my office

Just as exciting, for me at least, is that the dikkops are scouting the aloe garden. I am hoping that they will nest here again. These are the strangest and most delightful birds. They form monogamous pairings, and they “play dead” to protect their nests.

Dikkop is an Afrikaans word that translates directly into “thick head”. When South Africans say “thick”, they mean “stupid”; I must admit that I wondered if they earned their name from their habit of laying eggs in nests in the middle of lawns and walkways where they are so well camouflaged that they are really hard to see. They’re also known as the spotted thick-knee.

Last year, a female laid two eggs in the grass next to aloe garden. The male was always around, and sometimes they swopped the job of sitting on the eggs. I steered Alex and the lawnmower away from the area, and we were generally very careful not to disturb them. Of course, I had to chase the darn monkeys away again and again; the male would spread out his wings and hiss, and looked pretty formidable.

We awaited the hatching of the eggs, and even started thinking of them as “our dikkops”. But, one morning, I found that one egg had disappeared and the other had been broken. The adults were nowhere to be seen. We thought that perhaps a snake had feasted here. And I felt really heart sore. Nature can be so cruel, I pined to myself. 

Later, I did see a dikkop pair flapping around their baby. I like to think these are “our dikkops”. You just never know.

Strange days indeed

We know it’s winter because this is when the sardines “run” past our village on their way to KwaZulu-Natal. We know it’s winter because this is when the snakes hibernate and I can really get into parts of the garden I otherwise won’t fiddle with. And we know it’s winter because things get quite dry in this summer-rainfall area. Right? Well, no.

The small fireplace has been working hard

I’ve had two snake experiences in the past couple of weeks. First, we watched a nightadder lolling on Hanlie’s lawn in the village. Then, a friend stepped right over a long brown snake next to the strelitzia clump where I’d been cutting flowers just hours earlier: this was a harmless grass snake, we think. Still, I leaped away so fast that I almost collided with a tree. “Go back to sleep,” I yelled.

Sardine no-show

As for the sardine run, if it’s happened, I have missed it completely. I’ve noticed small clumps of activity in the sea, with gannets diving, and there are schools of dolphins most days. But it is nothing like the spectacular frenzy of previous years. 

A friend who keeps an eye out for the sardines from her beachfront home in Durban says she hasn’t seen them either. The sardines did make an appearance in Durban on July 4, according to this report, but it did not seem much to write home about. 

The road turns to slosh in non-stop winter rain

Maybe it will still happen – July is not over yet. Or maybe it won’t. It’s rare but apparently becoming more common for the sardines not to run, and the reason is that the sea water has to cool below 21C for the migration to take place. 

Wild weather

And the rain, oh the rain … it seems it will never stop. In fact, this is the third year in a row that I recall heavy falls in winter. We are fairly close to the winter rainfall area – it starts just south of Port Elizabeth – so small amounts of rain are not entirely unusual here in winter. But not deluge after deluge.

Then again, wild weather is creating havoc all over the world right now. And there are plenty of reports pointing the finger at global warming. (Try here and here.) 

So there are few certainties, it seems. One of them is our winter fires, which we make most nights in the small fireplace in our lounge. In a junk shop, I found an ancient metal grate that fits (we’d actually been using a baking tray!) into the smaller than usual space. And I covered the boring old surround with a mosaic. It’s made staying warm quite a pleasant affair.

The seagull and the cormorant

The cormorant and the seagull on the rocks this morning

This may well be as esoteric as you’ll get to see me, but the idea is just too intriguing – and comforting after the death of Max – to ignore.

Fiona comments that some Native American tribes believe that when a beloved animal dies, you should look for a bird “... something unusual, something rare, something that doesn’t belong where it is. That’s a sign that the animal is safe on the other side. It can be soon after the animal goes, or even a week later.”

She adds that she doesn’t usually believe in such things, “but somehow I've seen a special bird with all my departing dogs since I was told about this belief”.

When I read her comment this morning, I had just been for a long walk on the beach. It is a very beautiful winter day here: just the slightest breeze, and a clear and calm very blue sea. As I walked, I felt very sad: it was my first walk without Max, and he would have loved this, as usual.

