Just visible in the featured image: a “lizard specialist” predator, awaiting an ambush opportunity.
Immediately below: the “footprints” this predator leaves behind, when ascending the face of a dune:
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Circa 75,000 members of our own species live in Swakopmund, and a great many more visit, as tourists.
Below, you are looking at its beachfront, as viewed from a hotel window at 7. 20 am on 20 November 2022.
Namibia’s third largest city – and its one “seaside resort” – is sandwiched between the chilly, easternmost waters of the Atlantic Ocean and the westernmost dunes of the Namib Desert’s “sand sea”, whence I took the featured image at 5. 11 pm on the previous day.
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As last updated on 02 January 2025, on www.WA.gov.au:
If you are thinking about owner-building your own home or small commercial building, you will need to have been granted owner-builder approval from the Building Services Board before you can be granted a building permit from your local government authority.
Indian bureaucracy is globally-notorious, but in at least some parts of Rajasthan, the “DIY housing sector” is subject to very much less “regulation” than is Western Australia’s.
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The mammalian world’s biggest family – the rodents – includes six genera which (collectively) contain at least 110 living species of “gerbil”
Some of them – on their own turf, at least – are more commonly known as “jirds”.
Jirds are members of the genus Meriones.
As is generally true of gerbils, jirds live in deserts, and other “arid” or “semi-arid” places.
Unsurprisingly, most are nocturnal; but not the Indian desert jird, Meriones hurrianae.
One Indian blogger has described this post’s highly atypical hero as the tiny musketeer of Rajasthan’s Thar Desert.
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The Thar Desert’s other name accords with reality: it is India’s biggest desert, although 15% of it is in Pakistan.
Most of it – around 60% – is in Rajasthan; the Thar Desert occupies a little more than 60% of India’s largest state, by area
According to most sources, around 40% of Rajasthan’s human population live within the Thar Desert.
Rajasthan is far from India’s most populous state, but it is currently home to more than 80 million humans.
Unsurprisingly, the Thar Desert is “our” planet’s most densely populated desert, by a large margin.
It is also remarkably rich in wildlife.
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Sandfly Bay is also seal-approved – one species of fur seal does like to slumber there – but the pictured individual belongs to a much rarer species, of sea lion.
New Zealand’s sandflies are deservedly infamous, globally.
However the name of this spectacular Otago Peninsula ocean beach does not “honour” sandflies; it refers to the fact that on a windy day this is a place where sand really does fly!
On a milder, sunny day – such as 23 March, 2019 – Sandfly Bay loses its “sting”, and its sandy beach provides a warm, perfectly form-fitting, easily-adjustable “mattress”.
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Wet sand is often attractive in its own right.
Arguably, however, its greatest “talent” is its ability to enhance the beauty of whatever objects happen to be present within, atop, or above it…be they clouds, islands, shells, seaweed, crustaceans, birds, pebbles…or – in this instance – some wonderfully weird boulders on the Otago coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
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By car or bus, the pictured location is circa 45 kilometres south of Adelaide’s CBD.
If you avoid rush hours, a car trip from the heart of Adelaide to Aldinga Beach can take just 45 minutes.
Aldinga Beach is definitely not “just yet more of Adelaide’s dispiriting, seemingly never-ending sprawl”; it has well-protected natural bushland, a large number of resident ‘roos, reefs onto which one can walk, at low tide…and glorious beaches.
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Anvil Beach sits at the end of the Nullaki Peninsula, just east of where Irwin Inlet (sometimes) meets Southern Ocean.
It is one of the more “choice” of many wild and wonderful beaches on Western Australia’s south coast.
The proverbial crow – flying in from Denmark, not many kilometres distant, to the northwest – could reach Anvil Beach in just a few minutes.
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Today’s chapter in this series’ “wet sands” section features a fast-scuttling crab, on a northern Namibian beach,
Here, rain hardly ever falls, but fogs often roll in from the cold Atlantic Ocean, and thence into the western section of the Namib Desert.
Q: a terrible place to be shipwrecked?
A: yes…but this shoreline is far from “lifeless”.
The waters that lap it teem with life; human population density is among the lowest on “our” planet, but the local seafood is abundant and excellent.
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