Melville Koppies Nature Reserve

January to May 2010

We have run specialist walks/talks on the third Saturday of the month for the first five months of 2010. This is in addition to our usual open days and walks.

In January we had a Grass Course with Norman Baines. In February Bernice Aspoas ran an Insect course. In March Judd Kirkel led a Succulent walk. In April Walter Barker, President of the Tree Society took a group on a tree course, and in May we did something completely different and regular Melville Koppies guide Donald Gair, a professional photographer, did a photography walk, giving tips and tricks to aspirant photographers.

This course was extremely popular, and we are planning another one in July.

Another Melville Koppies regular event was the "Three Koppie Hike" on 1 May, a public holiday. The weather was kind to us - only just. An early morning thunder storm nearly washed us out but the rain stopped at the last moment and the 40 brave walkers who turned up did not get wet.

Special visitors were a group of Mis Earth finalists who got down to some serious weeding, but also did the "Diski Dance" for us.

Below are photographs of Bernice with Shaheena Freer on the insect course, the Miss Earth contestants doing the dance, and a group of (dry) walkers on the "Three Koppie Hike". Click on photos to enlarge.

Copious late summer rains brought us the usual crop of weeds, and the conservation team were extremely busy. Now that the summer rains have stopped the weeds have not, and the work goes on.

The rain paused on two occasions in January, enabling us to host a visit by 60 Yeshiva College Grade 7s and Grade 12s, and to hold the Grasses Talk.

Several other school and university visits were rained off, as was one of our open days.

There are bracket fungi all over the place, as well as the strange and extravagant object below. Wendy Carstens found it at the base of a tree near the Kafue Road Gate.

A recent sighting (in May) has been a slender mongoose with two babies. They have been seen twice near the lecture hut.

Photos: The Grass Course (Axel Dietrich), Yeshiva College students, and the extraordinary fungus. (Wendy Carstens). Click to enlarge.

There were plenty of open day visitors over the Christmas and New Year weekends - over 50 0n 27 December, and 25 on 3 January.

The rains have been prodigious, and we found an extraordinarily large wild apricot, shown below. The gentleman behind the apricot is TJ de Klerk of Wildswalk repute. Photo below by Wendy Carstens.

Other sightings on the Koppies have been a harrier hawk (also known as a gymnogene). On the December 6 hike we saw it being harassed and driven away by two crows which seemed to be very territorial. Photo below by Cavan Hill.

Another find was an orchid not seen before on the Koppies, Eulophia ovalis var. bainesii. Photo below by Wendy Carstens. Click photos to enlarge.

November 2009

We had nearly 40 participants on the Spider walk. Many were children. A trap-door spider and a baboon spider were found, among others. There were also plenty of scorpions.

Below are a trap-door spider nest, a baboon spider, and a scorpion. (Photos Norman Baines and Wendy Carstens. Click to enlarge.)

November has brought us copious rains. The spring flowers have faded, but the grasses are coming along fast. It looks to be a bumper year for both grass and weeds.

The monthly bird ringers succeeded in catching a pair of Diderick cuckoos. The Didericks have been back in town for about two months, and have been very vocal over the Koppies. Two photos of the male are below.

Photos Marty Jasper. (Click to enlarge).

October 2009

Thirty guests attended the October Flower walk.

The pictures below show Wendy Carstens (who led the walk) explaining the finer points, a crowned plover nesting in the burnt veld, and the Xerophyta Retinervis (Bobbejaanstert) in flower.

Photos Norman Baines and Axel Dietrich. (Click to enlarge).

September 2009

The highlight of September was the Heritage Day Walk on Thursday 24 September.

There were 128 walkers and the weather, in this otherwise chilly and unpredictable spring, was very kind to us.

On the day after the walk we hosted a group from the Guild Cottage.

