We’re away for the weekend and I want to relax.
But I still have to blog.
Thankfully, the fact that my beer fits in perfectly with the mosaic table here means that a quota photo is fairly straightforward.
But it would be awful if I just left it there and enjoyed the coordination.
So let me get to that now.
Dictyophorus spumans to his and her friends.
These guys were plentiful in the long grass on the west side of Koringberg over the weekend.
Fully 10cm long and CHUNKY, they’re actually harmless – unless you try to eat them.
And we weren’t about to do that.
I’m fairly sure that this is a female (big one) and a male (little one), but I’m no expert.
Their name comes from their ability to secrete a toxic foam as a defence mechanism from their thoracic glands. The toxins come from their diet, which includes Milkweed – and if you’ve ever encountered milkweed sap, well, you know.
But despite having a face that only a mother could love, they kept themselves to themselves, despite having a lens shoved (probably) a bit too close to them.
So don’t let them put you off coming to South Africa.
It’s the lions and the hippos you need to watch out for.
Quocust = Quota Locust.
Obviously.
I’ve been going through some images from earlier in the year: mainly just to check that they’d all been backed up successfully onto the family server and the external hard drive (they had). And I found myself tinkering in Lightroom with the odd one here or there. This was one of them, taken on our footy club’s weekend away in April. These guys (the insect here, not the footy club) are fairly common visitors to our back garden in Cape Town, although this one was a little further inland.
This is a Garden Locust (Acanthacris ruficornis). Fairly innocuous on his own, but you wouldn’t want too many of them around, nibbling your plants and eating your crops. There’s no scale here, but he’s probably about 7cm long.
I don’t really remember taking this photo, but I actually quite like the way that I’ve thrown caution to the wind as far as considering any sort of balance to the image.
It still works. (For me, at least.)
Not me telling you to look at my Instagram for weekend away content and then not posting anything.
We were having too much fun drinking, relaxing, walking, eating…
Not necessarily all at once.
Sorry.
Please accept a QP’d Dassie as some sort of recompense, and I’ll dig something out when I’ve had a chance to sit down and edit…
The sun is out! A lazy-ish morning, with a nice 6.5km run through the mud in the posh bit of Cape Town, followed by a trip to the butcher and the bottle store has left me with very limited time before I test out my new wares on and around the braai this evening.
And the things I need to do (including this), are stacking up a bit.
With that in mind, please accept this shot of Hout Bay, and then I can get on with my jobs.
See you tomorrow, folks!