rains

House Issues

As soon as our car got sorted out, our attention focussed on making our house more comfortable so we finished organizing the furniture, hanged our pictures and unpacked our books, including the few I had managed to find about Ethiopia as there were not the guides you find today.

Regarding Ethiopian animals, I trusted that my great “Field Guide to the Larger Mammals of Africa” by Dorst and Dandelot would do. On birds, the situation was pretty desperate and I spent a small fortune on a copy of Mackworth-Praed and Grant “Birds of Eastern and North Eastern Africa” and I managed to get Urban’s “A Checklist of the Birds of Ethiopia”. Now I needed to use them!

We had been warned that water and electricity in Bedele were erratic. The situation brought back memories of my early days in Uruguay during which there seemed to be a chronic period of austerity that included shortages of all kinds, including power and water. I still remember my mother discussing the latter with her friends and taking sides between those who preferred the absence of water or lack of electricity!

Regarding the electricity, we stocked up candles and got our camping gas lamp ready. Mabel and I agreed that water was more important, so we decided to store some in our bathroom by means of a number of one hundred litre plastic garbage containers that we filled and kept there for that purpose.

At the same time Mabel started her great vegetable garden and regular yogurt-making thanks to a few sachets of culture received from our friend Ranjini in the UK that, several times, came to our rescue. Yogurt with honey became a house “special” and I still wonder why no such thing is available commercially! We also learnt that green mangoes, very abundant in Bedele, were a great substitute for the impossible to get apples and Mabel excelled in making green mango strudel to the delight of ourselves and invited neighbours and those that dropped by following the amazing smell.

Mabel and her marvelous vegetable garden.

I focussed on the bird life and set up a number of high hanging plates where seeds were always on offer for those birds that wished to visit them. Immediately we got a positive response from the firefinches and waxbills that kept coming despite the anxious looks of our Siamese cat!

The birds did not take long to come.
“I wish I could jump that high”.

Not all was pleasure though. There came a day when the water heater packed up and, in the absence of a maintenance service in the laboratory, I took it apart and discovered that it was almost full of mud. Through a series of washings that took quite a while, I pushed the mud out and ended up with a functional appliance once again, to the satisfaction of Mabel.

Repairing the water heater. At the back on the left the piled garbage containers filled with water can be seen.

Unfortunately I was less effective with our septic tank. The device kept getting blocked with the same frequency as I needed to write project progress reports! I was nominated the responsible person on account of being a vet and therefore used to some unpleasantness… I soon discovered the meaning of those metal trapdoors around the house. This was not my favourite pastime as it meant to open them up and unblock the pipes for things to move along! With the passing ofthe months, practice made me quite good at it but unfortunately the heavy rainy season did not help.

Rains at Bedele. Credit: Data provided by WorldWeatherOnline.com

The onset of the rains would be announced by a gradual accumulation of clouds over a few days and then heavy rain would come and immediately we realized that our concern with water shortages was somehow exaggerated. With about 1.8 metres of yearly rain, water was in great abundance for about six months of the year. This required work on the garden drainage to avoid the water entering the house.

This week weather in Bedele. Screenshot of 1 September 2020 from Weather-Atlas (https://www.weather-atlas.com/en)

The noise of the rain on our tin roof did not let us listen to our music and, when electric storms came, the lightning and thunder that we experienced were the worse we have ever gone through, even when Harare is tough on this too!

Somewhere I had learnt, the probably incorrect fact, that to know where a lightning bolt has landed you started counting when you saw it until you hear the thunder and the number gave you the distance in kilometres from your position. I tried this in Bedele and I could never count more than two! I stopped as it only increased my sense of vulnerability, particularly when I did not see any lightning rods around!

It was in Bedele and the surrounding area that I learnt what car winches were for! The rains would transform our laboratory compound in a quagmire and often we needed 4WD to get out of it and to drive around the town, particularly to reach our butcher as I described.

It was on a rainy evening that the water finally got to us. It did not come through our door or through a leaking roof but from our bathroom. We were sitting reading quietly when we heard a loud noise and then saw a wall of water about 50cm high coming towards us! Taken totally by surprise we had time for nothing except getting our feet wet but, of course, our cats watched the events from the table.

One of our large garbage containers (not really for that use) that had another one on top of it, had cracked. The one on top also fell and knocked the one next to it. The result was that about three hundred litres of water were violently released in a mini tsunami! It took us until 2 am to wipe our house free of water.

After such a shocking incident and seeing the way it would rain, we decided that we no longer needed to store so much water and we made do with only one of the containers and we survived without having to open it until when, before departing we emptied it.

Spot the beast 61

We are having a slow start of the rainy season this year but, searching among my pictures, I found this ones that show a beast of some sort from one of Nature’s kingdoms…

See if you can spot it!

