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My garden + wildlife. Some are just summervisitors.

Wildlife in my Garden:

Cape / House Sparrow:




Cape White-Eye:


Laughing Dove:


Cape Wagtail:


Hartlaub's Gull:


More soon to follow...

Here we moan about the squirrels raiding our bird feeders, but I'd think vervets might be a far greater problem as vervets can cause a lot more havoc than squirrels — and squirrels are bad enough, have trashed my (third-floor) porch on occassion

There is some serious building activity in my back garden.
Just look at the progress over a 26 hour period.



The building contractor.



Greetings

Rock Pigeon is sitting on the nest again...so my broom is ready for those pesky crows

The first real batch of flying ants has erupted the last few days due to some good rains earlier in the week and of course the birds have been going crazy.
Apart from all the usual ones seen here, there was a lovely Burchells Coucal feeding so voraciously that it allowed me to stop right next to it and watch it for some minutes.

Vervets, Weaver, Buchell's Coucal, Crested Barbet .....
I wish we had such animals in our garden.
Infact we don't even have a garden ( as I am living in a city)
But we have a balcony with many birds on it. We got Bats flying around in the evening and even two Common Kestrels (right in the neighbourhood ).
There is some exotic wildlife in Cologne as well, there are huge flocks of resident Rose-ringed Parakeets. You can see them quite often in many parks of Cologne.
Nevertheless I got some garden-wildlife-pics I took in my parents garden.
This tiny Tit:


And there are three Squirrels as regular visitors and they even come up onto their balcony . Some people think they are a pest , but I quite like them.



The last two pics I had to take through the window of the balcony door .

We had no spring in Botswana...

We went from average 21 degrees daily to 32 degrees from Sept to October..

Since then, the ants, cockroaches and spiders came out of the woodwork And boy, are they big!!!

Luckily with them came the Yellowbilled Kites, Olive Thrush, Groundscraper thrush, Hoopoos and such. the bush (in Gabs) is suddenly alive.... My Black Monkey thorn tree is also shooting like there isno tomorrow....

One of my visitors.

Down near the wall at the bottom of the garden.

This past weekend, at our Marloth home, we saw our first babies for the season.
The impala have not yet started giving birth, although the ewes are all heavily pregnant….so is Bambi, “my” duiker ewe

We know the two sows very well. They are regular visitors…they use to be three, we presume they are sisters. The one sister has left the group, but now the group has again increased by four. The little ones were taking turns, drinking from both sisters.

My SO made a huge bird-feeder with 13 different places to put seed. There are also branches sticking out every where with nails in for the apples and a platform for the bananas etc. He hung a rope from the one tree to the other with sosatie sticks pushed through to keep some apples in place. We also put seed on 2 different spots on the ground for the birds which prefer it that way. (Isn't my SO just wonderful )

Our visitors:
Hadeda Ibis (about 10+ sleep's in our tree's)
Blacksmith plover (behind our house)
Helmeted guineafowl
Black-shouldered kite and Gabar goshawk (every now and then)
Black-collared barbet
Crested Barbet (both our sisal logs are occupied by them)
Grey Lourie
Speckled Mousebird
African Hoopoe
Red-billed Wood-hoopoe
Common fiscal shrike (saw him catch a finch in our tree)
Pied crow
Black-eyed Bulbul
Karoo Thrush
Indian Myna
Glossy starling
Cape White-eye
Rameron pigeon
Cape turtle dove
laughing dove
Cape sparrow
Southern Grey-headed sparrow
Cape weaver
Southern Masked weaver
Red-headed finch
Southern red bishop
Golden bishop
Pin-tailed Whydah (naughty boy)
Cape Robin (he uses the bird-bath every day)
Barn Owl (only see him sometimes)
Lots of bats

I havent heard Red-chested Cuckoo yet this season but we had a Black Cuckoo in our garden 2 days ago eating Butterfly Larvae off the Wild Peach Tree (PLANT INDIGENOUS) and the Jacobin (Black Phase) as is the Diederics and Klaas's are also here as well....nice pics yes the Black Cuckoo wakes me at 3 am these days with his call "Hy's Doooooood"

I have slides so I'll have to get someone to scan for me. They were on my Wild Peach eating larvae yesterday again my sons said so now I'm torn between going to Addo or staying at home to get this Cuckoo as the Larvae decimates my tree which I planted just to feed the Cuckoos of the east Cape...they cant resist the larvae. just as well because that tree will die wihout the cuckoos. However his song wakes me up at 3am ....2 hours too early but I love it....."Hy's DooooooooD"

Last night we found a Large Spotted Genet behind our fridge, I got the fright of my life! I think it could smell us braaing & was looking for scraps...

Oh how I miss Kruger...