City couple’s book on exploring the Cape Peninsula’s mountain chain is memorable, writes VIVIEN HORLER
WHEN you want to get up high in cities like London, Paris, New York or Sydney, you have to climb up some man-made structure like the London Eye or Eiffel Tower, the Empire State Building or the Harbour Bridge.
We spotted these two lions on the road in Kruger National Park. They were in the process of mating. With lions this can be quite the operation… Female lions need to mate every 15 or 20 minutes to ovulate, this is called induced ovulation. They do this for 3 – 4 days. It is necessary to ensure fertilisation.
As female lions are not picky when it comes to males, this delayed mating process will often give the dominant male the chance to reach the female. He will depose any inferior males and take over…
Only when my plane was about to touch down in Frankfurt did I finally realise that my time in South Africa was over… Since then it has been two weeks… I’ve almost settled down in Germany again (even if I still walk on the “wrong”, left side of the pavement). The first few days were quite exciting – it was great to see my family and my friends and I continued doing what I did on my last days in Cape Town…
In June of this year I was doing a world in one country tour – which is a 19-day safari starting in Johannesburg and ending in Cape Town. On the KwaZulu Natal section of the tour we visited a lodge called Emdoneni. They have a cat rehabilitation project on their property which is a great highlight for a safari. People bring them injured cats from around the area and they attempt to save and then release them back into the wild. One of the species they have and rehabilitate is the Serval.
Hard work for handler getting orphan to adapt to a new life
Source: Weekend Argus, 24th July 2010 but Sheree Bega
LIKA A devoted mother, Khulani Mangena tries to entice Vuma, an orphandes rhino calf in his care, to drink from a 30-litre bottle of specialized rhino refuses, eyeing the artificial teat suspiciously.
After all, it looks little like the source of the mother’s milk that nine-month-old Vuma thrived on until his mother was slaughtered by poachers at the Krugersdorp Game Reserve last week.
But little by little, Mangena, a rhino handler at the Rhino and Lion Nature Reserve in kromdraai, west of Johannesburg, where Vuma has been moved, sees progress in the traumatized animal. “He has not drunk any milk since he came here last Friday. But he is eating and drinking water. And every day he comes closer to the bottle.” Read the rest of this entry »
The time has come – yesterday was my last day at Jenman Safaris! I am now sitting at home on my couch writing this and I still can’t believe it… Maybe it was all the excitement and fun of the world cup that made the time go that much faster?! With only a few days left in Cape Town I decided to do as much as possible…
On Saturday we (my house mates and I) got up quite early and went to the food market at the Old Biscuit Mill in Woodstock. As the sun was shining we decided it was summer again…
Source: Cape Times, Monday June 14th 2010 – Craig McKune
NEW “camera trap” photographs, part of a project studying leopard populations in the mountains surrounding Cape Town, have confirmed the predators survive within the city boundaries. Up to 50 heat and motion-triggered cameras, set up in the Boland mountains, have been working “day and night” , rain or “sunshine” since March, shooting nocturnal and elusive animals from Porterville in the north to Betty’s Bay on the south. About 10 of these cameras, paid for by the City of Cape Town, have been set up in the mountains, near Somerset West, and late last week images were captured of an adult male and an adult female leopard in the Kogelberg Blosphere Reserve.
Read the rest of this entry »
Week 19 (14th – 20th of June)
We are now in the second week of the World Cup 2010 tournament hosted in South Africa and we are luckily in Cape Town which means we are amidst the buzz of it all! Everyone is still excited about the games and some South Africans are even evolving into proper soccer fans. In contrast to Europe, people here (SA) watch rugby and cricket rather and hardly watch much soccer. But since the World Cup started you hear more and more people talking about the day-before and the upcoming games – even the girls at work, which is quite a development 
