Bar-throated Apalis

A bar-throated apalis (Apalis thoracica) in the Karkloof Forest. 

I can highly recommend it as a place to visit & stay, although you should have a car with high ground clearance.

I used to drive there in a VW Golf -- the original box-shaped one, very, very slowly with one wheel in the middle of the road and the other on the side of the road to avoid for the deep ruts. On one occasion going home from the lodge on the mountain top, after perhaps a 40 minute crawl, I reached the tarred main road which has a 100kph speed limit and accelerated. My wife shouted at me to not drive so fast ... I was only doing 60!

There is another lodge in the forest which has 4 (5?) rivers to cross. My golf happily splashed across all of them except the last one on the return journey. It always hit a rock with the underside, I could never find the rock and it never hurt the car. :-)

My next car had high ground clearance and I drove the route normally at a reasonable speed, but the first salesman lost the deal because he insisted I needed a 4x4 :-) I guess he never saw the Top Gear episode where the backup car, an old VW Beetle made it right across Botswana.

African Spoonbill in Flight

An African spoonbill (Platalea alba) in flight over the Durban Botanical Gardens.

They are commonly seen around the lake there as are:

• Pink-backed pelican (Pelecanus rufescens)
• African sacred ibis (Threskiornis aethiopicus)
• Hadeda ibis (Bostrychia hagedash)
• Egyptian geese (Alopochen aegyptiacus)
• African masked weaver (Ploceus velatus)
• Common moorhen (Gallinula chloropus)
• Hamerkop (Scopus umbretta)
• Grey heron (Ardea cinerea) 
• Reed cormorant (Microcarbo africanus)

The last three are commonly seen at the lake, while the previous ones are probably always there as they breed in the gardens. Kingfishers can be seen at the lake diving for prey, but I only saw them occasionally.

There a lot of other birds to be seen in the Garden in general and I can highly recommend it as a place to visit. 

Thick-billed weavers (Amblyospiza albifrons) used to be common as they bred in the reeds on the sides of the lake but the Garden cleared the reeds a few years ago and I haven't seen them there since. There also used to be a lot more Sacred Ibis but they pruned the trees they favored for nest building.

Spur-winged goose

I photographed this spur-winged goose (Plectropterus gambensis) having a bath in the Durban Botanical Garden's lake. They are related to geese but despite their common name they have enough anatomical differences that they are in their own sub-family Plectropterinae.

Pink-Backed Pelican Fun

In South Africa Pink-backed Pelicans (Pelecanus rufescens) are only found in Kwazulu-Natal. One of the easiest places to see them is at the lake in Durban's Botanical Gardens where they roost at night in the trees around the uphill side of the lake. This is one of only three breeding colonies of this pelican species in South Africa.

The lake is also home to African Helmeted Turtles / Marsh Terrapins (Pelomedusa subrufa). I had previously seen Sacred Ibis walk up to a turtle on land and bang its shell with its beak for a bit while the turtle waited for the indignity to stop tucked away in its shell, before marching onward.

While watching the pelicans one weekend, one of them started playing with a object, throwing it up into the air and then catching it with its beak. As the object went up it would spiral around making a Catherine Wheel of water while the pelican would paddle into place to catch it.

I couldn't make out what the toy was but it was about the size of a turtle. The pelican played around for a few minutes allowing me to get some fantastic photos, but while worrying about the poor little airborne creature.

When I got home and looked at the photos it happily turned out that the object was actually the old seed cup from a Sacred Lotus flower (Nelumbo nucifera) which grow on the one side of the lake.

I was lucky to have this photo and 7 others chosen in a bird photography competition held by Birdlife KwaZulu-Natal to form part of the 30 to be displayed in an exhibition at the Durban Natural History Museum in October 2010. 

Turtle, Terrapin or Tortoise?

While reading up on the turtles/terrapins for this post I found that the turtle versus terrapin versus tortoise common name usage is far more unusual than I had thought. I had often called these turtles with someone correcting me to terrapin, although as you can see from the common names of this particular species both terms have been used. As an example of the strangeness, seemingly in Australia where there are no indigenous land-dwelling tortoises, all the freshwater turtles are called tortoises.

Butterfly and Bee

A lucky picture in a friend's garden.

Raspberry Pi 3 Model B

The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B was officially announced yesterday, which is either the foundation's fourth or first birthday depending on how you view the 29th of February :-)

The most significant changes are:

1. Integrated 802.11 b/g/n Wireless LAN
2. Integrated Bluetooth 4.1 Classic & Low Energy.
3. 1.2Ghz 64-bit ARMv8

The CPU has moved from 32-bit to 64-bit but it will use a 32-bit Raspbian version while they investigate whether there is any value in moving to 64-bit mode.

It will require a 2.5A power supply.

Links

• Announcement on Eben Upton's blog
• Raspberry Pi Foundation product page
• Hackaday announcement
• Adafruit
• RS Components 
• Element 14 (nice diagram)

Pied starling

A pied starling (Spreo bicolor) also photographed, like most of the previous bird posts, in the West Coast National Park.