What big teeth you have! - Maree

Derwent graphite pencil sketch in my Moleskine 200gsm Nature Journal

Croc Valley in Ballito (on the North Coast of KwaZulu Natal, South Africa), offers crocodile and snake feedings, bird watching and a swamp forest incorporating a nature walk across the swamp on a wooden board walk. The area is now a nature reserve where crocodiles and other reptiles used to roam freely in this area. Every time I go to the Ballito, I take a drive out to Croc Valley for a cup of tea and a hike through the swamp forest, which takes approximately three-quarters of an hour to complete.

It’s only when you’re up close and personal to these magnificent animals, that their power, strength and size is VERY apparent! Although this chap looks half asleep, the guide assured me that he was fully alert and aware of his surroundings!

This is a Nile Crocodile and they feed mostly on vertebrates like fish, reptiles, and mammals, sometimes on invertebrates like molluscs and crustaceans, depending on species. They are an ancient lineage, and are believed to have changed little since the time of the dinosaurs. They are believed to be 200 million years old whereas dinosaurs became extinct 65 million years ago; crocodiles survived great extinction events.

 The swamp forest walk

 The croc enclosure

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Dressing up to do battle

 

One afternoon, at the end of March, I went looking for one of my favorite spring wildflowers, Marah oreganus, also known as Manroot and Wild cucumber. It sprawls along rocky places and I had recently discovered that it grows wantonly  in a partially quarried rocky area in Howarth Park. As usual, I had trouble figuring out how to draw this long, sprawling plant and was thinking about giving up when I heard a tiny ruckus on the next rock over. I looked up to see two Western fence lizards (Sceloporus occidentalis), in colors I'd never seen before, fighting and posturing with great vigor. I thought there might be a female involved and I soon found her, peering out of a crevasse on a ledge below the action. The males continued to interact with one another for quite a while. Then one of them left, only to return again, and they picked up where they'd left off. A bit later they both went to opposite ends of the slab and rested up for the next round. The female had climbed out of the crevasse and looked a bit exhausted, though she began to recover (from what?) before very long. As the males resumed their battle, a young lizard climbed up the to view the proceedings from the edge of the rock. One of the males chased him away and I watched as he headed my way, only to stop short when he noticed me noticing him. When I once again turned my attention to the territory struggle, the female had climbed up the cliff and was standing next to one of the males. The other male turned around and headed off slowly through the grasses at the edge of the battleground. I watched him until he disappeared and when I looked back at the victor and his mate, I was astonished to find that his brilliant colors and pattern had reverted to a pattern almost identical to her drab brown!

Lizards - Not so easy! - Maree

“So you see! There's no end to the things you might know,
Depending how far beyond Zebra you go.”
- Dr. Seuss

I have a couple of Lizards living in my Bathroom court-yard garden and I often find them sunning themselves on the walls or the rocks and tree stumps. These cold-blooded reptiles eat insects such as ants, beetles, larvae and flies, so the ones we get around the house or game lodges are actually very welcome!

Being cold-blooded means that they don't have a control mechanism keeping their body temperature constant irrespective of their surroundings. They need the sun to warm their blood and provide them with energy to move and will remain mostly inactive on cold days and may hibernate in winter. There are no poisonous Lizards in southern Africa and South Africa is home to more than 200 lizard species, making it the richest country for lizard diversity in continental Africa.

The common lizard gives birth to live young, but other reptiles lay eggs. The lifespan of lizards is between 1 - 3 years.

I have tried to search the name of my lizards, but to no avail. There aren't even any pictures available on the internet. All I can find is that they are from the Suborder Lacertilia, but with no other information available. I'm going to call them my Common Lizards. Number one, I didn't know they would be so difficult to identify and, number two, so difficult to sketch! Never again will I say, "How difficult can this be?!" lol!

Kingdom : Animalia
Phylum : Chordata
Class : Sauropsida
Order : Squamata
Sub-Order : Lacertilia

A visit with a snake

One morning at the beginning of September Chloe and I were near the end of an entertaining early walk at Howarth Park. As we wound our way along the last trail before reaching pavement and the parking lot I saw something long and black stretched across the path. I stopped and bent closer to look and was delightfully surprised when the snake, for that's what it was, coiled it's tail and waved it about, revealing a brilliant orange red underside. Amazingly, the snake stayed right where it was and I sat down to spend some time in it's company. If I moved too close (and it had to be really close!) the tail would come up in a tight coil and wave about a few times then remain poised in the air until I retreated. There was a tannish band around the snake's neck, and the jet black upper part of it's body was shiny, as if wet, not what I would have expected from a snake. Chloe and I stayed about a half hour.

