Namaqualand, South Africa

Life beyond the flowers..

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For most people, it is difficult to conceive of Namaqualand as being anything other than part of the spring-flower route, that annual shock of colour which dazzles all who visit the area stretching in a 100-kilometre-wide finger adjacent to the western Cape coast. Each year the flowers attract multitudes of visitors during spring, all determined to see the sunny carpets of Namaqualand daisies.

The tourist industry in Namaqualand is driven by the flower gazers - and it is as ephemeral as the blooms themselves. Places such as Skilpad Nature Reserve close their gates out of season, whilst Goegap Nature Reserve receives on average 85 per cent of its visitors during August and September. Such is the spell cast by the flowers that most visitors leave the area oblivious to the everyday natural dramas that unfold within this floral carpet.

The flower displays act as the catalyst for a whole ensemble of animals and birds to survive in the region, from the smallest of insects to large mammals such as gemsbok and springbok. Each in its own way has developed systems to enable it to survive in this strange world of feast and famine.

What makes Namaqualand such a special area? One of the main reasons is the winter rains it receives. This feature sets it apart from many of the world's other arid regions, such as the Namib and Kalahari, where the rains fall during the summer months. In summer-rainfall regions, flowering plants tend to bloom as quickly as possible, before the searing heat parches them. Yet in Namaqualand with its winter rainfall, the cooler temperatures during the growing season allow the floral carpet to develop slowly through the spring, before the summer heat finally puts paid to the flowers. This period of relative bounty during winter and spring, followed by an unrelentingly hot summer in which almost no rain can be expected, sets the pattern for animal life in the region.

Some animal species are as ephemeral as the flowers themselves and are seen only during the springtime bloom. In many instances these are the insect species. A close inspection of Arctotis or gousblom flowers may reveal a male monkey beetle, his head buried within the flower. The males of some species have enormous back legs that enable them to embed themselves deeply into a flower head as they reach for its rich bounty of nectar, and all that remains to be seen by an observer are the protruding thorax and legs, rather like an upturned duck feeding at the water's surface. The beetle's powerful legs have another purpose which only becomes apparent after he has mated with a female. At such times he will guard his mate from other males which may try to stage a take-over. When an intruding male is detected, the guarding male, using his hind legs, will attempt to grasp the intruder and throw him out of the flower. This can result in bizarre wrestling matches between rival males which can last for more than 30 minutes before a winner is established; sometimes it is the challenging male which expels the unfortunate chaperone from his flower.

Just as interesting are the bladder grasshoppers with their ballooning abdomens. These insects create a large amplification chamber with their bodies, which are partially hollowed out to form resonance chambers. In a bid to attract mates in this vast arid area, the male rasps his hind legs against the chamber and the amplified sound carries over long distances. The grasshoppers call in the early hours of the morning but always stop before dawn, presumably to reduce the threat of bird predation, as a calling male would certainly make a very obvious target. When I first heard the call I assumed it must have been a frog and was surprised when I later discovered what the real culprit was which had kept me from my sleep!

Rodents also take advantage of this time of plenty to breed as females in good body condition are better able to suckle their young. In Namaqualand, wherever there are bushy areas the Karoo bush rat is common. These rather rotund-looking rodents build their characteristic stick nests within the bushes in which they live. A single bush frequently contains a small family group, and with some patience it is often possible to see the bush rats emerging from bushes in the surrounding veld to carry food back to their nests. In fact, an inhabited bush soon acts as a combined shelter and food store as it becomes inundated with a mixture of sticks and fresh green food plants.

While the Karoo bush rat occurs throughout the Nama and Succulent Karoo, one speciality of the Namaqualand region is the dassie rat, which is a rat species and not closely related to the dassie at all. Unlike the bush rats, which are often found associated with dry riverbeds, the dassie rat lives among koppies. Very easy to identify with its long hairy tail and rat-like appearance, the dassie rat is superbly adapted to its rocky existence, having a specially flattened skull and a set of ribs which it can flatten to allow it to creep away into the narrowest of crevices when danger presents.

The dassie rat is one of the few animals that feeds on the kokerboom and the plant's leaves form an integral part of its diet. While the leaves are not eaten by many animals, a kokerboom's flowers certainly attract sunbirds from afar. Three sunbird species are commonly seen in Namaqualand: the brilliantly-coloured malachite, the lesser double-collared and the drabber-looking dusky sunbird. All these birds readily defend kokerbooms for their rich harvest of nectar, as well as the other aloes which bloom through the winter. As the various aloe species flower at different times of winter and spring, the sunbirds are able to utilize this rotation of food sources, a system which obviously benefits the birds while at the same time ensuring that one aloe species is not competing with another for the sunbirds' attention.

As the year advances, the haze of summer heat replaces the winter clouds. By October the chances of more rain falling are slight and the increasing heat of the summer, together with the hot berg winds from the east, conspire against Namaqualand's flower spectacular. While the spring annuals leave behind them a legacy of seed to survive until the next winter rains, many animals must cope with a world seemingly set against them. Not only is this the hottest and driest period of the year, but the rich winter harvest has rapidly disappeared. This is a real test for many of the region's animals, which must survive until at least the next winter when conditions will again be good enough for them to rear their young.

