Summer VISITORS

Now that we have entered the prelude to summer with the late spring rain, we also have the pleasure of welcoming various summer visitors, like the cuckoos, the European roller, the bushveld kingfisher and other bird species who do not stay over in winter but take wing to warmer climates.

The interesting thing about these bird species is that somehow they know when to leave the region wherever they stay in winter and trek southwards.  I want to single out a few of these bird species as they have peculiar attributes, like, for instance the redchested cuckoo, the Afrikaans name is the Piet-my-vrou, from a rendering of the calls they make.  We can hear them calling endlessly, not only in daytime, but also during the night, but they are not easy to see, as they hide in the top branches of high trees for long periods during which they call.  They come from regions in central Africa and normally arrive in our region in October and leave again in April, but this year they only arrived in November.  The reason for this delay is that we have not had sufficient rain in October and these birds live mainly on caterpillars which only appear when the humidity is high, which means that the cuckoos sit somewhere in the Congo but in some way they know exactly when we will be having the first decent spring rain and they frequently appear about a day or three before the rain!  We are not quite sure how they know exactly when to come, because I do not believe that they watch the weather reports on TV!

They are extremely bad parents, the female lays one egg per nest in the nest of other local breeding birds like various robins, thrushes and chats and leaves the upbringing of their children to the poor birds in whose nest the egg is laid, and not only that, but their chicks throw out the host bird's eggs or chicks within four days after hatching!  Some of the other cuckoo species do not throw out the host's chicks, they just trample them to death and some of them even demand to be fed for a few weeks after they are big enough to leave the nest and fend for themselves!

Good by for now!

Oupa

CHANGED TEACHERS?

The wise king of Israel, Solomon, is credited with saying: "Lazy people should learn a lesson from the way ants live" (Proverbs 6:6, Good News Bible).  The other day I came to the conclusion that things have changed since Solomon's time and that the animals and birds are "aping" the ways of the humans (if the apes will excuse me using this way of stating different behaviour of non-humans).

Around first light, just about every morning, my friend, the duiker ram, appears and expects to be given his daily ration of papino and he usually stands around until I get around to giving him his ration and most mornings I take a quantity of chicken feed out at the same time for the spur fowls (previously called francolins!) of which we have a family of five, Pop, Mom, and three half grown youngsters.  Two mornings ago, I did not take out the chicken feed at the same time as I put out the papino and I had hardly closed the door behind me when the five spur fowl started kicking up a noise and toi-toing around the duiker who was enjoying his breakfast.

The only conclusion I could come to was that the spur fowls had learnt that some humans tend to congregate and wave placards and shouting "we demand ….. ", and in general making a nuisance of themselves in order to get what they think they are entitled to, and just like the humans, the noise and dancing and shouting tend to minimize as soon as they get what they demanded!

As the Romans used to say:  O, tempora! O, mores!

Oupa.

THE BOSS

Surely we all know a person to whom this is 100% applicable:

1. The Boss is ALWAYS right.
2. The Boss does not SLEEP, he RELAXES.
3. The Boss does not READ the paper, he STUDIES it.
4. The Boss does not HESITATE, he REFLECTS.
5. The Boss is not LATE, he has been DELAYED.
6. The Boss is not WRONG, he is MISUNDERSTOOD.
7. The Boss does not GO OUT, he is ABSENT.
8. The Boss does not COMPLICATE, he ORGANIZES.
9. Enter the office of the Boss with YOUR IDEA and leave with HIS IDEA.
10. In case of doubts, rule No. 1 applies.

Oupa

safari new prices

SNAKES

We live in a region where there are supposed to be many snakes, but in the 5½ years we have been living here, I have seen only five snakes (an average of about one per year!) and only one of those was potentially very dangerous, namely a mamba lying in the shade of a car parked in front of our house. The other four were two harmless spotted bush snakes, one mildly venomous redlipped snake and one dangerous young puff adder.

