Frary's Fresh Flowers

After the first big rains of the year in Soyo the flying ants would come out in huge numbers - the air used to be full of them for an afternoon and here is what happened the next morning - there were sheets of them hanging from the office walls. They are a fair size too. looking at the pictures again you can see that the ants are in dotted masses. I think that at the cwenter of each dot is a female - a potential queen for a future colony, and there are males all around fighting to mate with her.

Let me finish off the wildlife photos from Angola with a couple of the lizards that hung around the yard basking in the sun on the hot concrete some afternoons (well only really on Sat and Sunday as the yard would be busy during the week).

And I think that that is the lot - the sum of 2 years in Soyo. I wish that I had been into photographing flowers more then so I had ore to show you but after this it is back to Tipperty and the cold North East of Scotland.

Now what does this insect look like to you - to me it looks like a huge great bluebottle - same blue shiney wings and big eyes.  It is at least 3 centimetres long possibly 4 centimetres. Again one of the insect I found early in the morning when arriving at work (the lights on the office attracted them).
But when i looked again I became fairly coinvinced that this was a case of mimicry and that this is actually a moth pretending to look like a fly.
First off is the size - it's huge for a fly - secondly I'm fairly certian that it has 4 wings not two (flies are the order Diptera Di- two, ptera - wings.) I have heard of this sort of mimicry before (but can't tell you if it is Batesian mimicry where a harmless species mimics a poisonous species, or Mullerian mimicry where two poisonous species look like each other, because this insect was still alive and I was not about to poke around the wings of a 4 cm long fly/moth which might bite me at any time.)the local workers were unimpressed and frankly bemused by my excitement at seeing this insect and my taking of munerous photos, just like I guess the average aberdonian might be bemused by my excitement at seeing black-backed sea gull or a buzzard (both huge birds not typically found in Grimsby in the 70s. But i guess even the most jaded of Aberdonians might understand if I became excited at seeing a Golden Eagle or an Alien Big Cat or a capercaillie around these parts (none of which I have seen but all of which i live in hope of seeing).
I still get excited everytime I see a pheasant by the side of the road... or a wild dear... hey my heart still has a small flutter even i even see a kestrel. it'a amazing how little I have become jaded by so many things.  Such is life for a big-kid such as me.

I found another picture of yesterday's praying mantis - this shjows the roundel (the circular bullseye) on the wing covers and shows the tripiness of the legs much clearer. Here is a quick video I made (on a camera not a video  so quality not brilliant) showing the jerky movement. Not sure why it would move like that -- it's not as if it would make it less noticeable!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=up1i8gR5xUo

And then there is yet a third praying mantis that I snapped while out there - not too clear because of the crppy background - though it does demonstrate the effectiveness of their camoflague I guess- what is it with me and mantisesessess. I'm sure they would hiss like a snake if they could talk....

The photo above is one of my favourite ones and possibly the best picture I have ever taken. I was just so lucky that the autofocus hit the highlight in the eye almost exactly right. This deadly wee thing was about the size of my thumb and jerkedup the post towards me one morning in Soyo. The stripes on the legs are clearly camoflague so that it can sit poised on grass or leaves ready to strike. The wing covers hand dark green roundells on them - as if this were a crack aircraft for Mother Nature's airforce.
In contrast the praying mantis below is much longer and thinner and all green with a pink tinge to the thorax. I remember it as much bugger but I guess six inches is enough for anyone (or so I keep telling my wife).  You can see that the matis is looking up - I was holding my finger above it. As i moved my finger around the mantis' gaze followed my finger - it was like a puppy or a kitten or a baby watching a shiney object and just following the dancing ball - amazing - but then they do have those big eyes with tight psedo-pupils - they are very good visually. They always seem more intelligent than other insect but i am sure that this is anthropomorphism - humans always seem to admire predators much more than prey - lions and tigers and bears (oh my) are classic cuddly toys. It is only big herbivores that seem to capture humans imaginations where sheer size becomes important (elephants, hippos and rhinos) whereas your standard grazer wandering across the plains or through the forest in huge numbers like gazelles, wildebeests, cattle are not really lionized very often (note the word).  Why lions should be cuddly I don't know - where was I ?
Praying mantids Love them.
They were always one of those insects i wanted to see in the wild - they were one of the most exotic ones in the insect books I looked at as a kid. Praying mantids, swallowtail butterflies, stick insects, ichnumen flies, hornets, rhinoceros beetles, stag beetles - again the big and the weird - that I hoped to see some day. Supposedly praying mantids are occasionally found in Southern England but it took over 20 year before i saw my first - in Fiji - and managed to take a dozen pictures (expensive in the pre-digital days).Once i see one on the roses in Aberdeen then I'll know that global warming is too far gone and time to stop worrying.

