Hi All

We've had such cloudy rainy weather here in Durban that I've been going stir crazy. I had to wait until yesterday (22 Dec) to get out - Rob Dickinson and I went off to Vernon Crookes Nature Reserve off the road from Park Rynie to Ixopo. It's a place I've meant to visit for ages - Jenny and the birder ladies are always going there and telling me how lovely it is - and not long ago I went onto Google Earth for a look. Wow - like a small version of Ongoye Forest.






In the middle of all this there's a small dam:



This had two of Africa's most iconic birds flying around it - Crowned Cranes and Fish Eagles. The whole place is a confection of green hills and deep dark forests - as it's not far from Ixopo you find yourself remembering Alan Paton's words in "Cry the Beloved Country" - "These hills are grass-covered and rolling, and they are lovely beyond any singing of it..."

The road approaches through a forest, and on this we found some blues mud puddling. I opened up the camera bag to set up the Nikon - and found to my horror I'd left my flash ring at home. So I set the camera up for aperture priority shooting with the on-board flash as fill in, and hoped for the best. The first butterfly was this Common Meadow Blue Cupidopsis cissus, on the mud puddle:



We went up to a high viewpoint on one of the hills. It was jumping with butterflies, all the usual coastal stuff like Gaudy Commodore Precis octavia and Veined Swordtail Graphium leonidas. These tiny little Pennington's Coppers Aloeides penningtoni were chasing everything, all much bigger than them - the Jack Russell terriers of the butterfly world.




We were looking for Rocksitters, something Rob hadn't seen before. On one hilltop we found this glorious female Aranda Copper Aloeides aranda:



There were some spectacular flowers too, like these green Gladioli:




And all over, there were Scabious in bloom. Many had Aloeides penningtoni on them. One had a beautiful fresh Fulvous Ranger Kedestes mohozutsa, which got my adrenalin pumping as I never really got a good film shot of this and digitally it has always eluded me. But the need to get the sun on the right side, on a flower blowing in the wind, led me into contortions and my hat fell off, scaring it away. I had to speak a Word of Power...

On the rocks around the dam, we managed to scare up a couple of female Whitish Amakosa Rocksitters Durbania amakosa albescens:




We called Ernest Pringle and he told us where to look for Bicolored Skipper Abantis bicolor, but we were too early in the season. But we'll definitely be back - this is a special spot!

Cheers

Steve