Some, such as the common molerat, take a rather specialized approach to the problem of making it through the summer. During spring, when the soil is moist and relatively easy to dig, colonies of these industrious excavators get busy. Testimony to their digging efforts are the large number of earth mounds which appear in sandy areas during this earth-moving operation. In order to survive, individuals must co-operate in these efforts, building underground highways that lead to patches which are relatively rich in underground bulbs and tubers. By the time summer is upon them, the soils are much drier, harder and more difficult to dig through. Yet the molerats have already done their 'ground work' to survive the summer and they can continue to access these good patches of ground without expending energy. Without this forethought and their communal labour it is doubtful whether the colonies would survive.

The molerats' tunnels serve a dual function. Below the soil surface the temperature is far cooler than it is on the ground and the tunnels serve as a refuge from the midday sun. Many rodents use this approach in order to escape the day's heat. At night, species such as the hairy-footed gerbil emerge from their relatively cool underground nests to feed on the harvest of seeds that are waiting for the winter rains to fall again. These small rodents are specialized to derive maximum benefit from what little water they can glean from this rather dry diet. Their kidneys are very well developed, designed to extract every last drop of water from the seeds and prevent it from being eliminated in their urine.

While this may seem like a logical adaptation to have evolved for coping with water stress, it is not a universal solution adopted by all the small rodents of the region. Brants' whistling rats, for instance, produce relatively dilute urine, yet they have solved the problems associated with water balance in a different way. Namaqualand is renowned for its wealth of mesembryanthemums, with the region containing an unequalled diversity of these plants. They are characterized by their fleshy leaves, which yield much water when squeezed. Yet compounds within the leaves make them unpalatable to most animals and this ready source of moisture remains untapped. Whistling rats, however, thrive on mesemb leaves and are particularly partial to feeding on this source of water, as well as on other succulent plants that are common in the region.

Today Namaqualand is largely parcelled into a series of farms, each carefully fenced from its neighbour. While this is obviously necessary in order to keep domestic stock on the right properties, it has effectively closed off some of the ancient migration routes that used to be available to game species. The narrow winter-rainfall belt in which Namaqualand lies is bordered to the east by the summer-rainfall region of Bushmanland. In the past, grazers such as springbok and gemsbok used to migrate between the two areas, making use of the abundant grasses that can emerge in Bushmanland during the summer, but favouring the annual vegetation that appears in Namaqualand after its winter rains. Certainly, some of the famous springbok treks of old in which vast aggregations of animals moved en masse were associated with the failure of the rains in Bushmanland and the westwards movement of the springbok in search of greener pastures within Namaqualand. Today any larger antelope stock kept on farms or reserves are imprisoned within either the summer- or winter-rainfall regimes and are unable to move between the two. In reasonable rainfall years this does not pose too much of a problem; however, when faced with a drought period, such as the failure of the winter rains within Namaqualand during 1998 and the continuing drought into 1999, large numbers of animals face starvation, with their traditional 'escape routes' no longer open to them.

A group of animals that appears to thrive during the hot summer months is the region's reptiles. Namaqualand is something of a herpetological paradise, with many unusual and interesting species occurring in the region. It owes this distinction to its climate - the transition from the western arid zone in the north to the temperate areas further south has led to a wealth of reptilian diversity, with many endemics being restricted to very narrow ranges even within the region. Perhaps best known are the girdled lizards, of which the Karoo girdled lizard is the most likely to be seen as it commonly occurs in diffuse colonies on small rock outcrops and koppies. When disturbed, individuals dart into rock crevices, curling their tails over their heads which makes it very difficult to prise them out. Namaqualand is also a hotspot of gecko diversity, where closely related species appear to replace each other through the region rather than occurring in overlapping ranges.

The onset of warm weather in September and October heralds the beginning of the barking gecko chorus. While these small geckos are some of the most elusive reptiles to see, the air at dusk may become filled with their clicking-barking calls as they open up in full chorus. As with the bladder grasshoppers, the callers are males, proclaiming their territories and endeavouring to attract a mate.

The biology of many of Namaqualand's endemic reptiles is poorly understood and new species are still being described; two new gecko species in the Richtersveld were described as recently as 1997. The dearth of herpetological knowledge extends to the amphibians as well, with a new species of toad, the paradise toad Bufo robinsonii, being described from the Richtersveld in 1987, while a new species of clicking stream frog, Strongylopus springbokensis, was described in the mid-1980s. It is obvious that far more research needs to be conducted before we discover the full extent of Namaqualand's herpetological diversity, let alone the ecological requirements of individual species and what steps need to be taken to conserve them.

Namaqualand always has something fascinating to offer the visitor. While there is no doubt that the region is most famous for its spring flower spectaculars, these form only a small part of the area's natural bounty. Between the flowers there are many creatures leading a life just as fascinating, and long after the flowers are gone some of the real magic of Namaqualand remains, continuing to defy the harsh reality of its arid summers.

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