Many people have very confused ideas about snakes, as a snake expert, Johan Marais, points out in his book A Complete Guide to the Snakes of Southern Africa. He lists some of the misconceptions:
You frequently hear about large mambas, stretching from one side of the road to the other, but the maximum size recorded is about 4,5 m.
All snakes spit their venom! Wrong, in our area only the rinkhals and the Moçambique spitting cobra do that.
The snake can sting with its forked tongue! Nonsense, its tongue is only for smelling, it can not even lick with it.
The puff adder strikes backwards! No, it can only strike forwards or sidewards.
Snakes move in pairs and if you kill one, its mate will come looking for you! Superstition! Snakes do not have constant companions, they live alone and only mate in the spring.
Do snakes have nests? Not our snakes, but the King Cobra of Asia sometimes builds a rough nest, our snakes live in holes or under a rock or tree stump.

In South Africa we have only a few very poisonous snakes: most adders; the mambas; the cobra family; the yellow bellied sea snake; the vine snake; and the boom snake. Most of the snakes are completely harmless or mildly venomous and quite lot of them are extremely useful as they feed on the rodents and insects like snails and beetles.

Moral: Do not kill every snake that crosses your path!

Oupa

THE SIZE OF THE EARTH

In ancient times it was thought that the earth was flat, covered by a dome (with windows through which the rain fell) where the stars were situated and along which the sun and the moon revolved around the earth!  Then some people living near the sea, noticed that when ship sailed away the hull of the ship disappeared first while the sails were still visible and that led the to the idea that the earth was not flat!  Then they also noticed that when travelling far north or far south some stars would disappear and new ones appear!  As far as we know, the first person to state that the earth was a sphere, was a Greek named Philolaus of Tarentum who in 450 B.C. put forward this view and by 350 B.C. this was generally accepted, by learned men all over the known world and the they started speculating about the size of the earth.

Then a Greek philosopher, Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276 – 196 B.C.) was told that on summer solstice (21 June) at midday a vertical rod would cast no shadow in Syene (which was situated just about on the Tropic of Capricorn – when the sun would be directly overhead), but a rod in Alexandria, about 800 km north of Syene, would cast a short shadow, indicating that the sun was there about 7° south at the same time!  Eratosthenes then used this to calculate the circumference of the earth:  If  7° equalled 800 km, then 360° would be about 41 000 km!  Modern methods have arrived at a figure of 40 067,78 km at the equator, so hats off to mr Eratosthenes who was born 2286 years ago!

But this figure sounded too high for some people and later astronomers arrived at a figure of about 29 000 km which was accepted up to the time of Columbus who used these figures to convince his backers that he could easily reach Asia by sailing westwards over the Atlantic Ocean, but in fact it was not, because America occupied the place where they thought Asia should be!

The moral of the story:  Do not jump to conclusions!

Oupa

A PARABLE

It being Sunday, I think a parable would be quite in order. The following story was told to me by a well-known Afrikaans churchman.




The congregation had been invited to a attend a Bible quiz between two teams consisting of the elders of the congregation and Oom Danie was very surprised (so he said!) that he had not been chosen to partake in the quiz, so he visited the parson and aired his misgivings. He reminded the parson that he had been a serving member of the church council for very many years and had always taken part in all the discussions of the council and that he thought that omitting a prominent member of the council could be regarded as a slap in the face. So, to keep the peace, it was decided to increase the quiz teams by two more members.



It all went very well until the parson, acting as quiz master, asked Oom Danie a question:

Parson: "Oom, What is the distance between Dan and Beersheba?"

Oom Danie: "Parson, what do you mean by this question?"

Parson: "Oom, as you know, Dan was in the very north of Israel and Beersheba was more or less the most southern town in Israel. An answer to the nearest 50 kilometers would be acceptable."

Oom Danie: "Parson, do you want to tell me the Dan and Beersheba were places, I always thought they were man and wife, just like Sodom and Gomorrah!"



The moral of the story is: Do not think too much of yourself!



Oupa

THE AGE OF THE EARTH

In the paper today I found a very interesting piece! Two professors at the NW University took on a colleague who had written (my translation!) in a journal: "Mankind did not come from any animal and all species can not be coupled to each other." The two who replied stated: "Such a short and sweet conclusion denies a lot of scientific results of evolutionary biology." (Again my own translation!) This little bit of news sparked a question in my mind: How old is the Earth?