The photos below show the walkers at a stop for breakfast, and kids from the Guild Cottage discovering that we grind sorgum on the Koppies. (Click to enlarge)

September opened with our pyromaniac active again. He has had a very busy winter. The result of his incendiary zeal was that we found even more Iron Age walling. We knew it was there because Revil Mason surveyed it in 1963, but it has been overwhelmed by bush encroachment. We have now cleared the bushes and opened the area up for visitors.

We also built a new path to the lecture hut so that visitors could walk past some other Iron Age kraals. This path is quite steep in places, but it cuts through some bush we have never really had access to before.

The widespread burning means that the "pre-rain" flowers will do especially well in the next month or two. Already the first flowers are out, including Morea stricta, Ledebouria ovatifolia, Tulbaghia acutilobia (Wild Garlic), Bulbine species, Gnidia species, and Hypoxis species.

The pictures below show Morea stricta (Bloutulp), the Iron Age kraals being cleared (not really a pretty sight), and the route of the new path to the lecture hut. Photos Axel Dietrich and Norman Baines's cellphone. (Click to enlarge).

August 2009

Melville Koppies mourns the sudden death of guide Gus Broekmeyer. Gus was a vibrant enthusiastic guide who shared her passion for the Koppies with visitors. Her grandchildren referred to the Koppies as 'Granny's Mountain', as she made this a special place for them as well. Gus was also the chairlady of 'Reach for recovery', a volunteer organisation which assists women diagnosed with breast cancer. We shall all miss Gus, a very caring person.

On a less sad note, Spring (though not officially here) is making itself felt. The Acacia robusta is putting out buds, and the Ledebouria is starting to flower. In the picture below you can see the top of the tiny plant, which clings to the ground; by comparison the bulb is huge. This is typical of our "pre-rain flowers" which are now starting to bloom. By November they will be out in profusion, particularly because of the extensive fires. The third picture below is the nest of a Potter Wasp, which we found on Sunday. The Potter Wasp belongs to the family Vespidae, which has over 200 genera, and who knows how many species.

Photos: Axel Dietrich, Wendy Carstens. (Click to enlarge.)

Our 50th Annual General Meeting took place on Saturday 15 July. Special guest speaker was Archaeologist Revil Mason, who discovered and excavated the iron age furnace on the Koppies in 1963.

He brought pictures, plans, and maps illustrating his work on the Koppies and in the whole Witwatersrand area, and it was a lively and entertaining insight into the Iron Age culture of the last 500 years.

We have been fortunate to have obtained digital versions of the original slides kept at Wits. These pictures can be seen behind Revil in the photo below.

The pictures below show Revil Mason speaking, Wendy Carstens delivering the the annual report, and John Freer, Revil Mason, and Annabell Lucas with our 50th anniversary cake. John and Annabell were members of the original Johannesburg Council for Natural History, which managed the Koppies before the present committee came into existence.

The cake is a replica of the furnace - the ice cream cones are the clay tuyeres - the nozzles for the bellows used to build up the heat. Unlike the furnace which has lasted for 500 years, the cake lasted for 20 minutes at most. (Photos Maria Cabaço)

July 2009

July ended with a large part of the Koppies burning. Because this was done by our regular pyromaniac, the firebreaks cut earlier in the season were no use - he simply set fires on each side of the breaks.

The fire did reveal some things we were unaware of - several iron age stone kraal circles, and how the fire stimulates the Protea caffra seed-heads to open.

Below are pictures of the walling in the burnt veld, the veld as it looked a month before, and an open Protea caffra seed-head. (Photos Wendy Carstens and Axel Dietrich. Click to enlarge)

On Sunday 13 July We had many more children than adults, so the guided walk took on a different style. Wendy Carstens is shown explaining the Middle Stone Age (Thokozile Dietrich looks slightly alarmed at the idea), and also showing the kids how to hide from the well-known Melville Koppies Lions in the long grass.

