‘How do you know it’s not poisonous?’ Truth be told I don’t know… not for certain. ‘Intuition’ I offer up helpfully… although I’m suddenly reminded of a girl holding a blue-ringed octopus on an Australian coast somewhere, proclaiming its ‘cuteness’ while querying her followers as to what it was. (which I imagine made at least some of them1 suck air through clenched teeth)
[1] maybe I’m being optimistic.
In any event. Here I am, having just discovered a chonky caterpillar on the path and getting all googly- eyed about it. ‘Look at its little suction cup feet’, I gush.
I love bugs. Especially new bugs I haven’t seen before. This ones a Cabbage Tree Emperor. And turns into quite a pretty moth. (I say now with a sense of authority, pretending I’ve always known this)
The downside to living where we do is that a week before Yuletide we get Foie gras‘d with tourists ’til we’re busting seams and oozing out of every new orifice. Eleven months of the year its an awesome place to live. For one hellish month it’s really not… and so we’ve taken it upon ourselves to trek nine hundred miles up and to the right to escape the migration hullabaloo (by becoming migratory ourselves). Hence the new fauna.
It’s sub-tropical here, well… kinda2.
[2] Its very much slope aspect dependent. The valleys and gorges make you feel like you’re in a jungle (where you can’t hear yourself over the noise of the insects and birds). As you get higher it thins out into ferns, bracken and grasslands. At elevation you’ll get snow (in winter).
A ginormous millipede. Colloquially known as Shongololos, derived from the Zulu word ukushonga, which means to roll up. The Afrikaans word is also pretty cool. Duisendpoot. Literally ‘Thousand-foot’, although no millipede actually has this many legs.
They’re awesome.
These Polka-dot wasps were having sex. Scrolling through my photos I decide to spice things up a bit, add some risqué half way down the post. Which is apparently a good strategy to shore up waning interest. Or so I’ve been told.
Also I’ve decided I heart mushrooms.
I think it because we don’t really have a wet, forest floor in our local habitat and so fungus is suddenly novel, exciting and very different. For everyone else its probably a bit ‘meh’ though.
In terms of ‘larger’ fauna I did manage to snap this. With my iPhone! Which feels impressive (to me at least), and speaks to the distance between me and this… Bushbuck (I think3).
[3] small antelope tend to blur into a homogeneous collage in Joeys brain. It could also be an Oribi or a Mountain Reedbuck (he says, using random words)
I’m sure its delicious.
And here’s me, right at the end. Trying to look, stoic… maybe. Which is a terminological inexactitude, because I am really not. Other than when I’m roleplaying. (which happens less often these days). Hope y’all have had a Merry Christmas and a good new year.
Good luck with everything. Don’t accept dragon eggs from strangers in dive bars.
Go Darke 