Watermelons apparently originated in the deserts of North East Africa. As far back as 4000 years ago people used them for water and for food. Eating some for breakfast this morning I cannot help applauding the hearty fruit for its survival and spread all over the globe. Such a pure sweet exuberant burst of flavour.
Whether you go in the evening or during the day, Wolfgat offers authentic Strandveld hospitality.
Make sure that one person in your group is inquisitive about how the cuisine is put together, because the more you talk to owner Kobus van der Merwe, the more you realise the vastness of the knowledge he has accumulated over time. He will come to the table several times during the meal to discuss the exquisitely plated titbits that have been foraged from the environment or sorced locally. He is eager to explain the reasons behind how he has paired the food with each offered wine or beer; drinks that have been cultivated or brewed to encapsulate an earthy blend of the sea salted herbs of the West Coast. The added touch of the fine crystal of a Gabriel’s wine glass leaves only pure flavour on the tongue.
The food is prepared after careful “behind the scenes” research is done. As waitrons vie to bring all of your group’s plates to the table at once, Kobus van der Merwe will refer to a Louis Leipoldt recipe dating back to the 1930s or name a person in the kitchen who created the dish. Whether it is an oyster from Saldana or a limpet taken from the rocks on the beach, each bite rests for an explosive yet thought provoking moment in the mouth.
Most remarkably, each plated item is a work of art in it’s own right. If you love the West Coast (die Strandveld), this experience will linger with you. You will find yourself reminded of it when it is reflected in the veld and the sea around you. It becomes a reference point to say: “remember when we had those at Wolfgat!?”, and you will know the heart of the West Coast beats inside you too.
Today, 21 June 2022, the mist flowed in gently before the approaching storm and the sun hid high in the sky behind a thin layer of dense cloud. This left the light lingering in the apparent dusk of sunset for at least four hours. The Snoek were running and the fishermen were having golden dreams of how life could be when there is plenty.
Golden dreams of successful days.On the other horizon the blue light of afternoon still shone, showing only a thin strip of mist to account for the abnormally long sunset being produced across the bay.Every minute brought different cloud formations.Each incoming boat trailed its own flock of seabirds.Boats rushed in against the storm.Jonathan Livingston seagull made many appearances.Meeurots did not move.The sun dropped down into the sea
People who keep bird lists are often called twitchers or they are teased for being obsessive. “What’s important to you, the list or the bird?” I have often been asked. “Neither,” I tell them in my cheeky photographer voice. “I love catching them and taking them home in ways you may never see!”
My rock!
My bird list says I first saw an Oystercatcher on the 1st of January 1994 off Cape Recife in Gqeberha. This might not mean much to anyone else, but to me, my list is a magical record keeper of days of adventure and holidays filled with explorations. My first sight of this dark black bird made me instantly fall in love with her character, attitude, and surprisingly colourful first impression. A flock of Oystercatchers can be a veritable assault on the senses with their bright eyes, striking beaks and the shrillness of their calls to each other from the intense ocean smelling kelp and mussel beds.
African Black Oystercatchers have bright red eyes surrounded by an orange wattle that make them appear huge.
Now I live in Yzerfontein, where I can walk to the beach in five minutes and where on many of the beaches I can be sure to see Oystercatchers on any day of the week. They still thrill me. Late at night I can be lying in bed and hear one calling as she flies past on a mission of her own. “Yes,” I say, “I can hear you. You are a beautiful being.”
The bee wolf grabs the honey bee behind the neck and curls into her faster than the human eye can see.
As the honey bee drifts into unconsciousness, the bee wolf seemingly gives her a last kiss.
Gripped tightly to the wolf’s abdomen, the bee is flown off to a sandy nest where she will lie in paralysed state surrounded by other hapless prey waiting for the wolf’s eggs to hatch and finally complete the hunting cycle.
Take your clicky thing elsewhere and let her sleep! She’s my baby!
Zebra crossing
Twins
See how the light changes us. It is a thing of beauty that we can stand out in the open veld or under the shade of a tree and the light still makes the best of us!
Burchell’s Zebra above wear their insignia differently from the Cape Mountain Zebra shown below.
The Cape Mountain Zebra wears his stripes differently, so whê.
