Filming Wild

Category: birdlife, changing seasons, insect world, our life in the wild, trees & plants, wild animals | Date: May 20 2008 | By: filmingwild

Apologies for my long absence. I have been overseas on a work trip, and despite my best intentions, I had no time to blog! Anyway, I am finally back home at Kulafumbi, overlooking “our” familiar yet oh-so-changed river, and back at my desk too, ready to resume blogging on a regular basis.

Crocodiles & Hammerkops

Two big crocs basking in the sun

But first, before I tell you of our homecoming and our riverine friends, I’m going to make a brief attempt to update you on events during late March and early April, just before I went away and during which time I neglected this blog in deference to my workload elsewhere (which is not diminishing, incidentally, but which will have to leave some space for this blog from now on, as I do not intend to neglect it again…)

The end of March saw the river raging in a spectacular flood, the highest of the year so far. You can follow the whole episode in pictures here.

A Yellow-billed Stork watches the flood waters rising

Who would have thought it? We even added a new mammal to our list of animals seen at Kulafumbi, for a Gerenuk suddenly turned up here on 31st March. In fifteen years, we’ve never seen one of them here. It was a female, and she looked panicked, as if she had been running from a predator. She hesitated by the Mtito River, contemplating the leap across, before dashing away again. I managed to get a quick shot of her. You can see the long neck and legs, which make this antelope so distinctive. In fact, in Kiswahili, they are known as the swala twiga (proncounced swara twiga), literally the antelope-giraffe. They are also famous for standing up on their hind legs to browse taller shrubs and bushes.

A female Gerenuk, the first of its kind to visit us

Another infrequent visitor appeared in early April, this time in the form of a flower, which seems only to bloom once every few years. No ordinary blossom this one, but a huge black flower with luxuriant petals curling delicately around an extraordinary skyward-seeking spike. How exquisite, you might think, until you bend down to breathe in this giant beauty’s aroma, and are met with the stench of rotting meat. You recoil in disgust but the cloying smell stays with you, haunting your nostrils for the entire walk home. Is this a carnivorous plant then? Sending out its rancid smell to attract hapless insects into that tempting curling cavern, like a siren? Why else would nature have designed it thus? (We have other foul-smelling plants here in the Tsavo region, such as the hydnora abyssinica, for example, which emits a stench of rotting meat to attract insects which then pollinate the plant.)

April saw a multitude of flowers, as the rains continued to fall. Despite our beehive disaster, some of our bees did survive (and now have new homes after a swift reparation job to our hives), for we saw them buzzing around on the delicate blue commelina flowers, which were blossoming in profusion. Unlike the sporadic flowering of the bauhinia during the last rains, this time the bauhinia all flowered together, like snow across the landscape for a couple of short days before shedding their petals like confetti. Strangely, there was not even one “Seagrass Cabbage” leaf in sight – how different to the ‘Short Rains’ when the ground was carpeted with these broad-leafed plants. (The ‘Short Rains’ normally fall in November/December, but last year were late and then persisted into January and early February. The ‘Long Rains’ normally fall during April, May and June. This year, instead of a long dry spell, one rainy season almost followed directly on from the last, with just a few weeks’ gap in between.)

CATCH UP ON MORE PHOTOS FROM APRIL 2008:
Animals
Birds
Insects and other Creepy-Crawlies
Flowers and Plants
Trees
Athi River in Flood - 29th March 2008

I thought you might like to see this sequence of photographs as it’s quite fun: it was so hot during March and April that this Goliath Heron took to spending long periods of time just sitting down in the cooling water. When it finally emerged again, it hardly resembled the elegant bird we are so used to seeing!

Tags: africa, antelope, bees, bird, crocodiles, flood, flowers, gerenuk, heat, honey, insects, kenya, rain, stork, storm

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