I wass stationed for just over 2 years in Soyo in Angola which is 6 degrees south of the equator. It is roughly six months of rain and six months of dry - very dry. When it rains the whole place comes to life - birds fly in from all over and so do the bugs. As you can see from the photos the grass sprouts, pools form and everyhthing looks rosie - the birds in the pictures are wooly-necked storks and various egrets - beautiful white herons - they look very delicate but are pretty robust - you see them up to their knees in rubbish in Luanda.
And the bugs are big - very big, massive. This bug is a water scorpion (which is the insect we were given for a practical exam in the finals when i did my Biology degree in York) It is one of the biggetst insects I have ever seen and certainly the biggest I've seen in the wild. piercing mouthparts, big claws on the front, and a snorkel sticking up from the back.  Fortunately it was dead when I had it on my hand

So why these piccies on a gardening site - well there are trees there , and grass and one thing always troubled me about most of the trees alongside the road in Angola - they are all painted white up to around 1 metre high or higher. I thought that it might be an anti-pest thing, or decoration but it turns out to be an safety thing - it so you can see the trees at night - simple really. And it troubled me for ages. What an idiot I am.

The crabs and the water hyacinths yesterday were photographed on the river side of patron beach (the first place that the Portugese landed in Angola). I took the first picture there too - see if you can spot the animal in the picture before you scroll down to the bottom pictures.
The beach is a spit of land that stretches out into the Congo river - not too far out as the flow of the Congo is huge (the second biggest outflow of a river - the biggest is the Amazon). I was told that the river was up to 600 metres deep at the mouth -0 it certainly wasn't very wide at the mouth - it didn't seem much bigger than the Humber river (I'm from Grimsby on the banks of the humber) and i could clearly see the other side of the river from Soyo - Angola - the DRC - the Democratic Republic of the Congo... I love writing that - the Congo - to think that I have seen the congo and even dipped my toes in it - it sounds so much more exotic than it was in reality. I just love the sound of the name - the Congo - it's a real Heart of Darkness /exotic feel to it. When i was in Fiji for 5 years and used to write letters home - on paper, with a pen - real letters - remember them? - anyway when i was there i would always end my address with Fiji, The South Pacific. Now that sounded so exotic too - I loved writing that - the South Pacific....
Anyhow the Congo - I must say some more aboout the river and the water hyacinths when I get the time - and Patron beach - well the spit is covered with dry scrub mainly consisting of vines, rough grass and palms. Now i'm not too good on palms - I can recognise Royal palms, Coconut palms (fromn tFiji naturally - never saw coconut palms in Angola (or libya) which suprised me) and now Date palms (from libya) but that is kind of my limits at the moment. I thought that i could recognise fan palms (as in the photo below but it turns out that there are at least 12 genera of palms called fan palms never mind the number of species! Some fan palms are hardy even up to Scotland (on the milder West coast bathed in the gulf stream no doubt - not across our side of the country)
back to Patron Beach - scrubs of palms, vines and grasses.

Anyhow i snapped the picture at the start of this entry - just turned the camera upside down and photographed from underneath a 20 foot high palm tree.
it was only much later that I spotted the animal hidden among the leaves.
Did you spot it?
Perhaps if we turn the picture upside down

No? What about if i make it a little closer - show more details?

still nothing - what about a big big clue?

got it?
big bats hidden up there hanging around waiting for the night. I'm fairly sure that they aren't flying foxes like you see flying around during the day in Fiji but they are definitely fruit bats and a fair size at that to show up in a distance photo. The other weird thing is that they seem to have two sets of eyes - well either that or a set of eyes and a set of stumpy horns... weird or what.

After yesterday's depressing picture of the whale i thought that i ought to prove that not every animal that i photograph is dead.
here is a crab from the patron Beach at the very mouth of the Congo river - I managedd to find my pictures from Angola so i thought I'd share some of the more natural ones.
These crabs hang arounf the roots of the watr hyacinths that float down the Congo from the great rain forest 9and also from the local waterways. here is one doing just that - hiding among the roots that is.