I consulted some scientific books on astronomy and found very interesting facts!



1. A Greek philosopher, Xenophanes (560 – 478 B.C.) had already pointed out that the earth must be very old as he had seen seashells embedded in rocks on mountains, which meant that the sea level must have been much higher in the past and that this type of change could only occur over long periods of time.

2. A church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea (260 – 340 AD) used statements in the Bible to calculate the birth of Abraham and decided that it took place in 2 016 B.C.

3. Some Jewish rabbi's went even further and used the genealogy given in Genesis to calculate the creation of the earth and arrived at a figure of 3 761 B.C., still being used by the Jews as this is the year 5 670 in their calendar.

4. Then an Anglican bishop, James Ussher (1581 – 1656) calculated from data in the Bible that the earth was created 4 004 years before the birth of Christ which makes the earth (and the rest of the universe) 6 014 years old.



Yet many prominent persons were not satisfied with an answer of "about 6 000 years" and the first to say so openly and in detail was a French naturalist, Georges de Buffon (1707 – 88). He spent fifty years writing a 36 volume encyclopedia on natural science and in the fifth volume, published in 1778, he gave his ideas on the development of the Earth and theorized that the sun and another heavy body had collided and thus formed the earth which in time cooled down and animals, and finally, mankind appeared on earth. He also imagined a form of evolution though degeneration – some horses degenerating into donkeys and some men into apes.



I rather fancy the last one as I know quite a number of people who behave like apes!



Oupa

THE AGE OF THE EARTH

In the paper today I found a very interesting piece! Two professors at the NW University took on a colleague who had written (my translation!) in a journal: "Mankind did not come from any animal and all species can not be coupled to each other." The two who replied stated: "Such a short and sweet conclusion denies a lot of scientific results of evolutionary biology." (Again my own translation!) This little bit of news sparked a question in my mind: How old is the Earth?




I consulted some scientific books on astronomy and found very interesting facts!



1. A Greek philosopher, Xenophanes (560 – 478 B.C.) had already pointed out that the earth must be very old as he had seen seashells embedded in rocks on mountains, which meant that the sea level must have been much higher in the past and that this type of change could only occur over long periods of time.

2. A church historian, Eusebius of Caesarea (260 – 340 AD) used statements in the Bible to calculate the birth of Abraham and decided that it took place in 2 016 B.C.

3. Some Jewish rabbi's went even further and used the genealogy given in Genesis to calculate the creation of the earth and arrived at a figure of 3 761 B.C., still being used by the Jews as this is the year 5 670 in their calendar.

4. Then an Anglican bishop, James Ussher (1581 – 1656) calculated from data in the Bible that the earth was created 4 004 years before the birth of Christ which makes the earth (and the rest of the universe) 6 014 years old.



Yet many prominent persons were not satisfied with an answer of "about 6 000 years" and the first to say so openly and in detail was a French naturalist, Georges de Buffon (1707 – 88). He spent fifty years writing a 36 volume encyclopedia on natural science and in the fifth volume, published in 1778, he gave his ideas on the development of the Earth and theorized that the sun and another heavy body had collided and thus formed the earth which in time cooled down and animals, and finally, mankind appeared on earth. He also imagined a form of evolution though degeneration – some horses degenerating into donkeys and some men into apes.



I rather fancy the last one as I know quite a number of people who behave like apes!



Oupa

THE AGE OF THE EARTH - CONTINUED

A geologist, James Hutton (1726 – 1797), stated that it is evident that some rocks were formed by sediments compressed in layers, other rocks were certainly formed by volcanic action and exposed rocks were worn down by the action of wind and water, and so on. He also pointed out that this process was slow and also assumed that this process had probably always been going on at the same slow rate and that the Earth must be much older that the 6 000 years or so postulated by previous claims. He published this in a book Theory of the Earth in 1785 and is commonly regarded as the "father of geology".




