Colours of Wildlife: Exploring Makgabeng
Created | Updated 5 Weeks Ago
Exploring Makgabeng
Willem is a wildlife artist based in South Africa. He says "My aim is simply to express the beauty and wonder that is in Nature, and to heighten people's appreciation of plants, animals and the wilderness. Not everything I paint is African! Though I've never been there, I'm also fascinated by Asia and I've done paintings of Asian rhinos and birds as well. I may in future do some of European, Australian and American species too. I'm fascinated by wild things from all over the world! I mainly paint in watercolours. . . but actually many media including 'digital' paintings with the computer!"
Today I want to share with you a few photos I took while accompanying my herpetologist fried, Ruan Stander, to the Makgabeng Plateau region. We weren't much on the plateau though, we were hiking over some of the flat regions below the main plateau, but we did get onto a low rocky hill where we had good views.
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Just to let you folks know about the plateau. It is a region situated in the far northwestern corner of South Africa, a tad to the south of the Blouberg Mountain. It is a wild and sparsely-inhabited part of our country, but with a rich cultural and natural heritage. Around the plateau, there are more than 1000 sites of ancient rock art. Rock art usually survives from being situated under overhangs or in caves where they're protected against the elements. Amazingly these had been produced not by one but several groups of peoples: San or Bushmen hunter-gatherers, KhoeKhoe herders, and forebears of the present-day Pedi or Northern Sotho people, who were farmers. The region has a record of sorts of the interactions of all these different groups, which makes it of considerable historic interest. This region is where the late stone age hunter-gatherers managed to survive the longest in South Africa, up until the nineteenth Century.
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As to its natural features, the plateau is composed of ancient and eroded slabs of sandstone. These rocks are quite different from the nearby Blouberg and Soutpansberg mountain ranges. They're also unique in how they were formed. Most sandstone formations in the world were made by sands being washed into lakes or inland seas, where they built up into thick layers which hardened there and later were raised up. But the Makgabeng sandstones appear to have been deposited without water – they were layers and layers of sand deposited by winds in a vast desert! What's more, this happened about two billion years ago! This is indeed the oldest remnants of an ancient desert we know about. Even better, there are traces of life – cyanobacteria that apparently at that early age were already starting to adapt to living on land, and in quite a harsh climate too!
When it comes to wildlife and plants, Makgabeng shelters a rich diversity. The plateaus have connections with the Blouberg and the Waterberg ranges, while the low-lying regions around them are similar to the Kalahari Desert which covers most of the country of Botswana and the Northern Cape. There is at least one plant species endemic to Makgabeng, Streptocarpus makabengensis. This is a strange plant with no stems, only leaves that root directly on rock surfaces, and bear the small but pretty flowers.
Ruan and I were basically looking for reptiles on the day, and were lucky to find several. Most intriguingly, we found a nest of skink eggs! Now you may not realize what's so strange about that, unless you know a bit about the biology of Southern African skinks. These ubiquitous and versatile little lizards are – known to be live-bearers! Except when they aren't. Amazingly, even one and the same species, can sometimes give birth to live babies, and other times lay eggs. So we found concrete evidence that at least this one species can occasionally procreate by way of oviparity. The second astonishing thing is that we found 13 eggs in one 'nest'. Again you may wonder what's funny about that. Well, seeing as these eggs produce rather large and well-developed youngsters, they're very large compared to the adult lizards. Each egg was a tad over 1 cm in length. But the body of an adult female skink is only about 6 cm in length, and less than 1 cm wide. There was no way to fit 13 such eggs into a single female! It must have been a communal nest. We've no data on communal nesting for any skink in South Africa!
Well I don't have any photos of the lizards, so instead here I show you some photos of the landscape and trees and flowers. I hope this gives you a little sense of the wild beauty of Makgabeng!
Sadly, this unique region is under threat. There are people who want to mine for Platinum, and their mining explorations and operations will likely damage both the natural and cultural sites. We're now fighting a battle over here to maintain the protected status of Makgabeng.
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