Earth, Wind & Water

An inkling of spring.....

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 06:19:00 +0000

We haven't had a hard winter here, just the one frost so far, but I'll still be glad when the days begin to lengthen out a bit more and I get to see a bit more sun. Today I noticed one of my Zantedeschias had decided the same thing. Online sources suggest this should flower from May to June, this chap may be a little premature.....

The giant white arum, Zantedeschia aethiopica, is native to southern Africa in Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland. I've always thought they looked beautiful but a watergardening aunt of mine called them "death lilies" and insisted she would never grow such a bad omen. My own parents weren't keen either but this was one of the first plants I put in my own first garden.

Pups on the rampage....

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Not a reference to Michael Clarke's recent (and epic) triple hundred (sorry non-cricket fans) but to some actual puppies. This is one of the few times E,W&W will feature something called a dog because your host is a cat person. These aren't Canis familiaris though. These are African Wild Dogs, the second most endangered canrivore in Africa. I'll give some background to this post later on when work settles down. For now though enjoy the national geographic quality footage below of one of Africa's most special sights.

Top 10 Nature Moments of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 23:25:00 +0000

It's about that time of the year where I look back on the moments of the previous year that really stood out for me as the best. Last year was unusual in that I saw so many spectacular things the list is all about them and less about the little interesting moments that usually make it on there as I geek out.

1. Platypus - The duck-billled egg-laying freak of Australia; I worked hard to see it and I got spectacular views as a result.
2. Honey Badger - the Honey Badger takes what he wants and doesn't hang around for photos. Nonetheless adding this fantastic creature to my self-found list with a roadside spot was epic. I've never seen an animal run with a shambling, ambling strut before but this guy had charisma.
3. Longimanus - my 30th shark species in the wild was a true monster of the deep.
4. Snouted Cobra - in a year in which I saw a number of the world's most deadly snakes, dead on roads (mozambique spitter, eastern brown(!)), seeing a big egyptian snouted cobra negotiate a road successfully was awesome.

5. Southern Cassowary - enormous dinosaur bird walks out of the forest next to you? Legendary.
6. Lions of the Kruger - my first lion sighting was cool. Cooler still would follow (and will eventually appear on the blog).

7. Colugo - a wild flying lemur makes its home in a zoo and I get a reward for looking hard.
8. Black Rhino mother and calf - there's a story coming about this one.
9. Wild cycads of Queensland - geekfest. total geekfest. It was awesome.
10. Saltie - in a year in which I saw both the two big Crocodylus; Estuarine and Nile, there was no competition as to my favourite: 14 feet of Crikey.

The top 10 left no space for other weird marsupials, small antelopes, birds big or small, the 5th biggest snake in the world or hammerhead sharks. Let's hope 2012 is spectacular enough to make next year's top 10 as difficult and as always I'd love to hear about your top 10s (or top 1s!).

Tis the season for a tipple................

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 16:17:00 +0000

.....and at E,W&W command central that currently means this stuff.......

Well actually it will mean this stuff in about a year as I've just decanted it and want to let it develop. This is my home made sloe gin or as I've named it "Red Kryptonite" (because I'm a huge geek) and it's another of those things I thought I'd told you about but apparently didn't. Non-european readers: Sloes are a hedgerow fruit from the Prunus genus (ie same as plums, cherries, peaches and so on) that are small and bitter raw but which when pricked and combined with gin and sugar in the right quantities create a rather delectable liqueur type thing over the course of a few months). If you don't have sloes (or the similar damsons or bullaces around then there is probably a local equivalent you could switch too). I've got a couple of bottles of this stuff and a couple of bottles of sloe whisky set aside for next year's festivities (and a little friendly competition). I've also just filtered a couple of bottles of blackberry vinegar so a) the house smells amazing, b) the hedgerow was kind to me this year; and c) I'm feeling like quite the domestic guru. Time for a latte break.

Cardboard to food in a few easy steps.

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 07:26:00 +0000

So here is a guide to definitely the coolest way yet I've produced food. How did this start? Well a while back I picked up a golden oyster mushroom kit on sale after christmas. That was after some cat-inspired setbacks a great success.

