Along the way - Bernice in the Bush

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A colleague/friend kept finding spiders to show me every time we were in the bush together. Now anyone who knows me, knows I’m a beetle and moth kind of girl, so I found this quite odd. Eventually I asked her why she kept showing me spiders and she said because you love them. And actually, I do!! Spiders are super cool and many people really just don’t give them the chance they deserve.

Sometimes something will catch your eye because it just doesn’t seem quite “right”. And that is how I happened to see this particular little lynx spider. The branch it was sitting on, did not yet have any leaves on it, but out the corner of my eye I saw some green. And upon closer inspection found this beautiful lynx spider, sitting there among its pretty strands of web. Such a delicate looking little spider with its lumo green body.

It must have been the day for lynx spiders to be out and about, because on the very tree next door to this one, was another lynx spider. These are both green lynx spiders, but I haven’t identified them to species yet.

Whilst on our walk taking in the spring blossoms and beauty (previous post), there were a number of other interesting bits and bobs along the way.

We came across this praying mantis egg case.

Praying mantis egg cases are called ootheca’s. The egg cases are species dependent, as in different species have different types of ootheca’s. This particular one was not very fresh and the babies had obviously hatched out a while back, but it’s always really great to see them.

The little mantids exit the ootheca through little pockets along the side – where it looks darker on the picture. I would hazard a guess that this is an ootheca from a praying mantis in the mantidae family, but further than that I cannot say.

I also have no idea which snake this skin belonged to, but it’s always cool to come across a shed snake skin. This wasn’t a recent shed, but you can clearly see the dorsal and ventral scales. The long rectangular looking scales are the ventral scales and then the smaller more round shaped scales are the dorsal. The skin of the head was no longer attached.

We also came across the skull of a vervet monkey, again not recent, but we had not seen it before. It’s amazing what pops out at you on a particular day, where you can have walked umpteen times, and not seen said item previously. There were no other bones near the skull, so maybe it had been brought to the spot by the jackal pups previously. Honestly no way to tell.

Many people who have not seen a giant African land snail before are often taken aback by its size. They really are very large compared to your average garden snail. We find their empty shells dotted around every now and again. And when we’ve had some rain, we have also had a few live ones wandering around. They are amazing creatures. This shell is an old shell, breaking down and returning to the earth.

As you can see, they are definitely not tiny.

One of my favourite reptiles is the rock monitor lizard (called a leguaan in South Africa). We found this lovely sign/marking from one of these, in the sand. You can clearly see the lines from its stomach where it might have been catching a bit of sun. They can move remarkably quickly if they need to. We had cousins visiting, and one ran across their path while we were out walking. There were some people who nearly lost their skin that day, from jumping so high!

And yet another glorious sunset to end the treasure-filled day.

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