Every year I spend a few weeks in South Africa visiting my family. The first two weeks I spent in Durban with my mom, and we spent many hours sitting on her sunny verandah watching the garden birds as well as other random visitors. Here are some pics that I snapped during that time. Next on to Cape Town and a five day stay at Struisbaai, a beautiful little town near Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of Africa, where the Atlantic and Indian Oceans meet.
While in the area, I spent some time at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm where there is a very active rookery. The squabbling and screeching of birds of all types created a deafening cacophony as chicks squawked for food and parents fussed over the chicks while defending their clearly defined territories. I guess the rules are baked into the general chaos and all the birds understand them! My favorite youngsters were the tricolored heron chicks and I was entertained by their antics for a couple of hours. All the while, the alligators loitered lazily in the swamp below, waiting for the occasional hapless baby to fall from a nest. Here are a few of the images.
In the heart of the Ace Basin, where the Ashepoo, Combahee, and Edisto Rivers empty into the ocean is where you will find the St. Helena Sound. This is classic low country shoreline, where migrating shore birds gather on fragile sandbars, and where the shrimp trawlers ply the waters, attended by expectant gulls, pelicans, and dolphin. These images were taken yesterday morning as we set off from a Harbor River landing before dawn.
Having tried multiple ways to keep the squirrels from plundering my bird feeders, I finally found some wisdom that works. The trick is to provide a diversion and entice them away. This is apparently a very common dilemma for backyard bird lovers, as I discovered when I googled “squirrel feeders”. After reading many reviews, I picked a nice compromise between reputedly worthless and excessively indulgent, and ended up with one that provided much amusement for about 5 days. It seems that ultimately the structure was unable to support the weight of one of my heftier squirrels and the bottom fell out. As an experiment, the price was certainly worth the cost of admission for days of entertainment, however I didn’t want to replace it every week. Today I found one at Lowe’s that seems much sturdier so it will go into service tomorrow much to the delight of the birds and squirrels. Just trying to keep everyone happy 🙂
I was thinking this as I walked the West Ashley Greenway and watched all these different species of wading birds as they feasted on small fish and molluscs at low tide this morning. They were all courteously minding their own business as they went about their day. Didn’t look so hard.
