Orangutan, Gunung Leuser

An old photo for Earth Day: female orangutan with a rather ineffective makeshift umbrella, Gunung Leuser National Park, northern Sumatra.

Sumatran orangutan WWF info page LINK.

The cuteness continues: a baby tortoise

Just in case the baby sunbird wasn't heart warming enough, here's a tiny baby tortoise spotted in the garden this morning.



Juvenile Angulate Tortoise Chersina angulata (Schweigger 1812). Adults get to about  the size of a man's outstretched hand, but this one had a carapace barely 8cm long.

Just for the record, this is a free-roaming tortoise. We're a stone's throw from the fynbos of the extended Table Mountain National Park. Wild visitors are one of the huge privileges of living here, and a very good reason to leave the bottom of the garden mostly natural. It also makes for a very nice view across our wild olives and Rhus glauca thicket, which could almost convince you you're actually inside the nature reserve as long as you don't look to the right where suburbia sprawls.

Just a baby sunbird

Fledged four days ago. At first just a tiny ball of fluff, completely out of control, crashing into the ground and cheeping plaintively while its parents fluttered around frantically . It's a miracle any birds survive their first day or two out of the nest in the hungry wild. Two days later, when this photo was taken, it was starting to fly and move through the plants confidently, even exploring flowers for nectar. But it's still very much a baby. The non-stop peep-peep-peeping makes it easy to find in the garden while its parents hurry around and bring food. I was lucky that the nest was right next to my vegetable garden, so I could watch the show from the very start, and they soon got used to me being a few feet away. Father, like all male Lesser Double-collared sunbirds, is small but spectacular, with an iridescent green head and postbox red breast, separated by a narrow band of the deepest royal blue. He seemed to spend most of his time on top of the nearby Cape Honeysuckle or the fence, showing off his disco plumage and singing his heart out. You could tell when baby hatched, because suddenly mom was around again, all businesslike, backwards and forwards between collecting insects and delivering them. Maybe, baby it will hang around long enough so that I can see it's going to be a shiny boy or a sleek grey girl.

Southern Double-collared Sunbird or Lesser Double-collared Sunbird, Cinnyris chalybeus (formerly in the genus Nectarinia).

fishing for a living

Giant Kingfisher (Megaceryle maxima) doing its thing.

Being botanically inclined, I tend to forget how damn hard it is to photograph birds, especially without long telephotos that cost as much as a luxury car. This guy helped a lot by deciding that the edge of the bridge an arm's length away from my car window was a great spot to base his morning's fishing.

Ten plunges over a half hour yielded a 60% success rate. Possibly assisted by low winter river levels, but still impressive. Only three misses and one extremely unimpressed look when a submerged root was hunted in error. I didn't realise quite how amazing it is that they just fly out of the water.

black velvet

Look at her, freshly moulted, resplendent in her blue-black coat, and completely living up to the name Velvet Spider. Such a shy little thing, all 1cm of her gazing cautiously at me through those four eyes. As our porch was recently rendered unsafe by vigorous cleaning, especially for a soft and recently moulted mommy with eggs, I gently relocated her to a wild rockery further down in the garden.