And then, in 1896, Antoine Henri Becquerel (1852 – 1908), discovered radio-activity! Physicists soon found that the heavy metals, uranium and thorium, gave off radiations and were giving off heat continually, because atoms were breaking down. Ernest Rutherford (1871 – 1937) showed in 1904 that particular varieties of atoms broke down at fixed rates and this led to the discovery that in any such a reaction, half of the atoms breaking down would do it in a certain time interval, say x years and half of what remained would break down in an additional x years, and so on, and that period is called the "half-life". It was also found that elements could consist of different isotopes, a term that means that the different forms still had the same chemical features but that the atomic mass was different.



The first element found to be radio-active is uranium and it consists of two isotopes, namely uranium-238 (meaning an atomic mass of 238) and uranium-235 and the half-life of U-238 is 4 500 000 000 years and that of U-235 is 700 000 000 years. The second element found to be radioactive is thorium, which has only one form with a half-life of 13 500 000 000 years. In that same year of 1904, Bertram Borden Boltwood (1870 – 1927) discovered the fact that both uranium and thorium break down to final non-radio-active products, uranium-238 ended as lead-206, uranium-235 as lead-207 and thorium as lead-208, three of the four isotopes of lead. Boltwood also showed in 1907 that these facts could be used to calculate the age of rocks on earth by measuring how much lead of each isotope the rocks contained and today scientists agree that the age of the earth is of the order of 4 500 000 000 years.



Quite a bit older than I am!



Oupa

PERCEPTIONS

The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines perception, among others, as: intuitive recognition of (something), but I would like to add: by the use of our experience and knowledge. To illustrate this definition, the following story.




Our granddaughter is pregnant with her second child and had a sonar taken some time ago in which it was evident that the second child is female, and the other day she had an appointment with the doctor for a second sonar and intended taking her firstborn, Johann, aged about a month short of 3 years along as it was a Saturday and he could not attend the play group. The following conversation took place between father Hendrik and son Johann:



Hendrik: Johann, your mother is going to see the doctor who will look at your sister to see if she is doing well.

Johann: That's good, she can then sit on my lap when we come back.



Hendrik then had to explain to Johann that the doctor used sonar to inspect his sister and that she had to remain where she was for another ten weeks or so, but all of us find Johann's reaction hilarious, because we know what a sonar does, but Johann has never seen a sonar picture and has no idea of how it is taken!



We form perceptions about things, frequently with only partial understanding of the subject, should we not try to find out more about the subject? Do we learn anything from this?



Oupa

WORDS, WORDS, WORDS!

My father was trilingual, his parents were German-speaking but he grew up in the Republic of the Orange Free State and all his school mates were Afrikaans and he said that all the brothers spoke Afrikaans to each other and, as he had an affinity for langauges, later in life he was fluent in English as well. Of course he became a school teacher and eventually became principal af a school in the Southern Free State. He used to buy just about every new Afrikaans book published and could never say no an offer to buy a dictionary, I think we had about seven dictionaries in the house! He used to love a play upon words and a pun!




And the he suddenly resigned as principal of the school, took a post in a school in another town and at the end of the year he took early retirement, I have never been able to find out exactly why. He the tried his hand at farming and rented a farm near Kroonstad, but his idea of farming was to sit on the stoep with a good book and now and then giving instructions to Koki Mokeki. Needless to say, his farming was unsuccessful and he then joined the Regional Office of Water Affairs in Kroonstad.



The whole of the above is just background to what I want to write about, namely their typist in the office, an elderly lady with very little typing ability as she continually tore the paper out of the typewriter because she had made too many mistakes. One day my father said to her: "Miss Turner. I wish you would one day type a letter to the Director of Irrigation, but type Irritation by mistake." She replied: "O no, mr Grosskopf, I will lose my job if I make a mistake like that!" to which my father replied: "Miss Turner, all humans make mistakes, the man who does not make mistakes has still to be born, and then he will be stillborn!"

Oupa

TRUE OR FALSE?

Some time ago the Discovery Channel on DSTV had a program of a team in the USA who specialized in trying out all sorts of sayings to find out whether they are true or false, and one particular saying that they tested for "true" or "false" interested me very much.