Far up the beach, I stop to watch a group of cormorants. One is sunning his wings, a couple are swimming, and a few are clutched together on the rocks. Max loved to bark at these birds, and as he became more deaf, it would be quite a job to get him to stop.

And there is one cormorant that stands out: he stands calmly at the very top of the tallest rock. A seagull touches down next to him. They are watching the sea, it seems. And I watch them for a very long time. I take photographs because I think they are beautiful.

As I walk back along the beach, I meet my friend Lauren and her dogs. We chat and I tell her that I had a sense of Max being in turmoil, but that it feels that he has settled now. Maybe, I laugh, he’s with his Gypsy.

Just saying. It’s a nice pic, anyway.

Distractions and diversions

It is meant to be a quick drive to the shop to buy milk and bread. It turns into an excursion.

On the river route: dassies, surfers, vygies, aloes, buck and the odd dolphin

The trouble is that I spot a pod of dolphins flowing lazily in the blue, blue waves, and I decide to follow them on the way to the shop. I stop first to watch the mother bushbuck near the house; more likely, she is watching me. 

Then I splash very carefully through the pools – all this unseasonal rain – in the barely there dirt road that hugs the sea towards the river mouth.

And there is just so much to take in. The road itself is edged with bright pink vygies (mesems), which is a distraction enough from the task at hand – to trail the dolphins. There is an orange smudge beyond that; I just have to stop to study that aloe in full flower.

You can just make out a fin between the water plumes of two whales

Winter warmth

The dassies (rock rabbits) are out with their families, warming themselves on the rocks in the winter sun. I stop to watch someone catch a fish; then I notice some surfers in the water. 

Further out in the bay, I watch two whales frolic. I try to take a picture for you, but manage to get only their plumes of water, although you can just make out a fin.

Next I look, the dolphins have slipped off. And I wonder what on earth I had set out to do.

Mid-winter pleasures

It’s the winter solstice today here in the South. In theory, it’s the middle of winter. But it’s far from a typical winter day: in this summer-rainfall area, most of the morning has been wet and overcast.

I pull on a jersey and walk through the garden, and even in this relative gloom, I am struck by just how lucky I am to live here. There is so much going on around me, and that’s apart from the birds gathering over the sea.

A kingfisher takes off from the knobwood tree. A pair of sunbirds are dipping into the wild dagga and the strelitzia. The hadedas are patrolling the grass, aerating the soil with their long, long beaks. A flock of guinea fowl are pecking near the aloe garden.

The gloriously scented indigenous jasmine is coming into bloom; so is the iboza. The first clivia minutiae flowers are out. Some of the aloes, including the exciting “hedgehog” hybrid, are starting to flower. The lemon tree is still heavy with fruit. The broccoli are forming good heads, and I think we can eat some this weekend.

I took pics as I strolled, and I’ve experimented with putting some of them into a collage on this page. I hope you enjoy them.

The wannabe lion and the toyi-toying cows

Just dropped by for a quick bite

The mommy bushbuck is visiting for a snack. She rests in the shade of the milkwood tree, her head peering over the teak table, while her baby watches from close by.

I should be shooing them away – they’ll be eating my agapanthus next – but I don’t have the heart to do it. Instead, I hide behind the kitchen window and watch. It’s all quite idyllic.

Suddenly, there is a movement. Here comes Isis along the path we’ve just built; she’s taking one slow step after the other. Good grief! She is actually stalking the buck. Isis may be a very small cat, but she’s also a very hungry lion (well, at least in her head).

And here comes the stalker

Now Isis stands at the leg of the table puffed up to her full height – all 20cm or so – and the mother buck stares at her (she has to duck her head under the table to do this). I don’t hang around long enough to see who wins this staring battle, but I do notice the mother and her baby peeling off into the forest and then popping out in front of the house.

Seething mass

The baby watches it all

I get into my car for an infrequent trip “to town”. Barely 2km from home, I notice a seething mass of … something … stretching across the road in the stripy shadows of the exotic eucalyptus trees that line the road and make you dizzy, like a strobe light, as you drive past them.

The mass is moving towards me and there’s a man with a flag running ahead. As I pull my car to a stop, I think: who is toyi-toying (dancing in protest), and why? And where on earth do all these people come from?

Ahem. And then they come into view: not dancing and singing people, but cows, a large herd of them. Actually, I should call them cattle because I see some large horns, too. They stream past my car in quite a well-behaved fashion. 

