Boland visit

The past two weeks has seen us in the Boland, moving between Gouda and Tulbagh, to Moorreesburg and back to Gouda again.  A huge amount of rain has fallen in the past two or three days resulting in extremely wet and muddy roads, large ephemeral pans in the fields, very full dams, swollen rivers and even making some of our usually dry farm roads unpassable with huge water bodies suddenly showing up to block our path.

While I sat and waited for Eugene to decide if it was safe or not to cross at this point, I watched some Banded Martins that were perched on the left hand side fence.  First for the season.

It didn't take long for our brand new Ford Ranger to be changed from shiny white to muddy brown.  It stayed that way for the whole trip despite being in the rain every day.

Back in Moorreesburg, Eugene took me to the farm where he and Zina had found bats at their last visit.  And sure enough, there they were, hanging upside down attached to the sides of these wooden ceiling panels by their tiny feet.  We don't often find occupied roosts so this was very special.

They are Egyptian Slit-faced Bats (Nycteris thebaica) and have such huge ears.

The farmer is a great nature lover and has a wonderful indigenous garden full of aloes.  He loves the fact that there are bats in his store room and brought out his bat book to try and identify them.  We will have to give him the update when we visit him again.

The guesthouse we stayed in was called Die Hut.  It is a large venue which obviously hosts weddings etc.  The rooms were nicely decorated but a bit cold.  The food was very very good though.  We had fantastic steaks, freshly sliced for us on request.  The large garden has a lot of birds, mostly sparrows and starlings and of course, the ubiquitous cockerel.  They were very beautiful, but I don't enjoy being woken up at 4.30 every morning by their croaky crowing!

  
I don't usually take much notice of domestic ducks but this one was having a wonderful time in the guest house swimming pool while we were eating breakfast.  It was so cute and spent almost an hour preening and fluffy and diving under the water to clean those beautiful white feathers.  Very entertaining.

The last night we were back in Gouda, doing bats on the new site.  There were no bats to be found and when our last point was right next to a large pan in a field, we heard so many frogs croaking, we decided to get out and look for some.  Most of the pan was behind a fence which we didn't bother climbing but some water was on the side of the road and we found this tiny little green guy hidden under some grass.  That is my index finger it is sitting on!  So tiny.  According to the Frog group on Facebook, it is a Cacosternum platys or Flat Caco.  A first for me so very chuffed to add it to my Western Cape wildlife species record.

Now I'm home for a few days before heading out to Durban for my annual Unisa Nature Conservation Practical where I'll be joining my fellow students learning all about marine wildlife, rocky shores and mangroves.  Can't wait!  The weather in the Western Cape is shocking right now so it will be an absolute pleasure to spend the next week in the sun on the east coast of South Africa.  I'll be sure to blog about the wonderful things I am about to discover there.  Look out for it.