Now you all know that we compare someone who is extremely clumsy to a bull in a china shop, and the team investigated this saying by "constructing a china shop" in a corral in one of the western states where the people still like to have rodeos, one item of which being riding a bull and whoever remained on top for the longest period was the winner. The bulls used are of course not very tame otherwise the whole contest would be non-existent! The team put up four shelves, each about 3 m long and 1,5 m high, with a space between them that would easily accommodate two people passing each other, which is just about the width of a normal bull, and then filled the shelves with all sorts of crockery articles. They then chased six bulls into the corral where the shelves were and the six bulls wandered around between the shelves for about ten minutes and did not even knock over one item of all the pieces on the shelves, let alone breaking anything!



Is like a bull in a china shop a true or a false comparison?

Oupa

THE WINDS OF CHANGE

The newspaper reminded us the other day that it was 50 years ago the British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, made his "Winds of Change" speech in our Parliament. Of course he was right, because things change just about daily, but some changes take longer. The political changes in South Africa did take a long time after the speech of the Prime Minister, but I am not going to amuse you with politics, I want to refer to some other changes, specifically changes in our day to day living, for instance, food.




When Mr Harold made his speech 50 years ago, we were still trying to absorb all the changes brought about by the Second World War, and many of them changed our eating habits and I am now thinking about meat consumption. At that particular time things like ox tails, offal, and tongue were not in great demand, in fact, many people looked down upon them, because in the days gone by our consumption of meat was quite different from what we regard as the norm today, the three that I mentioned above, were not considered quite the correct thing by many of our citizens, and were therefore quite cheap, after all, the butchers wanted to sell all of the meat of a slaughtered animal and not just certain portions. But look at the current situation: ox tail and tongue are quite expensive and offal is just about impossible to get unless you have a very special contact!



And then there is the saying "the more things change, the more they remain the same", which is quite true for many things in life, but not for items bound by fashion, like food, clothes, hair styles and the like.



What is going to change next?



Oupa

THE GARBAGE REMOVER

Maria, the same evening when you saw the hyenas outside the fence of Letaba, I heard them inside the fence of our township! They were not far away from our house and were giving their long drawn out cooooweeehp, but on other occasions I have heard them making quite a variety of sounds. They are very interesting animals and very often misunderstood by us humans.

The species we have here, is the spotted hyena (Crocuta) and long ago they ranged over most of Africa, excluding the rain forest in central Africa, as they are equally at home in the bush as in desert regions and they roamed from sea level to the snow line of Kilimandjaro in order to be able to do their work: removal of any dead animal (including humans), reptile, fish, or bird! They have very powerful jaws and can crush even the thick thigh bones of the buffalo and they eat the hides, bones and hooves of smaller animals. Where other predators, like lions and leopards, are plentiful, they will clean up after the lion prides have eaten their share, but they will chase away single lions, leopards, and cheetahs from their kills. If they can not find enough food by scavenging, they will hunt, singly or in packs and are known to have brought down sick of wounded buffalo, but their normal prey consists of the smaller antelopes, baboons, ostriches, tortoises, in fact, any meaty animal!

They are about the size of a largish dog, with a sloping back and much bigger neck, head, and jaws. The body colour is a variable buff to grey, sometimes even reddish brown and they have blackish spots over most of the body, and unlike dogs, they have only four toes on the front feet. Shoulder height is about 80 cm to 1 m and body mass around 45 to 55 kg, but up to 90 kg have been reported. When hungry, they can consume up to nearly a third of their body mass. The pups are nearly black when born, but after a few months the pelt becomes lighter and spotted. The pups are born underground and kept there for about six weeks.

Very interesting predators, the hyenas!

