We popped in at our local nature reserve again and I found some strange birds.
Ever so slowly nature is recovering as we saw a lot of green ground cover, but the trees and the famous protea bushes will take a few years to recover.
I have shown you the fire and the damages to this area in posts before and every now and then we return to see how things are going over here in the nature reserve. A worry is that I have not seen one of the Snapper Turtles yet and I wonder if they survived the heat.
Fires are bad news here as they kill many of the smaller animals, but Mother nature always restores herself.
Come and look.
Hellooo! Now what was this? A strange duck with two heads?
Nope. It is a pair of White-faced Whistling Ducks (Dendrocygna viduata).
This is the lovely face of the female.
And here we have the face of her husband. Such pretty little things, don't you think?
If you look closely, then you will see there is a tree on the bank of the dam towards the right of the picture.
Something landed in that tree, and I wondered if it was an eagle.
Nah! It was a Cape Cormorant (Phalacrocorax capensis).
This was the best shot of the zoom that I could get of him.
There are wonderful views all around as the nature reserve is on top of the last hill before the mountain.
So yes, nature has many wiles and fire is one of them. Either by the hand of man, or by the hand of nature itself. Now we might think that fire is a very bad thing, but did you know that for the plants and trees to be regenerated fire is needed every few years. I found this strange, but then when I thought about it, it made perfect sense. In our normal gardens, we often have to take out dead flowers and dead plants. Nature does this with fire. And after she waters it with rain showers, the plants and trees recover and new ones grow all over the place.
An amazing system.
And That's All Friends.
Photos by Zac Smith-All Rights Reserved.
Camera: Canon Powershot SX70HS Bridge camera.
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