Conservation Updates

The Cape Robin was for many years always the first to greet the dawn in our garden. Then quite recently a pair of Hadedas took up residence in a nearby coral tree, and we are now very often woken by their strident calls first thing in the morning....

It was late in the season and the setting sun cast a golden glow on the long dry stems of the grass growing beside the road. There was a rustle of bird activity as they settled down for the night, for here far north of Kariega Park there is little...

Despite their proximity - they have set up home within ten metres of our living-room windows - and their at times anti-social behaviour - they are given to littering, and in the early hours of the morning to calling to one another at the tops of...

We snaked silently through the bush following in the footsteps of our game-ranger. He paused and while un-slinging the rifle from his shoulder, lifted his left hand as a signal for us to stop. What had he seen? After a few moments he turned slowly...

It was finding a large sheet of cork that led to my collecting insects. I brought it home from where I had found it amongst the rubbish behind the shops. It was obviously something out of the ordinary, and a treasure to a small boy, but I wasn't...

Everything about warthogs charmed and delighted my mother. She approved of their usually inoffensive behaviour despite their ferocious looks. “They're just like cousin Fred,” she informed us, referring to a distant relative that none of us younger...

In Europe and North America, ecologists, apiarists and others are concerned about the future of the honey bee, swarms of which have been declining. The loss of these pollinators is a potentially serious problem for fruit and vegetable farmers, and...

Everywhere one goes young animals are to be seen, and the talk at lunch-time centres around the lioness and her cubs and whether or not they have been seen during the morning. Beside the road to River Lodge a Cape Spotted Eagle Owl has a nest...

The south-east Cape coast is an area regularly beset by drought. The family farm diary bears witness to this, and it seems that hardly a year passed that was not “the worst in living memory.” Nonetheless for close on 200 years farming activities...

It was in April 1947 that Dr Robert Broom, the noted doctor-turned-palaeontologist, announced to the world the discovery at Sterkfontein caves, some 70 km south-west of Pretoria, of “Mrs Ples,” the fossilized skull of an Australopithecus...