I feel a little sheepish. But this little foray onto the planet of the animals has made me smile.

Fellow travellers on the road

The colour orange

One of the things I love about living in my part of this part of the world is that there is always something to make you happy in the garden, even as we creep towards mid-winter (officially, that’s just three weeks away).

Dazzling

Sunbirds love the nectar of the wild dagga

Every time I step out of the kitchen door, I am dazzled by the flaming blooms of a clump of wild dagga (Leonotis leonurus). Usually, I end up scaring away a sunbird or two: these lovely little birds like to poke their long beaks deep into the tubular flowers to drink their nectar. A couple of times, though, I managed to get a pic of them before they fluttered away.

I grew each of these plants from cuttings taken from the garden I left in suburbia, and planted them out as little things about 18 months ago. Now, they are almost 2m tall and thick and healthy.

There is also a white cultivar of wild dagga, and I once thought I’d bought one – the label claimed it was white – but it flowered in gleaming orange, and I wasn’t about to rip it out of the ground to cart it back to the nursery.

Apart from lifting my spirits, the flowers are also lovely in a vase. They don’t last as long as, say, Strelitzia reginae, but they are gorgeous. The strelitzia – orange, of course – seem to have been flowering for months.

‘Look at me!’

Pretty and fleeting as cut flowers

Orange is not a gentle colour in the garden: leave that to the soft blues and pinks. It seems to scream, “Look at me!” And a lot of gardeners don’t like it for that reason.

But it is warm and zesty, which seems perfectly appropriate at this time of the year. It’s interesting that so many of the South African winter-flowering plants produce orange blooms. So the wild dagga has followed an abundant flowering of the red hot poker (Kniphofia uvaria). And there are still clivias to come.

The wild dagga, like the red hot poker, is indigenous to South Africa and both grow naturally in this area of the Eastern Cape.

 

In colder parts, the frost cuts the wild dagga plants back, but there’s no frost here, and you have to prune it back yourself – it’s better to take it back to a leaf shoot, I have found – or it starts to looks spindly and does not flower very well.

Charming

A feast anytime

Red hot pokers add to the show

Apparently, wild dagga is favoured in traditional medicine as a treatment for all kinds of ailments, from spider and snake bites to headaches and fevers. And it’s even used as a charm to keep snakes away (now that’s what I call useful information). 

But if it’s a high you’re looking for, L. leonurus won’t oblige: it’s named after dagga (marijuana) largely because of the similarity of the leaves. Sorry.

Birdie business

Sunbird weaving her pretty nest

We are drinking tea, Kathy and I, at her lounge window. Right outside the window, a sunbird is busily weaving her nest. She is using bits of stringy vegetation (apparently, they also use some spider webs) and shreds of fabric that Kathy has purposely left out. So it’s quite a pretty, arty affair. 

It is probably a malachite sunbird; these tiny birds are quite prolific around here. This little brown thing is a female; the males are the brightly coloured ones. There has been a flurry of bright green wings at my bedroom window: that’s a male.

Rollercoaster

Red-collared barbets perch outside my bedroom window

Kathy seems to have a particular pull for birds. For a while, a red-collared barbet moved in with her and Phil. They called him Rollercoaster because of the way he flew at them and over them. He became a beloved pet. They would even get baby-sitters (bird-sitters?) for him when they went away. He would love to sit on visitors’ heads and nibble on their ears.

And then, one day, probably when he was in his adolescence, Rollercoaster upped and flew away. He settled with a couple on the other side of the village for a week or two, and then moved on. K and P were very sad, but understood it as the way of things.

We watch the sunbird in wonder, and then we go back to drinking our tea. Birds, you see, are as natural as breathing here.

Bashing, smashing

A family of hornbills lives noisily in the forest around my garden, and we didn’t bat an eyelid when one of them kept bashing his large beak against the kitchen window. I thought he was reacting to his own reflection until someone kindly pointed out that he was in fact smashing his prey to death. That would explain the strange smears on the glass.

More of a mystery right now is the very large bird of prey that periodically perches on the telephone pole behind the house. We think it’s an eagle, but have no idea what type. I managed to take a photograph: it’s blurred, but you can just make out some colouring.