Ring-necked snakes (Diadophis punctatus) are found throughout the United States and in parts of Mexico and Canada. Nocturnal and secretive, they're seldom seen during the day. They're mildly venomous but, as I found, not aggressive. The venom may help incapacitate the salamanders, worms, slugs and insects that they like to eat.

Most of the resources I found call this snake  Pacific ring-necked snake (Diadophis punctatus amabilis). However, there seems to be some disagreement as to whether the different subspecies of D. punctatus are really different from one another.

Find out more about these shy snakes:
CaliforniaHerps.com
Wikipedia
wildherps.com
eNature.com

Leopard tortoise (Geochelone pardalis) - Maree

Within my house of patterned horn
I sleep in such a bed
As men may keep before they're born
And after when they're dead.

Sticks and stones may break their bones,
And words may make them bleed;
There is not one of them who owns
An armour to his need.

Tougher than hide or lozenged bark,
Snow-storm and thunder proof,
And quick with sun, and thick with dark,
Is this my darling roof.

Men's troubled dreams of death and birth
Puls mother-o'-pearl to black;
I bear the rainbow bubble Earth
Square on my scornful back.
- Elinor Mortin Wylie -'The tortoise in Eternity'

Early this week was the first time in about 8 weeks that Torti surfaced from her semi-hibernation state and took a stroll around the garden. Torti is my Leopard or Mountain Tortoise whom we rescued, as she was destined for the pot.

Southern Africa is very fortunate to have the largest variety of animals in the world. It is home to more than 800 bird species, 150 mammal species, about 50 snake and lizard species, 11 tortoise species and thousands of invertebrate animals like insects and arachnids.

The Mountain tortoise inhabits a wide range of habitats, from dry Bushveld to moister coastal plains and is the most widely distributed and also the biggest of the 12 species of land tortoise found in Southern Africa. It is believed to take its name 'mountain' tortoise from its size rather than its habitat. ('Leopard' tortoise comes from the black and yellow blotched patterns on its high-domed carapace.)

Though not averse to gnawing on an old bone, the mountain tortoise is mostly vegetarian, feeding on a variety of plant matter, including grass shoots, succulents such as cotyledons, fungi and fruit.

Adults usually weigh from 10-15 kg, but some specimens of over 40 kg have been recorded in the Eastern Cape.

REPTILES

An Uroplatus phantasticus - watercolour

and a snake - watercolour

South Africa's King - Maree

Rinkhals in my garden

In the past couple of weeks I've had to temporarily give up my sojourns into our Blue gum forest at the bottom of our property where I go to sketch and paint, due to all the rain we've had, which has resulted in a larger than normal number of snakes that I encounter while trying to settle in to sketch.

While you're concentrating on a specific tree, it's rather disconcerting hearing the leaves rustle and then seeing a Rinkhals (Spitting Cobra) nonchalantly sailing in your direction. It means either sitting dead still, hoping he's not going to notice you, or it's a mad scramble trying to get out of the way (and then alerting him to your presence), sending easel or sketchbooks and water flying through the air!

In the past 2 weeks I have already rescued and evicted two Rankhalses from my garden (the pleasure of my garden only to be enjoyed by Mollie, my resident Mole Snake or the Brown House Snake - all others like the Rinkhals and the various Adders are summarily evicted!). Chrissie, my gardener, immediately takes a short-cut home when she sees I'm busy catching a snake for safe delivery to a dam nearby us.


Rinkhals - Hemachatus haemachatus

The Rinkhals is a member of the Cobra family and is also a spitting cobra. It is the smallest of the cobras reaching only about 1.2m or about 4 ft in length. It is a venomous elapid species found in parts of southern Africa. It is one of a group of cobras that has developed the ability to spit venom as a defense mechanism. Rinkhals are unique amongst African cobras in being ovoviviparous. They give birth to 20-35 young, but as many as 65 babies have been recorded. The Rinkhals is unique also, compared to cobras, as it has keeled scales.

If you would like to read more about the Rinkhals and how he feigns death when faced by danger, you can go to my NATURE JOURNAL.


One of the sketches I did of our blue gum forest in my Moleskine watercolour Sketch-book