Oupa

FRIENDS

We moved to Port Elizabeth at the beginning of October 1984 and we only knew two couples living there, one was my predecessor and the other relatives of my wife.  I was lucky enough to have a few days off in order to move into our house, and on the day that the furniture removers arrived, we started unpacking.  Some of our possessions had been in storage for nearly eight months and we had difficulty in deciding where what should go and just at this stage a youngster pitched up and said:  "Oom, my mother says she is making tea and coffee, which would you prefer?"  A day or two later I was getting the garage in order when a woman on a bicycle passed the house, turned round and rode into the garage.  "I am Elsa and I live in number two at the end of the street, welcome to this community."  That same afternoon I was washing my car when somebody said to me:  "Good afternoon, I have heard that you are from Southwest Africa", and when I turned around I saw it was Jakes Jacobs, whom I had known in Windhoek and they lived in No. 13 (we were in No. 10) and within a few days we had three lots of firm friends!  We went to church and the service was held in the school hall and afterwards tea was served and the lady who had been playing the piano came up to us and said: "I see you are new here, I am Rinnie Marais, who are you?"  Port Elizabeth certainly lived up to its reputation as the 'The Friendly City!'

This is what we need most in this country: getting to know people you see often, not necessarily your next door neighbours, and being friendly towards them, it costs you nothing to smile and say "Have a good day!"

Oupa

MURPHY'S LAWS

Scratching around in all my papers and things, I came across a copy of Murphy's Laws and it is amazing how we are all subject to those laws! They are called "A guide to anticipating the hidden bugs", but then you must keep all of them in mind every time you want to do something, otherwise the hidden bugs strike!

I feel that I must give you a decent sample of Murphy's Laws, so here goes. The first law is very simple: "If anything can go wrong, it will". Can you fault it? The second and third are equally simple, namely "Nothing is as easy as it looks", and "Everything takes longer than you think", but, o so true!

My all-time favourite is the Eleventh Law: "Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first", and think about it as much as you like, you will eventually realize that it is impossible to circumvent this Law. If you decide it is tea time, you first have to switch on the kettle, but only after ascertaining that it contains enough water, otherwise you have to fill it. While the kettle is coming to the boil, you have to get a tea cup and saucer, a bag of tea and a tea pot which has to be warmed first, get the milk out of the fridge, find the sugar bowl (and you probably have to top it up!) pour the boiling water on the tea leaves, allow the tea to brew to the strength you like, pour the tea and after putting in sugar and milk (or putting in milk first!) you have to wait for the tea to cool down enough in order not to burn your tongue! So you see, even a simple thing like having a cup of tea is complicated and then you could also have the first law to contend with, sudden lack of power to the kettle, for instance!
Makes life complicated, but interesting!
Keep to the Laws!
Oupa

PINK ELEPHANTS

Some time this week I saw an advert on TV featuring five or so pink sheep and it reminded me of my friend Wikus when he lived in Windhoek for a few years, not that he is prone to seeing pink sheep, or pink elephants!  It was in the old days when we still had compulsory military service for young people and one of his nephews was doing his training at the military base in Walvis Bay, at that time still a part of the Republic of South Africa.

The youngster had been there for a few weeks and then he got leave for a whole weekend and decided to visit his uncle and aunt in Windhoek.  Having of course no transport of his own, he decided to hitch hike to Windhoek and felt very lucky when two sergeants of the SADF stopped their LDV and said they were going to Windhoek and would he perhaps like a lift.  He of course jumped at the chance and got onto the back of the LDV and settled down for the 3½ hour ride to Windhoek.  After they had covered a good portion of the way, one of the sergeants asked him whether he was thirsty and handed him a bottle of beer and the same happened twice more on the way to Windhoek.  This was the first time the young man had ever tasted beer and he thought he was quite sober when they dropped him in the street in front of his uncle's house, but as he was climbing up the stairs to the stoep, he saw before him two pink toy poms who started barking at him!  And then a lady came out, gathered the pink doggies in her arms, invited him in and took him to his Uncle Wikus an Aunt Bertha.  After greeting them he asked whether he could lie down for a while and they took him to his room where he soon fell asleep.

After waking up, he sought his uncle and said to him: "Uncle Wikus, I apologise for arriving in such a condition and I promise I will never again drink so much, seeing two pink dogs was quite enough for me!  Next time it might be pink elephants!"  His uncle the explained that their other guest was the owner of two white toy poms and that she now and again washed them in a dye, and last time it was a pink dye, and that he accepted the humble apology which was quite unnecessary as he did not think his nephew was drunk at all!

What I want to know, do drunks really imagine they see pink elephants?  Let me know if you find out.

Oupa