In my garden, the lavender bushes grant great big perpetual bunches of flowers breezed through with gentle soothing scent. They gather together many beings. These photographs were all taken this 2nd of April 2022 with a 100mm macro lens in a single lavender bush. The late afternoon sun provided the colours.
Rock can bring out the gravitas in a scene. A beach without a trimming of rock is just not as pretty. The layering of rock tells stories going back millions of years. I can imagine rock as the place where the earth holds its breath. I love rock. Rock rocks.
English is a language with an extensive vocabulary, and yet many words are used in different contexts to contain a range of meanings.
Provisions (noun): the act of supplying something for use. It could be a donation, or an agreement around services to be rendered.
Provisions (verb): to allocate beings with food, drink, or equipment, especially for a journey.
As cute as squirrels are, humans have not domesticated them as a species. Squirrels will happily share space with us in urban gardens, but with two hands to hold onto a store of nuts foraged from the environment, this Tree Squirrel still knows the freedom of gathering enough to provide a quick and immediate nibble as well as how to keep supplies in reserve for hungrier times.
Dogs, on the other hand, have left behind their wolf ancestry to feed off our human belief that we are the providers, the controllers of the food chain. They have trained us to scavenge on their behalf for the duration of their lives.
Give feral cats an option between snacking on snails and lizards in the bush, or consuming our processed dry chicken cubes and they soon become acclimated to our non-organic ways.
At the other end of the spectrum, many small beings have a much greater knowledge of which plants are providers than humans may ever know. Plant material goes in and out of this caterpillar in his determined drive towards transformation.
Caterpillars process all that plant material into provisions for Redbilled Hornbills and many other species and so do not always manage to reach the next phase of their development.
This Southern Fiscal Juvenile is learning about provisions. Within four months Juveniles are ready to leave their parents’ territory and fend for themselves from the earth’s bounty.
Those caterpillars that do survive become some of the most beautiful flying people. Here one such beauty is pictured with her proboscis deeply inserted into a lavender bush. Life continues after her period of cocooned transformation and nectar is provided to this Painted Lady.
The beings on land are not the only provisions. Fisherman go out to sea in fair hope of feeding their families.
Other beings, such as this cormorant, are also well equipped to make use of fish as a source of energy. We can learn from them how to take what is needed only.
The earth feeds all of us, but unfortunately there is not much of nutritional value left in the things humans leave lying around.
Even nature’s thorny food is far more digestible than the waste humans create.
Some lambs get born in the depth of cold winter rain storms and may be discarded by inexperienced mothers. The farmers try to save as many of these lambs as they can. On this particular farm our discarded single use plastic bottles are given a second chance at usefulness by becoming milk containers to fulfil a life saving role.
All around us every day we are faced with providers and provisions. Do we remember the chain of life that brings us to where we are? Are we happy in what we have? These are some of the questions that may help us to understand the need to be respectful when playing but a small part in millions of years of events.
Species differ, but life itself runs the same developmental progression of youthfulness through to ageing and death within all. Cuteness always favours the young and there seems to be inter-species awareness of this beauty. This provides part of the pulling power to elicit the care from elders that enables life to be resilient.
How freeing would it be for humans to honour, value and find gratitude in all of life’s intricate aspects, rather than to minimise our reverence to the human form?
Doves and their etymological cousins, the pigeons, are well known across the majority of the earth’s landmass. People often see them, and seldom give them any thought. The geographical features of the Sahara Desert, Antarctica, and the high Arctic are too stark to allow for the survival of these birds, but elsewhere they are considered abundant.
Even when offered as an example of the potential for extinction, these birds are discussed casually. Let’s look at Passenger pigeons. They are arguably the best known example of Anthropogenic extinction… they were an abundant species. They were eradicated from the surface of the Earth by humans. Quickly. We teach that this tragedy happened because of us, we recognise it as our responsibility, even when using the distancing techniques of language we don’t get much further away than saying they died “due to human activities”.
Here are some examples of abundant doves and pigeons. Decide if they are ordinary, dismissible, easy to live without.
Cape Turtle Dove, Nossob, Kgalagadi
Mourning dove, Kruger NP
Red-eyed dove, JHB
A Laughing Dove flying over Marievale, Gauteng
Laughing Dove, Yzerfontein
An Emerald spotted wood-dove in the Kruger National Park
Common Bronze-winged Pigeon, Melbourne, Australia
Currently at least eleven species of doves and pigeons are endangered world wide. How many can we afford to lose before we know they are no ordinary birds?