Water hyacinths are quite fascinating plants - they look too big and bulky to be able to float - I meant the one with the crab is at least a foot in height from the water level - and there isn't that much of the plant below the surface (see below).
Until i checked my sources. It's all down to the (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_hyacinths) I hadn't realised that they are native only to the Amazon basin - I mean i knew that they were very invaisive to the lakes in East Africa (and in the water ways in Fiji too) but i thought that they were more widely native than they are - they aren't native to the Congo basin For example where these photos are from.
they can double their population in 14 days! now that is impressive.
I have seen them for sale in the UK for ponds (naturally) but I wouldn't think that they would survive the winter - although losts of areas in S America are as cold or colder than the UK (think of the Andes or tiera delFuego) and the Amazon is sourced in the andes so there may be UK hardy plants out there.
Here is some advice from http://www.perfect-pond-detective.com/faqs29.htm o someone in Halesowen in the UK
"Some people I have had news from had even left them out of doors with the pots sunk deep into the ground. This was in Canada and it gets cold up there and although the foliage went black and mushy, the plants recovered in spring. Straw over the top may have added a little more protection. Only try this if you have a lot of plants to spare! "
Recommendation is to keep over winter in a frost free greenhouse or to bury deep and then cover with straw (like with half hardy fuchsias). if the plants can double in number every two weeks then you only need to keep one or two alive and you'll be okay for the next year. I might try some next year in the black bins we use as heat sinks in the green house - I wonder if the flowers make good cut flowers?

Quick apoologies for the lack of posts for the past few weeks. - I was only at home for one week and since I've got back every evening has seemed to be busy with every day full as the annual plan comes into view. Boring work stuff that is totally unrelated to flowers and plants - as is this post.
One of the... highlights?... could you call it a highlight - well something I had wanted to see, in a way though ... anyhow - a sperm whale beached on Balmedie Beach about 5 miles south of us and 5 M north of Aberdeen. The authorities rteckon that it was dead or very close to death when it beached and was certainly gone by the time anyone in authority arrived.
I battled through a huge cold wind and pouring rain to gawk at it as did many others - as I knew that his mioght be my only chance ever to see a real sperm whale.
The body was the size of a school bus and stank to high heaven by the time I saw it 2 days after death. Despite the roaring gale blasting off the sea across the beach it was still possible to smeel the carcase from 100m down the beach. How the smell could possibly reach that far I don't know. But it did.
Even an hour after leaving I could still smell/taste the dead whale in my throat and my wife said that she could smell it on my clothes (which had been sand blasted at the time).
There were a couple of things about the whale which I knew intellectually (had read/seen) but which I didn't truly appreciate until I saw the body. The head is at least 1/3 of the body length but the thing that really amazed was the narrowness and thiness of the lower jaw. I guess i had always seen pictures/videop of the whales from the side where the mass of the lower jaw is hidden and you imagine that it more like a side portrait of a person but, as you can see from below - the bottom jaw is maybe six inches to a foot across at most while the head is a good two to three metres thick. it is as if a toothpick was laid along the underside of a potato -very strange.

So is it weird to push through driving rain to look at a dead body. it knid of has the same fascination as exotic road kill - I have only ever seen badgers as road kill - two or three times around Aberdeenshire - and the size of them was amazing. I guess that for many of us roadkill is as close as we get to most big wildlife nowadays but at least it is a real experience as opposed to watching something on the TV where the picture may be prettier and the surroundings are more comfortable but TV can never replace an actual experience (even if it is of a dead animal) same as watching gardening shows will never replace smelling a real flower.
I could go on for a while wittering on about real vs reported and dead vs live but I won't. I'll just apologise once again for the lack of posts and assure you that I will be posting a bit more frequently in the runup to the end of the year.

Well I've been back almost a week and it has been a miserable few days weather-wise, rain, rain... and then it rained some more. Until yesterday which was clear which meant that we had our first strong frost of the year - oh joy - winter is kicking in. Fortunately I ghad managed to move most of the fuchsias into the greenhouse so they might avoid freezing and last out the coming winte.
Brrrrrrr - I'm shivering already - and that is in the house after haviong the heating on all evening. How our new "Lipstick Vine" will survive I don't know. minimu temperature is supposed to be 13C well there's no way it will survive the winter in our house then. Not only is it a cold house (the walls are solid) but my wife has the abnnotying habit of leaving the top windows open during the day while she is out.
It does mean that the air is fresher but it also means that the house cools down during the day so that all that heat in the morning is totally wasted and then if yoyu don't get the windows closed early enough - before it gets dark (around 4pm in winter) then the hous freezes in the eveniong before the heating comes on.
But try telling my wife that (or my mother) and it's ignored - because she doesn't pay the damn heating bill that's why.

Well I can't see our new vine surviving even up until December so that's £7.98 wasted at B&Q - we bought it because the leaves were so unusual - they look like christmas bunting- those loop streamer things - fascinating.