Regulars

There’s a host of regulars: the barbets that like to sit on the branch outside my bedroom; the mousebirds that scoff their way through the fruit trees; the little wagtails that dance across the grass. Among my favourites, though, are the kingfishers, both pygmy and malachite. They especially like to sit on the wooden fence around the vegetable garden, or, to give me a lovely respite from hard thinking, outside my office window.

Eagle on the pole

Hornbill on the verandah

Kingfisher at my office window

Winter offerings

These late autumn days and nights are decidedly chilly, and soon, perhaps even tonight, we’ll make our first indoor fire of the year. The garden obliges with an abundant offering of wood that will likely be more than enough to warm us through the winter months.

First, on a particularly windy day – there’s a howling south-westerly – an entire tree crashes down, narrowly missing V’s car. It’s an ngwenya tree, a wild plum (Harpephyllum caffrum), the smaller of the two: the other is at least 12m high, and probably as wide.

An entire tree crashes down, just in time for winter fires

The car is trapped. With the help of Phillip’s bakkie (pick-up), a lot of small handsaws, sore muscles and sweat, we manage to move most of it out of the way to free the car. A few days later, Cousin D arrives with his chainsaw – I’m looking for one in pink – and then Alex, the gardener, dispatches it into neat piles of firewood, drying in the sun.

Useful ash

Some of that wood has already made its way into the fire pit, and the ash has been spread through the garden. Wood ash is a great source of potassium, which plants need for growth, disease resistance and fruit formation. It’s also needed to maintain crucial functions, like photosynthesis. Sandy soils, like mine, are most susceptible to potassium deficiencies.

A large branch of the allophylus tree breaks off

Ash also apparently helps keeps snails away. In fact, I can’t imagine any goggas (bugs) being partial to ash, so I have also scattered it onto plants that have been attacked by real nasties, like amaryllis worms. It seems to help.

Ash is not good for acid-lovers, like camellias and azaleas, and there is some caution that some wood may contain heavy metals. So, as with most things, moderation is the key.

In my face

Then, I stumble to the kitchen to make coffee early one morning and open the door to the garden. And I see … a tree! Close-up, right in my face. Talk about not being able to see the wood for the trees.

A very large branch of the allophylus tree (smile, Kathy) has rotted off, right at the base. It’s quite a job to hack it up and drag it out of the way, and now it, too, is awaiting Alex’s attention.

We’ll be giving Cousin D a call soon to beg his muscle and chainsaw power: the guava, naartjie and lemon trees, among others, need some serious trimming.

Everyday magic

From the aloe garden, he stares and stares

Girl fairy helper is blowing out the candles on her birthday cake – she is four – when she spots him. “Buck,” she says.

Buck (antelope), indeed. He is the big male bushbuck, who tends to be quite furtive: the females (his harem, I suppose) are the ones that we see more often. He walks swiftly and decisively, and stops in the aloe garden. Trying to hide behind the garden shed, I manage to take a few pics on my phone.

But he knows I am there, and he stares me down. After a few minutes, I scuttle off to eat cake with smarties and pink icing.

Later, perhaps an hour later, boy fairy helper – he’s still six – is shadowing me, as he does, and chattering nonstop, as he does, while I clatter at the sink outside the kitchen door. Seeing that we live half in the bush, we wash our pots and pans here, not in the kitchen. When it rains, we don’t wash the pots. Simple.

Huge

He wins the staring contest

Suddenly, there is a movement, and there he is, under the milkwood trees. The ram is huge. I am almost 6 feet tall, and I swear that if you include his horns, he is at least as tall as me. Boy fairy helper (bless him) draws in his breath, and we are both as quiet as mice. 

The ram does not bullet away in fear; he gives us a rather bored look and saunters off. He was surely snacking on my garden while I was eating cake.

My uncle Aub, a farmer and a true man of this soil, sees the photos and he is quite excited. Do you think he is the only male around here? I ask. It’s possible, Uncle Aub says patiently, that there are other males in the area, but this must be the senior buck. Only the senior would be brave enough to come so close to us.