After doing a bit more reading I decided to try and make my own kit and cook up some oyster mushrooms on cardboard. Rather than trying to produce my own spawn first up, I decided to start by trying to grow my own mushrooms using someone else's spawn to see if the methodology would work. So I got some spawn from a guy on ebay choosing the blue oyster strain as a) it's supposedly the most aggressive and b) don't fear the reaper.

I ripped some plain brown cardboard from old boxes into strips and boiled it for a couple of hours before draining it. I then layered it (like a lasagne) into some foil roasting trays (which I'd also boiled) with the grain spawn. I then wrapped in clingfilm, pierced some holes and left alone. It was soon possible to see the mycellium ripping into the cardboard....

After 3 weeks the tray tops were covered with a thick white mycellium and smelling "mushroomy". After 3 weeks 1 day this happened.

Note the white mycelium underneath the clingfilm.

Fruit bodies popping their way up through the clingfilm! A day later....

and a day later still.....

Shortly after that they started to show signs of ageing so I harvested.

I may have left them a little long but they were delicious (and certainly not at all like cardboard). Oyster mushrooms are also supposedly excellent sources of the cholesterol reducing compound lovastatin.

About 3 weeks later I got a second flush

So this really was a simple and delicious project. It was perhaps smaller scale than ideal and I guess the issue for the home mushroom grower is one of scale; producing lots of mushrooms at once is probably not much harder than producing a few at once. Producing a nice staggered harvest for regular consumption is probably tougher. Oysters won't just grow on cardboard but also tree stumps, woodchips, sawdust, straw and coffee grounds and you can also get an array of other strains besides the blue and yellow ones I've grown. I'd definitely recommend giving them a go.

Toads!

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:53:00 +0000

It isn't just big beasts like lions and elephants one can enjoy on safari. A deep bass croaking from a small pool can reveal smaller game....

and where there's croaking toads, there's likely to be toads doing other things.....

echoes of plantsmen past

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 06:42:00 +0000

Oh so typically, municipal tree planting is bland, uninteresting and functional. This is something I often bemoan. I like to imagine that if I had responsibility for such things, in 30 years time people walking through the town or city I had responsibility would frequently wonder at the beauty and weirdness growing, fruiting and/or blossoming amidst the concrete. Every now and again though, I walk through a park or suburban area and am pleasantly surprised by evidence that a like-minded soul was here before me. This is a park in Exeter and this is the biggest Acer griseum I've ever seen.

Acer griseum is a maple native to central china which typically tops out at less than 30 feet (this one was all of that). It was introduced to western cultivation 110 years ago by Ernest "Chinese" Wilson for Veitch's nursery. Wilson is a legend among plant hunters - more than 2,000 species introduced to cultivation (including the Pocket Hankerchief tree discovered by Pere David and the Regal Lily) and namesake to 60 species. The Veitchs meanwhile introduced 1200 species to cultivation in Europe including 49 conifers and such famous species as the giant pitcher Nepenthes rajah while dispatching famous planthunters like the Lobbs and Wilson to what were then the furthest frontiers of exploration. The Veitchs also had one limb of their nursery in Exeter. So Acer griseum comes with serious historical pedigree plus it is rather ornamental. It's common name is paperbark maple.....because it does this:

Spectacular and I love seeing a big one of these in a park in Exeter, thinking of the Veitchs and Wilson out in the wilderness and then thinking of a plantsman 30 or so years ago pondering that history, thinking of the link to the town and a beautiful tree and then beginning to dig a hole.

At the other end of the park was something rather different, arguably more surprising and also with some history.

This is Pinus wallichiana, the Bhutan Pine which is, as its name suggests found in Bhutan and indeed across the Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindu Kush, from eastern Afghanistan across northern Pakistan and India into Yunnan province. It is named for Nathaniel Wallich who sent seed to Europe in 1827 and who like Wilson has a fair bit of planthunter pedigree.