This is no ordinary love No ordinary Love This is no ordinary love No ordinary Love
Keep trying for you Keep crying for you Keep lying for you Keep flying and I’m falling
These starkly prehistoric birds love walking about in groups, showing off to one another what they have caught. Perhaps the girl with the prettiest eyelashes gets a share of the most delicate item on the menu?
From Cairns in Queensland, Australia one can ride the Skyrail Cable car right into the rainforest around Karunda. The highlight is Barron falls. A place where it becomes easy to believe that the rivers, forests and waterfalls of the earth have a conscious, breathing, living right to the self determined existence we usually reserve in our thinking for human beings.
A well loved vineyard, expansive architecture, a taste of wine, a range of art, and jovial company made the Saronsberg Wine Cellar an adventure to be celebrated.
A recent long weekend at the Percheron Stud Farm Outeniqua Moon did wonders to lay to rest the tumultuous time of the Coronavirus. I feel for all who have been working ( or not working ) without as much as a chance to see such incredible beauty.
Shadowfax standing peacefully in his paddock. Currently the main stud stallion for Percheron in South Africa. A dark Percheron from the USA, aptly named Goliath, is valued for his intense glimmering coat. Delicate blossoms, a handful of sunbirds and the occasional Knysna Turaco round off a place that still believes in the healing spirit of nature.
Kelp is constantly being washed onto our beaches from their sea beds during storms or strong tides. I love the way the decaying, sun burnt kelp seems to expel a last strong surge of life force, a kind of inner passionate fire.
After a month of traveling, I have come home with a store of photographs. Finally the mad rush slows down into these quiet representations of what flashed by before. Being in the moment is an art, but having it prolonged into a meditation is a luxury. Staring at leisure endows artistic splendour to all who managed to flee.
I am about to leave my most beautiful and glorious home to travel far and wide in Australia, Papua New Guinea and the United Arab Emirates. A little voice was whispering in my ear that I may no longer believe I live in the most beautiful place on earth when I return, but then I realised that we all have access to a world in which beauty is unbelievably generous when just added to what we look at, and that such looking does not need to be compared, competed over or judged . We can choose to love the accumulated effect of many places and live in one whole world. I can safely be excited about leaving, and open hearted about returning.
There are no easy answers to the ravages of time, but eyes such as these demand an intimate reckoning. And therein lies the beauty of all abstracts: the infinite canvas of projection.
Thousands of Painted Lady butterflies are moving across our area during this season of heat after the rain. They sit still for a few seconds at a time only and I am grateful for the auto-focus on my camera being fast enough to capture them in such glorious detail. Their eyes show that they keep up a wary scrutiny of the photographer while the proboscis sinks into that inevitable next drop of nectar. The Afrikaans name Sondagsrokkie suggests that they have dressed up in their Sunday best: to be seen by others. A lovely tribute to these wafting bits of colour.
The sisters are now four months old. When the door was finally left open they egged one another on to explore the garden.
Jessica crept around obstacles
carefully watched by the deeply concerned poodle.
Grace found her feet on the pathways
and knew how to run from the Mongoose.
Most importantly, the pathway to the inner sanctum of a safe home is clearly established. This is what will help to let them have further walks in the near future.
Out walking by the Yzerfontein harbour this afternoon I came across this eroding sign washed in sunlight. Finding exactly the right frame certainly gave me a moment of stillness.
“Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in” – thank you Leonard Cohen for finding words to complete the untraceable connections.
If flowers had feet they may choose their partners differently, but this little snail is riding high as the crowning glory in its sensual bed of silken softness.
Every time I look at my photographs from The Kgalagadi region I think of survival. The creatures who live there are rugged and adapted to hardship. Endurance is their art.
I started reading “H is for Hawk” today and it reminded me of the day this juvenile pale chanting Goshawk landed next to us in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. It was close enough for the car to be reflected in its eye – and it shows up in the photograph I took. These days the photo hangs in the home of a friend in McGregor. I originally had it printed for an exhibition in Hilton. A well travelled Goshawk one may think, but it’s the engagement I remember. The knowledge that I too was causing curiosity in a mind as acutely aware as my own. Bird brain? I think not. Balance. Beauty. Benign. Blessed. I am the one left with the bounty of the encounter. Be for birds.