Alpha male

Gathering on the field behind the house

Wow! The alpha male. I am feeling suitably thrilled and privileged until I remember that I have seen this ram up close before – in Kathy’s garden on the other side of the village. Or maybe there’s another ram on that side? Anyway, he eats her herbs and vegetables. Oh, and her pelargoniums, all of them. She waves her arms at him – much as I do to the damn monkeys – and threatens to turn him into biltong.

A view from my office

Privilege

But the fact that we are so blasé about something so magical shows that we are very privileged indeed. We see these beautiful, graceful creatures – usually the babies and the females, but sometimes also the males from a distance – almost every day.

There are also some blue duiker, the cutest little things, but they are far more skittish than the bushbuck. They scurry out of the bush to grab fruit that has fallen to the ground.

Poaching has been a real problem in this reserve (and elsewhere), and the ranger talks of a pack of dogs from a nearby farm that have run wild here and killed some of the buck. The duiker remain terrified of humans, and sadly, that’s the way it should be.

Things that slither

It’s as I am reaching for the chives that I detect, out of the corner of my eye, a slight movement on the fence of the vegetable garden – a snake, a long, very thin, green thing with black markings. I lurch backwards and the terrified creature slithers in the opposite direction. It twirls itself onto the gate, and I am trapped.

Wild garlic, a smelly but pretty snake repellent

I can see my mother – the granny in the granny flat – and I wave my arms frantically. This is a terrible mistake: my ridiculous fear of snakes is all her fault. “I don’t like that,” she says. “It could grow into something very ugly.”

The little thing lifts its head. “No, it’s not a boomslang (well, I really hope so), and even if it was, it couldn’t do anything to us,” I say. “It’s quite pretty.” I cannot believe I’ve just said that – shows you how far I’ve come.

A boomslang is poisonous, but its fangs are so far back in its mouth that you would literally have to force your little finger almost down its throat if you really want to be bitten. But still …

We yell for grown-up boy-child (so glad he is home), who finds a long pole for the snake to slither onto. “Take it far away,” I say.

“Umm … I’m running out of time,” he says. The snake is indeed now half-way up the stick. He manages to get it to the boundary fence. It winds itself on the latte and hurries away.

‘Super pet’

It turns out that this is a bush snake, which a blogger called Libby says “makes a super pet for any young boy … They become extremely tame and will recognize you immediately and slither to the glass to ‘talk’ to you”. This snake is not poisonous.  

Amazingly, this is the first snake that we have seen here since our house-warming party last April when a snake (someone identified it as a red-lipped herald), lazing in a potted tree, made its presence known to our guests. That caused quite a flurry.

We’ve had some close encounters. The most scary was when my two cats flushed out a puffadder, close to two metres long and with very yellow markings (apparently, this is a sign that it is old), from behind an old hibiscus and herded it into the bush. Puffadders are the worst: they are highly venomous and lazy, too, which means that they won’t always get out of your way. Fortunately, we don’t get the mamba so far south, although we have seen them in the Transkei and in our garden in Durban.

Sharing

I’ve had to accept that I share this space with all kinds of wildlife, including snakes. In fact, I am in their territory. That, and the dawning understanding that snakes are really terrified of humans and will get out of our way, has helped deal with some of my unreasonable fear.

But I still don’t like them, and I’m always on a mission to find ways to keep them away. It’s said that cats keep snakes away, and that does seem to be the case. Phew! 

Also, there are apparently some plants that repel snakes. Wild garlic (Tulbaghia) is one of these, so naturally, I have planted clumps everywhere. These plants, indigenous to big chunks of South Africa, do have a strong smell (which is probably what the snakes don’t like), but their purple flowers are really pretty. Allegedly snakes don’t like pelargoniums and geranium, also indigenous, so these, too, are planted all over the place.

Inside the storm

Living here, on the south-eastern edge of South Africa, we experience some really wild weather. I once watched a black thing ooze over the sea from the west; it took about 10 minutes to reach us, and it was vicious. Add that to some real infrastructure issues, and power outages and interruptions in connectivity become a regular part of life. In fact, I’m on a first-name basis with the technician for our telecommunications parastatal. 

But little has come close to what we got this week: a massive storm that knocked out power for the night and internet connections for a couple of days. Our little village was literally inside that storm. Terrifying, exhilirating, spectacular. Fortunately, my grown-up boy-child is home for a while, and he’s pretty good with his camera. Here are some of his photographs:

Pics: CHE