Edited highlights of Wallich's resume include:

First Honorary Curator and First Superintendent of the Oriental Museum of the Asiatic Society.
Superintendent of East India Company's Botanical Garden at Calcutta
In 1822, at the behest of his friend Sir Stamford Raffles he travelled to Singapore to design the botanical garden.
Prepared a catalogue of more than 20,000 specimens which is known informally as the "Wallich Catalog". Today, Wallich's personal collection is housed at the Kew Herbarium as a separate collection, known as the Wallich Collection. In addition to the specimens in the Wallich Collection, Wallich also distributed duplicates of his specimens to herbaria, of note are the duplicates he sent to Sir Joseph Banks, which are in the Kew general collection, outside of the Wallich Collection.
Published two important books, Tentamen Floræ Nepalensis Illustratæ (vols I-II, 1824–26) and Plantæ Asiaticæ Rariores (vols I-III, 1830–32), and went on numerous expeditions.
Regularly offered assistance to the many plant hunters who stopped in Calcutta on their way to the Himalaya.

To the extent that sounds nice but garden oriented bear in mind the significance of rare plants in those days, Wallich was involved in assessing the possibility of tea growing in Assam (you may have subsequently heard of Assam Tea) and both rubber and quinine plants flowed through the Botanic Gardens established in India and Singapore with significant economic results. Pinus wallichiana by contrast simply looks nice.

It is a little tender in the more northern UK (ie mine died) but good in the south and has rather beautiful delciate drooping needles and long drooping cones. There is a monstrous specimen in RBG Kew and I'd thoroughly recommend it to those planning to plant a pine......especially those in public gardens with a sense of showmanship, history and a kindred spirit with plantsmen o the past.

Wordless Wednesday - Stangeria

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:54:00 +0000

whilst photographing the Shiitake on the kitchen windowsillI couldn't resist letting you see a picture of my baby Stangeria eriopus (forest form).

The first elephant

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 11:54:00 +0000

How to describe seeing one's first African Elephant? Well, I looked to my left and there it was striding down a dried up river bed. Beyond that there's not much I can offer.

Elephants in South Africa look like they should be there. If that sounds odd, consider their vast size and unique shape. I've always felt Elephants look slightly ridiculous in zoos and safari parks; impossibly big for their surroundings. In the massive vistas of Kruger though they simply fit.

Check out the foliage on the head. There will be more elephants to come.

hubble bubble toil and trouble

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 06:59:00 +0000

Well, not so much toil but a little bubble. Some of you will recall the saga of my growing out a yellow oyster mushroom kit. I eventually followed that (eventual) success with growing my own blue oysters from spawn on cardboard (which a search suggests I never blogged about - oops! Will fill you in soon). Well here we go again. This is another kit but for a much more delicious (but sadly more difficult to grow) shroom; shiitake (Lentinula edodes). Shiitake has been cultivated for over a millenia and this is a pre-established commercial kit so I'm hardly inventing the wheel but I thought it'd be worth getting experience with the species before I try and grow it myself.

In addition to being delicious Shiitake is believed to be a positive food medicinally; wikipedia tells me that modern research has indicated shiitake mushroom may stimulate the immune system, possess antibacterial properties, reduce platelet aggregation, and possess antiviral properties, possibly through antiviral agents known as proteinase inhibitors.

Active hexose correlated compound (AHCC) is a compound isolated from shiitake which trials suggest may enhance immune function. Apparently a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 21 people supported the idea that AHCC may enhance immune function whilst other studies have shown that AHCC may benefit patients with hepatocellular carcinoma and prostate cancer.

Lentinan, a compound isolated from shiitake, is used as an intravenous anticancer agent in some countries and has been associated with a higher survival rate, higher quality of life, and lower recurrence of cancer.

Wikipedia is not a source I base my medicinal decisions on but all of the above sound like excellent reasons to keep eating something which is delicious.

You can see what look like proto-mushrooms forming in this which I believe is the "popcorn" phase of shiitake growth. I believe this kit is so well colonised it should just start fruiting without any need for cold shocks or drownings. We will see.

Ancients in Profile

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:34:00 +0000

Some ancient and familiar silhouettes line the serpentine. The ancient tree species I love tend to have conveniently recognisable shapes. The "billowing column" almost always means Taxodium distichum (the Bald or Swamp Cypress - in nature they form rather different shapes as they tend to form stands rather than grow in isolation).

It also colours a spectacular burnt orange when autumn arrives. This makes those jade green cones rather stand out.

A spiky "star shaped lolipop" profile means Ginkgo biloba

and Ginkgo biloba means an autumnal gift of a thousand golden crowns....

