Gouda goodies

Spent last week in the small area of Gouda in the Western Cape.  We stayed in Tulbagh at the lovely old hotel/guest house called The Witzenberg Country Inn, where we have been staying for the past couple of months, and were once again hosted by Nan and Andrew Buttle, who are most accommodating.

It rained quite hard on the 3rd day we were there which made our bird and bat monitoring a bit challenging and it also made the normally placid little river, Klein Berg Rivier, which runs through the main site farm, an almost raging torrent.  It was very interesting navigating ourselves over the low lying bridge with the water coming to almost door height.

I was too nervous to do it, so I took all our equipment and gear out of the car and sent David over to check it out first... he survived and came back to get me.

From our vantage points, we spotted large flocks of Great White Pelicans gliding slowly all over the wind farm area, a point of concern for us.

One of my very favourite plants, the Brunsvigia Orientalis or Candelabra flower is just starting to bloom in the fields.  The rock hard cricket-ball sized bulb which is about 50cm under the soil is kept at the desired temperature for germination by the 4 "flat on the ground" large leaves which then die back when the gorgeous deep red flower emerges and begins to unfold its furls.  It is about the size of a football by the time it is open completely and when it dries eventually, it breaks off at the bottom of the stem and rolls around the dry dusty veld like a tumble weed.

 A nice close up of the individual stamens of the flower.

The endangered Geometric Tortoise (Psammobates geometricus) is not seen too often these days and this little one was found squashed on a track, obviously by one of the farm vehicles.  Such a sad sight.

Lambing season is in full swing and little lambs were dropping all around us.  Some of the ewes on this farm had twins.  They are so precious, makes you never want to eat lamb every again.

We did a bat roost monitoring session one night and found this evidence of bat activity in an old abandoned house on the farm, lots and lots of guano.  We took our detectors there at dusk and found hundreds of bats in the building.  As it was drizzling slightly, the bats left the building and promptly flew back in again.  We then heard them feeding quite happily inside the building.  Must be lots of gogga's there for them to eat, no need to brave a cold and rainy night!

Next stop is Swellendam.  Watch out for more from the road soon... :)