{"id":11892,"date":"2014-08-18T11:03:44","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T15:03:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=11892"},"modified":"2014-08-18T11:11:16","modified_gmt":"2014-08-18T15:11:16","slug":"south-africa-wildlife-iv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/south-africa-wildlife-iv\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa wildlife IV"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post is part of my occasional series of photoblog posts about the wildlife and nature I see while living in South Africa.<\/em><\/p>\n

For various reasons, it’s been far too long since I’ve been able to get outside and enjoy nature, but this weekend changed all that – we had beautiful summer-in-winter weekend weather and it was too nice to be inside. I took my camera with me to see what I could see, and ease me back into my wildlife photoblogging. So, there’s no real theme to this post, it’s just ‘what I saw this weekend’ \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

In my garden:<\/p>\n

…a white butterfly finally stopped moving for long enough for me to photograph it:<\/p>\n

\"white<\/p>\n

…a giant grasshopper found the perfect lighting to pose for me:<\/p>\n

\"locust\"<\/p>\n

…and I spotted a new (to me) sight with my favourite Garden Acraeas<\/a>: egg-laying! <\/p>\n

\"garden
\nThe female hangs from the edge of a leaf and raises her abdomen to lay her eggs against the underside of the leaf (see the butterfly on the right). I have no idea why a male (top left) kept flying over the other female’s leaf (bottom left) and interrupting her while she tried to do the same.<\/em><\/p>\n

At a local nature reserve:<\/p>\n

…flower season is most definitely beginning:<\/p>\n

\"flowers\"<\/p>\n

…the waterbirds were enjoying the sunshine:<\/p>\n

\"flowers\"
\nBack: white-breasted cormorants; front: red-knobbed coots.<\/em><\/p>\n

…some kind of shield bug (I’m no bug expert!) sunned itself on a succulent:<\/p>\n

\"flowers\"<\/p>\n

…and the red bishops looked spectacular as always:<\/p>\n

\"flowers\"<\/p>\n

And, by the river:<\/p>\n

…these tiny flowers look like normal lawn daisies, except the petals are extra-short:<\/p>\n

\"daisies\"<\/p>\n

…we spotted a Cape weaver starting to weave a new nest between two tree branches:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

…carefully weaving each blade of grass into the ring he’d already constructed:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

…3 hours later, the ring of grass had become a ball and a female came to check it out:<\/p>\n

\"cape
\nIf she liked his work, she’d line the nest and they’d lay their eggs inside.<\/em><\/p>\n

…she inspected his handiwork thoroughly, but wasn’t impressed:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

…maybe he needs to do a little more weaving and he’ll have more luck tomorrow! I’ll have to check back – if a female moves in, we should be able to see her flying into the nest with soft lining materials. If not, he’ll abandon the nest in a couple of days and try his luck with a new one…<\/p>\n

\n

A bit of a random return for my wildlife posts, but these little signs of spring make me very happy! I hope you’ve enjoyed seeing them too. Please leave me a comment if so – I do love to hear from you…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This post is part of my occasional series of photoblog posts about the wildlife and nature I see while living in South Africa. For various reasons, it’s been far too long since I’ve been able to get outside and enjoy nature, but this weekend changed all that – we had beautiful summer-in-winter weekend weather and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wildlife"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11892\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}