Exotica of London

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Fri, 25 Nov 2011 03:52:00 +0000

We're having a very, very mild start to the winter. As I type this the last of the day's sun is casting a beautiful light outside with blue sky overhead and a few whisps of cloud. I have a number of Salvias and Nasturtiums still in flower in the garden (actually I have nasturtium seedlings coming up right now!) which is lucky as today my bees were out in force still grabbing what food they could. In London's St James' Park last week though I think I could be forgiven for thinking I was in another country or even continent.....

Bananas (Ensete maurellii) and tree ferns above, more of the same plus all sorts of exotica below including Cycas revoluta (I really hope they get taken in before long and aren't sacrificed to winter even if they are sort of hardy).

In the crab apple trees birds were feeding up for winter albeit perhaps not what one would typically expect to find eating crab apples in an English November.

On the lakes there were more exotica on display. London's Royal Parks are a repositary for all sorts of weird waterfowl, beautiful plastic traps for the unwary newbie birder like ruddy shelduck....

Snow Geese...

Smew (I think)....

Not to mention hooded merganser, wood duck, mandarin, bahama pintail, red crested pochard, whistling ducks and various other geese and ducks. Of course the most famous residents of this pond are the Pigeon-eating Pelicans which I didn't see but I'm pretty sure this Grey Heron was fishing for squirrels....

He was standing amongst a load of nuts a passing tourist had thrown the ducks and squirrels and watching with the sort of intent heron's usually reserve for things they plan on swallowing in a comedy fashion.

A cultural diversion...sort of.

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 06:47:00 +0000

Last week I attended an art exhibition in London's fashionable Shoreditch. Of course the reason I'm mentioning it here is that it was nature-related. Ghosts of Gone Birds is an exhibition which is, in its own words,...

raising a creative army for conservation through a series of multimedia exhibitions and events that will breathe artistic life back into extinct birds species. Ghosts Of Gone Birds celebrates their diversity thru paintings & sculpture, talks & poetry, installations & live music. Plus a series of Ghosts stories that shed light on front line conservation work being done around the world to prevent any more birds migrating to gone status.

Sounds pretty interesting right? Well since I had business in London, I popped along to take a look. What was really fascinating was the way the different artists had approached the subject (especially from my point of view as more of a naturalist than an art lover). Some perfectly replicated the bird in question, others really captured (whilst not making a perfect visual representation of the species) a bird's jizz (or how I'd imagine it). Others focused more on the concept of extinction or telling the sad story of a species extinction (Some lovely riffs on the Stephen Island Wren v. Lighthouse keeper's cat story - a story which like the bird's common name is slightly apocryphal). Extinction is a melancholy subject but a number of the paintings were vibrant celebrations of what has been lost rather than grey pieces of mourning and self-recrimination. Others captured that melancholy perfectly.

Others focused on birds we still have but may not have, Gail Dooley was one with, her raft of albatross busts (some complete with longline hooks) adorning one wall and looking spectacular. Gail's Albatross Project is rather beautiful and each head is spectacular but seeing them gathered like this really gave scale to her work.

Another section of the gallery addresses the issue of hunting in Malta. The bird below is made up of shotgun shells and photos of dead and injured birds shot on the island. The species involved are astonishing. Why any hunter would think it worthwhile to shoot some of them is beyond me and indefensible by any hunter's rationale.

This is one of a number of metal sculptures by Harriet Mead. I believe it is King Island Emu and the painting on the wall behind represents Kangaroo Island Emu but I may have got them the wrong way round....

Below are two pictures of my favourite piece in the whole exhibition. Cally Higginbottom produced a triptych of Bachman's Warblers embroideredinto birch bark. The top picture is part I and the bottom part III....

The unpicked embroidery sums up extinction and its effect rather beautifully and the delicacy and scale of this piece beautifully sums up a tiny and lost american wood-warbler.

Ghosts of Gone Birds was a beautiful if fleeting exhibition but I suspect it is not quite done although the exhibition is finished. The website talks of taking things out of London and I hope that many of you get the chance to see it or a variation of it in future.

Beautiful bats, part II

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:44:00 +0000

Where were we? Oh yes. Under a sun shade in the Kruger national park looking at bats. Now the trick to looking at mammals this size is to really, really look at them. They have just as fascinating behaviours as the big ones do (if not more) but if you don't really, really pay attention you can miss things. Like a momentary opening of wings to reveal a hidden treasure....

