Categories
Astro-photography Astronomy Cape Town Photography Table Mountain

Floodlit Table Mountain

On special occasions, the Council switches on huge spot lights and lights the front face of Table mountain. Tonight is one of those nights.

Table mountain is shown in the bottom third of the  photo. I havent fiddled the white balance so the mountain is a green colour which is quite nice.
The rest of the image has stars in a black background
The top cable car station is visible on the flat top of the mountain
Table mountain is shown in the bottom third of the  photo. I havent fiddled the white balance so the mountain is a green colour which is quite nice.
The rest of the image has stars in a black background
The top cable car station is visible on the flat top of the mountain
Categories
Birding Cape Town Photography

Intaka Island

Intaka Island is a wetland and bird sanctuary resulting from a requirement to preserve an existing wetland and provide water purification.
You can see the website here:
We recently visited the sanctuary and enjoyed the peace and serenity offered by the place despite being in the middle of a built up area of Cape Town.

A White Breasted Cormorant posing for us
Black Capped Night Heron
Red Eyed Dove – morning ablutions
Egyptian Geese chicks
A cormorant leaving the district rapidly.

Floating water weed covers part of the main pool.

Categories
Cape Town Door Photography

Reflections

On a walk around Cape Town I took a picture of a church door. Only when I got home did I see that Table Mountain was reflected in the window panes above the door.

Categories
Cape Town Photography Western Cape

Clouds over Signal Hill

Lockdown and I spent some time trying to capture the beauty of the clouds over Signal Hill.
Time lapse taken over a 10 minute period.

Categories
Cape Town Poetry Travel

Poem: Theewaterskloof

The Western Cape was hit by a crippling drought. The level of the main storage dam, Theewaterskloof dropped to 25% and vast tracts of it were just dust and loose sand instead of water. I had this poem rattling around in my head and it just demanded to be written.

Dust bowl dam. Sun light glitters, stark on pale
Bone white surfaces, black stark tree skeletons,
Dry shod, heat struck, sand blasted we cross
The sparkling dam that once was and is no more
Oven heat scrapes roughly across our exposed skin
Slitted eyes blink against the wind hurled dust
No breath to spare for the pointless vital question
What have we done? What have we left our children.

Theewaterskloof

Categories
Astro-photography Cape Town Photography Table Mountain

Nighttime over Gardens

Living in Gardens Cape Town is a privilege. The views are extraordinary. Here are some night time photos. Venus and the moon in close conjunction.

Categories
Birding Cape Town Photography Travel Western Cape

Birding on the Symphonia

We went on a cruise with 2000 other birders looking for pelagic birds.

We got some really great shots and had a really good time. We left Cape Town in the late afternoon

Lions head and Table Mountain

The sunset was marvelous

Then next day, the birds

And then back again.

There is a video here

 

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Categories
Art Cape Town

Casspir Project – SA National Gallery

Amanda and I ended up going to the SANG today and found the most amazing military vehicle. A Casspir, completely covered in bead work with a Bible quotation to justify the work. Absolutely beautiful, and in another sense horrible.
You decide.
Photo credits to Amanda and I as I am not sure who shot which image.

But first a description of the art work by the gallery

 

Categories
Cape Town Photography

Another Cape Town

Cape town is known for its mountains, seascapes, vineyards and general lazy attitude to life. We all recognise the iconic Table Mountain.


But there are other Cape Towns, one of which I found when walking to work. Join me on a walk from Belleville Station up to Voortrekker St.
Cape Town has a large Muslim community.


Shops have mannequins on the pavement outside the tiny shops.



A shopkeeper chains his mannequin to the shop.


Many of the stores carry a mix of products for sale.


And supply hawkers with bulk supplies.


This place is no exception to the multiple income stream business


A herbalist alongside and arcade.

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Categories
Birding Cape Town

Birding Trip Down the Cape Peninsula

We were approached to test an app for logging birds during a competition. The organisers needed people to log birds from all over the country in an arbitrary manner. We volunteered.

My wife Amanda and I live in Cape Town on the slopes of Table Mountain.

Table mountain is the  base of a triangle of land, a peninsula and being really original, we call it “The Peninsula” but we may on occasions refer to parts of it as the “South Peninsula”.

The first European name of “The Peninsula” was the “Cape of Storms” so named by a very wind blown Portuguese explorer who was blown past the tip of Africa and had to beat his way back to find land again. This picture of a yacht under a single genoa sail and trailing a sea anchor will give you and idea of the power of our local wind.

Winds can gust up to 70 km/h which is when  the harbour is closed, people get blown off their feet and buses get blown over. Cape Town is beautiful, but you do not really want to go out in one of our serious gales. You can see pictures of a serious winter storm here. We did, and survived. We reserved tent in the Smitswinkel Tented camp for Saturday evening and set out at 12 on Saturday morning to our first stop, Milnerton Lagoon. The mountain on the right is Devils Peak

It doesn’t look windy but at that stage it was blowing at about 30 km/h. The white spots you can see in the water are Greater Flamingos. In the following picture, Pied Avocecs work the mad flats.

Having scored about twenty bird species we moved on to Intaka Island and still in sight of  a bit ofTable Mountain and Devils Peak through the construction site. The cloud you can see is the Table Cloth and only arrives when the wind is really moving.

Intaka island is a water reclamation site for Century City. It really is a special place surrounded by the city and is open to the public. You can take a ferry from the big shopping centre and cruise at your leisure around the whole area. Read more about Intaka here. We scored the cute picture of the day here too.

Red Knobbed Coot chicks just starting to fledge.

Bath time, weavers in partial mating plumage. We moved onto Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens where we “knew” there were baby owls to be seen. No such luck they had moved on. But the scenery and the flowers made up for it.

The top picture is a Mountain Dahlia and the bottom one is an unusual picture of a King Protea. Normally they are shown fully open. This one is partially open which, I think makes a nice difference. Kirstenbosch is in the Fynbos Biome which has the most species of plants (9000 ) in any biome but it is also the smallest biome in area. See more on Kirstenbosch here.

We moved on towards Smitswinkel bay and we both assumed we knew where the tented camp was. Down by the sea, at Smitswinkel bay.

You can see the settlement with the end of the peninsula, Cape Point, in the distance. The only access is down a gravel path so we loaded our bag with sleeping bags, dinner and a bottle of bubbly and set off down.

Only to find that the tented camp was back up the slope and 2 km further. Please note that the bay is a jealously guarded piece of property and visitors are not really welcome. So we climbed back up, drove the 2 km and found the tented camp.

Nestled in a grove of wind blasted flowering gums, it is one of the overnight stations for the four day Hoerikwagga Hiking Trail which traverses the Table Mountain chain.

The accommodation is basic, but comfortable. Problem is that when the wind is blowing the tent thunders quite dramatically.

By this stage we had gotten 44 birds and were seriously considering going straight home, but the Cape Point Nature reserve was right next door, so next morning we headed that way.

Looking back toward Cape Town, the sea blown flat by the howling wind. The wind was really strong, we watched with some amusement as a Cape Longclaw flew up, was blown backwards, gave up and took to walking.

Everlastings. The hillside was covered in them.

A Black Headed Heron caught and lost a snake, then stood staring into the bush the snake had vanished into for a long while before giving up and moving on.

This is a screen shot of the BirdLasser App we use for tracking our sightings. A great app, limited to South Africa.

In all we got 62 birds, which considering the wind was not a bad score