{"id":9401,"date":"2013-02-17T03:16:50","date_gmt":"2013-02-17T08:16:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/?p=9401"},"modified":"2019-07-02T14:28:24","modified_gmt":"2019-07-02T18:28:24","slug":"south-africa-wildlife-i","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/south-africa-wildlife-i\/","title":{"rendered":"South Africa wildlife I"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve renamed my nature photoblog series from ‘Cape Town wildlife’ to ‘South Africa wildlife’, to distinguish these new occasional posts from my previous month-by-month year of wildlife posts<\/a>. It’s been a long time since I last posted nature photos (9 months!), so I have a lot<\/strong> of special things saved up to show you, when I have time to organise and edit my thousands of photos! I’ll ease back into the wildlife blogging with a study of one of my favourite local animals…<\/em><\/p>\n

I like to play ‘spot the chameleon’ in my garden. It’s like a real-life version of Where’s Wally\/Waldo, only with a much better reward: you get to watch the tiny adorably grumpy-faced lizard after you spot him, and, because chameleons don’t dart off in a split second like geckos do, it’s much easier to take good photos.<\/p>\n

I have no idea how many Cape Dwarf Chameleons live in, or visit, our garden. My best guess is ‘several’, and I choose to believe that they are all babies of Kermy, the chameleon I used to watch every day last year (and even fed a grasshopper to, on one magical occasion). Look how difficult it is to spot the (full-sized) Kermy:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

There he is! In dark colour mode:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

And in bright colour mode, with my hand for scale:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

Now imagine how much more difficult the chameleon-spotting game is when they are teeny-tiny babies like this:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

Awww! And it’s not just the size that makes it tricky; they change colour like crazy! Here’s another baby (these are all the same species btw, Cape Dwarf Chameleons):<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

Look at the amazing colours!<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

I was even more excited though, when I saw this completely different type of baby chameleon…<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

(who, incidentally, has a pretty neat way of hiding when he sees you coming…)<\/p>\n

\"cape
\nWhere did he go?!<\/em><\/p>\n

…only to discover the next day that his grey colouring was just skin getting ready to shed and he was a regular green chameleon all along! I could hardly believe it, but I have proof: here he is with just the nose skin left:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

And then I spotted this very skinny orange baby on the same bush, so I know for sure that there are at least 2 of them:<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

The next day, I managed to catch one of them napping! Awwww….<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

Then I didn’t spot any for a couple of weeks until yesterday, when I found this one – he’s much bigger now, and starting to look more like his daddy, my old friend Kermy \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

\"cape<\/p>\n

You can probably tell that I’m pretty smitten with these little guys…<\/p>\n

I almost wish I hadn’t already designed my chameleon crochet pattern<\/a> last year, because I’m just not getting over this fascination, so I settled on the next best thing: I’ve designed a different lizard pattern to indulge in my newfound appreciation for reptiles. (It’s a cute one, and I’ll be revealing it very soon…)<\/p>\n

I really hope you’ve enjoyed my chameleon photos – please<\/strong> leave me a comment if so. I promise I’ll try not to leave such a long gap until my next wildlife report \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve renamed my nature photoblog series from ‘Cape Town wildlife’ to ‘South Africa wildlife’, to distinguish these new occasional posts from my previous month-by-month year of wildlife posts. It’s been a long time since I last posted nature photos (9 months!), so I have a lot of special things saved up to show you, when […]<\/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-9401","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\/9401","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=9401"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9401\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9401"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.planetjune.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}