Once I'd spotted bub and realised that both it and mother were awake I knew that simply watching closely (I love my telephoto lens!) would show me something. Sure enough baby was restless and it's hard to get comfortable when you're newborn, hanging upside down and mum is licking your wings clean. Sometimes a nice big stretch helps.....

There followed much folding and unfolding of wings and the special kind of stationary fidgetting that my own mother and others from her place of birth refer to as "jiffling". Eventually however comfort was restored and a picture of perfect serenity emerged.

See, told you I could convince anyone bats can be cute!

Beautiful bats in the Brai-shade (pt 1)

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 06:41:00 +0000

In Skukza camp in the Kruger national park there are a number of thatched sun shades for people to rest under and take shelter from the sun whilst enjoying a snack from the cafe, breakfast from the little restaurant or something grilled off the Brai....and under one of those thatched sun shades the chairs and tables are ringed around the edge of the shade leaving and odd gap in the middle....and if one should venture under that shade and look up above that middle one will see a rather unusual sight:

These are epauletted fruit bats, (I'm guessing Wahlberg's epauletted fruit bat, Epomophorus wahlbergi based on what I can work out online) and the white dots you can see are not eyes but the epaulettes. These are false eye spots in essence, a simple defence mechanism designed to confuse predators. The real eyes are a beautiful brown....

I know some people don't get on with bats but I think most people visiting the camp were a little transfixed by these guys. They're big but not huge, have cute faces and do cute things like yawn so it's easy to like them....

Tomorrow you'll see a bat so cute I defy anyone to not fall in love with it...

Wordless Wednesday - beautiful sunshade

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 05:01:00 +0000

Roadside Jacaranda, South Africa

The first lion

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 05:01:00 +0000

The big truck used for night drives by the parks board felt less intimate than the small 6 person jeep we'd ridden in all day....until the shout came. Someone on the other side saw of the jeep saw it first and yelled "Lion on the right". The driver stopped and presumably wondered how he'd missed it. It was huge after all.

A giant male with a thick mane striding towards us through the short grass dwarfing the landscape somehow.

He kept walking, eyes on the truck at all times. He came close enough to allow us to see the scars on his nose and muzzle and the patch on his rear as he turned broadside.

Eventually after staring through us for what seemed an eternity he turned away and sniffed the air.

Something new caught his attention and away he strode leaving a truckload of mindblown tourists.

A little twitch

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 07:36:00 +0000

I had a little twitch yesterday, my first for ages. Actually I had two. A desert wheatear (as opposed to the more standard northern wheatear and the more delicious dessert wheatear) had been seen in an area of the island which habitually gets good birds I can't find after they are reported and I decided to give it a go. Predictably I dipped and more predictably when I checked our local bird news later it had been seen.

More excitingly the same news service informed me of a juvenile red-backed shrike five minutes from my house. This enthused me far more than the wheatear because a) it was located somewhere with relatively few hiding spots and should be easier to find; and b) it was a shrike so should be sat relatively proud and hence easier still to find.

Of course it wasn't that simple and after half an hour all I'd found were some delicious parasol mushrooms. I was just about to give it up and accept a second dip in a day (already consoling myself with delicious garlic mushrooms in my mind) when I clocked the bird flitting into a pine. A quick scan and....boom...red-backed shrike:

It was (as shrikes tend to be) smaller than I expected but beautiful in an understated, confident way.

And with that I laid the ghost of the morning's dip to rest and retreated to the kitchen with my mushrooms.

Delays, delays

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 20:32:00 +0000

It's nearly time for the African megafauna (and microfauna) posts but I'm stuck on a business trip for the next couple of days and really need to get some shuteye......

More next week.

A timely bit of blogging

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 22:03:00 +0000

In case anyone in the UK is currently/has just watched Hippo: Inside Nature's Feast here are some straight from the camera shots from a couple of weeks ago.....

what's that smell?

said at the time: "I love the smell of rotting hippo in the morning.....smells like victory". It actually smells however like death, not victory - seriously unpleasant.

.....unlike their hippo, this one was apparently a lion kill(!). More to come once editing is complete....

