Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
The Namib’s “sand sea” has to be seen to be believed…and when you do see “our” planet’s most exquisite dunes, you may still wonder if you are dreaming, or hallucinating.
Namibia also has the most beautiful rock faces I have ever seen; as is also true of Central Australia’s rocky ranges and outcrops, their beauty is in part thanks to the highly specialised vegetation with which they are sparely “punctuated”, rather than fully “clothed”.
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Atlantic fog-factor permitting, early morning affords your eyes and camera their best chance to experience/capture crisp, sharp views of some of the world’s most astonishing vistas.
(Namibia’s western side is one of “our” planet’s least rainy regions, but also one of the foggiest)
Once the sun is “high” and the heat is “on”, the light becomes flatter, yet harsher, and heat haze destroys fine detail.
However, late morning has its own special charm…
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As even the most cursory googler will discover almost instantly, “facts” and opinions concerning Namibia’s seal population and human “management” thereof are widely/wildly divergent/contested.
Suffice for now that all of Namibia’s seals are Cape Fur Seals, and that an enormous number (and major proportion of the global population) of them live and die on Namibia’s coast.
Comments closed(Yale-based historian Timothy Snyder is best known as the author of Blood Lands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin, a book which profoundly enriched/jolted not a few readers’ understanding of “The Holocaust”, this reader’s included)
What European history really shows, and quite powerfully, is that in order to become, quote unquote, a ‘normal’ European country, you have to become post-imperial, [meaning] you have to lose your wars.
Snyder’s words, quoted immediately above and below, are from an article published in today’s Australian edition of The Guardian.
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Péringuey’s Adder is one of many names for Bitis peringueyi; the most descriptive are “Namib desert sidewinding adder” and “dwarf sand adder”.
This one was variously speeding/attacking/burrowing-hiding on or near the surface of one of the Namib’s westernmost dunes, just in from the Atlantic Ocean…and almost literally next door to Swakopmund’s easternmost houses.
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This mother and calf are black rhinos – the smaller of Africa’s two rhino species
They still “enjoy” a critically endangered conservation status, but numbers have rebounded in recent years.
Circa one third of them live in Namibia.
Photo is copyright Doug Spencer, taken at 9.30 pm on 05 November 2022 in Etosha National Park.
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On Thursday – the second day of our current “expedition” to Namibia – my beloved and I had our lifetimes’ most exciting (to date) close-range encounter with a wild carnivore.
The featured image’s leopard is coming back down from the tree in which she had just stashed “the kill” she had made that afternoon.
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Terns are particularly lovely in flight… or when hovering, intently.
The pictured individual is a Caspian tern, I think; s/he was our post-lunch highlight at Cottesloe yesterday.
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From a research article published this week in the British Ecological Society’s Journal of Applied Ecology:
Our results suggest that the enrichment of natural soundscapes using underwater speakers may provide an efficient solution for boosting early recruitment and habitat building by oysters.
However, caution the researchers, restoration practitioners must consider the potential for negative impacts from speaker enrichment.
A question for you, dear reader:
before you read the quoted words, had you ever contemplated oysters’ “hearing”, much less their response to sounds played through underwater speakers?
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Budgerigars, according to CSIRO Publishing’s The Australian Bird Guide, are always in flocks, sometimes of immense numbers.
That ain’t necessarily so, always!
On 18 October 2022, a whisker less than 200 kilometres north of Perth, we enjoyed an unexpected encounter with a pair of wild Budgerigars.
They were alone, together/ish.
The “/ish” is because they probably had offspring, safely invisible to us, nestled snugly within the tree hollow from which the female member of “our” pair only very occasionally and briefly emerged.
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