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Here it is. As you have realized by now, it is not a giant fern sprouting but a chameleon digging its egg-laying hole with the rolled tail out!

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This is the culprit laying, darker after the effort.

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Rain bird

A few days back we have started hearing the by now familiar ‘wip-wip-weeu’ that the rain bird or red-chested cuckoo (Cuculus solitarius) make endlessly at the time the rains should start in Zimbabwe. But, where have they been since their appearance last year?

 

Before I knew much about bird movement and migration, I often asked myself this question. I recall watching in awe widowbirds displaying in Northern Kenya and asking my friend Paul about their whereabouts during the rest of the year. His reply, was that they would go to the Sudd[1], a huge swampy area located in Sudan.

Sudd_swamp Credit NASA (Public domain)

Sudd Swamp -a Flooded grasslands and savannas ecoregion in South Sudan. To the left the river/wetland Bahr al-Ghazal connecting to Lake No (top). This photograph was taken during the driest time of year—summer rains generally extend from July through September. Taken from space, May 1993. Credit: NASA (Public domain).

So, every time that someone asks me now where a particular bird is when it is not seen, I say that it is in the Sudd, a very convenient reply!

The truth about the rain bird is that they are intra-African migrants that breed in southern Africa between September and March, although most arrive in mid-October and the majority are gone by the end of April.

The rest of the year they reside in Sub-Saharan Africa, in countries of Central, East and West Africa, including the Sudd wetlands in South Sudan!

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Rainbird distribution map. Attribution: BirdLife International (2019) Species factsheet: Cuculus solitarius. Downloaded from http://www.birdlife.org on 02/11/2019.

Their preferred habitats are woodlands where they perch high up in the trees. The red-chested cuckoo is usually solitary and it takes on more than a single mate so it is polygamous. Every year they visit our garden where they are occasionally seen while they feed on caterpillars and other insects in the tall msasa trees.

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While in Southern Africa -including Zimbabwe- the rain birds practice brood parasitism by breeding through egg-laying in other bird species nests, some twenty-seven of them! The most common hosts are thrushes and robin-chats and the Cape robin-chat (Cossypha caffra), the Cape wagtail (Motacilla capensis) and the white-throated robin-chat (Cossypha humeralis) are the most popular hosts.

The cuckoo’s resemblance with a small bird of prey (like a sparrow hawk for example) scares the future parents from their nests and the cuckoo female lays the egg that, not always, resembles their hosts’. It is estimated that they lay about twenty eggs scattered in various nests every season. Then it is up to the surrogate family to raise the chick.

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A cape robin feeding an almost fully-grown rain bird. Attribution: Alandmanson [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Piet-my-vrou_%26_cape_robin.jpg. Downloaded from Creative Commons on 2/11/19

A very interesting biological phenomenon helps the cuckoo chick to have a head start from the other chicks in the nest: the female cuckoo literally incubates the egg inside her for 24 hours before laying it! [1] This ensures that the chick will hatch first and eliminate the competition at the nest.

Cuckoos are great travellers, capable of flying enormous distances during their migration and, although the red-chested cuckoo covers less distances than others, it uses the same mechanisms to do so. These navigation skills are genetically passed on to their young. The latter stay behind to complete their development while their parents depart but the new generation are able to fly back north on their own to join their parents!

Now we only need good rains while we watch the cuckoos until they depart and then we wait for them to announce the rains in 2020.

 

[1] See: https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-11401254

A dozen eggs

Luckily it is raining well in Harare. More than we expected so our pool -turned into a water reservoir for a few years now- spilled over and the area became a true wetland! Water was also running from the top of the garden in large rivulets that avoided our dikes and continued unstoppably to the bottom of the garden washing our scarce topsoil. The consequence was that we needed to perform some emergency repairs to our contention dikes.

While digging from the sand the pile that we keep for this kind of work we found a cluster of twelve small eggs! Their shells were flexible so they clearly belonged to a reptile, probably a chameleon.

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Stephen (our caretaker) and I were very excited to find them and went to communicate the good news to my wife as we were sure she would also be happy as I was quite sure them to be chameleon eggs. The news was received only with lukewarm enthusiasm and I was both disappointed and surprised!

It was after a few minutes of thinking that the penny finally dropped so I declared: “I am sure that they are not snake eggs”, trying to convince myself that there were not! “Why not?” was her immediate and rather expected reply. I could not argue so I decided to find out what they were!

I performed a rather thorough check in the Internet and could almost confirm that they were in fact what I thought. However, to keep the peace I agreed to leave them where they were found so that they will continue with their normal development.

Further reading educated me that it takes up to 300 days for chameleon eggs to hatch and the breeders of these animals in captivity start checking for hatching from day 220! So, if you had any hope of learning what came out of the eggs, you will need to wait until next year, if we are lucky to see the newly born emerging from the sand!