Wordless Wednesday - not all black and white

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 21:06:00 +0000

Abberant Plains Zebra (Zebra quagga) illustrating broken patterning

Spitting mad over a DOR Cobra

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 07:15:00 +0000

So I'm struggling to come up with quite where to start telling the story of the African adventure, I guess I'll just dive in and helpfully a fellow blogger has provided a useful jumping off point.

A while back FC posted some beautiful shots of a roadkilled eastern diamondback rattlesnake and whilst in Africa I came across a DOR hot of my own......This is not the way a herper wants to come across his first wild Mozambique Spitting Cobra........

DOR snakes were pretty rare in the park because there were no private cars allowed to drive after dark (I would have LOVED to roadcruise those roads all night - mambas, african rock pythons, cobras, oh my!). That said we did see a couple of live snakes on the roads and this. This was a massive horse of a snake by spitter standards (the shot above gives a good indication of how chunky it is - Naja mossambica tends to top out at 3 foot) and these are also a fast moving species - I'd like to think whoever hit this just got no chance at all as a big snake stretched out of the verge and sped under their wheels. Very, very sad but at least the vultures and kites would have gotten a feed and I'd think this one was big enough to have produced a fair few youngsters already.

The shot below shows the throat patterning on this bad boy; a pattern I'd far rather have seen under a spread hood on a live snake but we have to take what we get.

Elsewhere I'd have been out of the car in a jiffy examining the snake in the hand (having established it's deadness very carefully - "dead" snakes can bite and many snakes (even spitting cobras) fake death very effectively) but in the park leaving the car was forbidden.

Some of you may think examining roadkill is a bit weird but in truth it's a great way to get a really close look at animals one might not otherwise get to see properly. Keeping an eye on roadkill is also a brilliant way to establish the presence and prevalence of animal species in a region and if you don't believe me, the fact brilliant field naturalists like FC and Zick do it to might convince you to stop and check out the roadkill once in a while.....

Home (from the range)

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 18:39:00 +0000

I'm back and here's a picture that should provide a massive clue as to where I've been for the many of you blessed with encyclopedic knowledge (but have not been following @twaihaku on twitter (seriously guys hop in - my follower count is brutal!)).

The clue is not the cattle egret, a bird which has been found on every continent save for Antarctica at this point, but the cattle. Long time followers will know I've a bit of a thing for rare or unusual native cattle breeds

The clue is, as the encyclopedic ones amongst you may have picked up, that the cow is of a breed native to the region I went to; it's a Drakensberger and I think it's a rather handsome breed. Because it's a Drakensberger you'll be able to work out I was in South Africa and that hence spectacularness will hopefully follow.

Sharkin' bycatch!

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:05:00 +0000

We were diving a particularly Egyptian type of dive site - moving along a stretch of coast perpendicular to the shore over a reef which sloped gradually away from us into the deep; not a wall, but not flat either just a gentle slope into the deep. I like these sites. You can dive them at almost any depth simply by moving up or down the slope and if you get that depth just right you can enjoy beautiful reef on one side with all the benefits that brings whilst keeping an eye to the other for bigger things moving along the edge of the coast which they do from time to time......

....and this time something big was moving. I picked it up pretty quickly. Squinting to make out quite a broad shape moving towards us but not quite flat enough to be eagle ray or manta, bowfin guitarfish perhaps? No. Something spins off to one side - it is not one creature but two. Both still two distant to quite recognise. The spin repeats; flashing a whiter belly. Mating sharks perhaps? No again.

In a fraction of a second I've considered and ruled out most of the logical options for something that big. They're moving faster now and coming straight at us and the realisation of how lucky we just got hits and they are on us as I start shooting.......
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DOLPHINS!!

Mother and baby and baby is keen to see what my flash is, banking in to have a look at what made that light. My camera has been playing up all week, the shutter button is jamming and I'm flicking from one unsuitable mode to another trying to get another shot as they shoot past, mother keeping the kid moving and providing a protective flipper to shield and corral her baby.

and then they're past us. Melting back into the blue and one of the most exciting 20 seconds of my diving career has ended and the reef is normal again.

Wordless Wednesday - if the cap fits....

noreply@blogger.com (tai haku) — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:18:00 +0000

Capped Heron (Pilherodius pileatus)