More seriously, the Joburg Roads Agency has responded rather promptly to our requests for some kind of traffic calming on the lethal bend in Beyers Naude. There are now warning signs, and improved road markings. In the picture you can see where someone took out eleven sections of palisade a few weeks ago. They also took out the lamppost, but that was replaced quite promptly. For palisade you wait longer.

(Photos Axel Dietrich and Wendy Carstens. Click to enlarge)

On 5 July one of our guests turned out to be a devotee of the rather esoteric hobby of "geocaching". The is an international "treasure hunt" which you can read all about at the official website www.geocaching.com. We did discover two "geocaches" on Melville Koppies Central, and rather frustratingly a third was just across the fence and, thus inaccessible, on Melville Koppies East. We strongly suspect that this particular guest will come back quite soon and nail down the MK East one. It was rather a different experience - not the normal kind of thing we do on open days, and a pleasant diversion.

July began well for us when the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry chose Melville Koppies as a venue for 30 learners at grade 7 level to spend two days in the open air as part of a programme run at the University of the Witwatersrand.

They studied topics varying from soil types, soil erosion, ecology and the interconnectedness of all things - all topics important to us.

In the photos below you can see the kids and one of the facilitators down at the spruit, a tiny lizard and two lizard eggs discovered by one of the kids, (lizard and eggs were carefully put back in the veld), and the soil "sausages" made to test the nature of soil. This technique is used to test soil for its degree of clay, loam, and sand content. The degree of "breakability" of the sausages gives an indication of the nature of the soil. (Photos Joshua Lewis. Click to enlarge.)

June 2009

Our open day visitor numbers have picked up, and we have had a number of school groups.

Early in June Wendy and David Carstens, and Norman Baines visited the Bernard Price Institute at Wits, where we were shown the records of the archaeological investigations in the 1960s.

There are box files of notes and diagrams, and also a set of slides. Justin du Pisanie, who looks after these archives, has kindly promised to have the slides digitally scanned, so quite soon we will be able to put them up on this website.

Then Justin and his colleague Myra Mashimbye took us to the basement where boxes and boxes of artifacts from the excavations are kept. There are Early, Middle, and Late Stone Age tools, fragments of pottery with the distinctive incised decoration of the Tswana people, small containers of pollen (which is extracted from the excavated earth using a centrifuge). Pollen tells archaeologists not only what the vegetation was, but also what the climate was like.

From the archives we have maps of the old kraal walls, and we intend to clear the bush around one of these complexes so that visitors can get an idea of what remained when the settlement on the Koppies was abandoned in the early 1800s.

The aloes are coming into flower this month (left). The other pictures show the Tree Fuschia (Halleria lucida), now flowering down near the spruit, and some of the Tswana pottery from Melville Koppies in the Bernard Price Institute. Click to enlarge - the distinctive patterns on the potsherds can be clearly seen. (Photos: Axel Dietrich and Wendy Carstens.)

May 2009

We had a good month:
Open days : 46 guests
Groups: 552 learners and educators
Total: 598

We had visitors from Michaelmount and Louw Geldenhuys Primary Schools.

Saturday 9 May was very busy. The Wits Bird Club continued ringing.

Professor Kim Hein of Wits led a geology walk. She is studying the Witwatersrand intensively, and had many new things to tell us since the same walk last year.

The Melville Koppies has a wealth of geological features which are buried below building development in other places. It is sometimes hard to grasp that some of the oldest rocks on earth are exposed on the Koppies.

In the picture to the left the bird ringers caught a guinea fowl which is a larger bird than they normally get. It is probably a good thing we have no ostriches.

Below Thoko Dietrich and a thrush, Felistus (8) and Nkosi (10) came with Kim Hein and were probably surprised to find themselves involved with birds, and Kim herself gets down to earth about geology.

(Photos: Maria Cabaco)

The 50th Anniversary cross-Koppie hike happened on 1 May 2009. 340 people came. This was a bit of a logistical problem, but TJ de Klerk of Wildswalk and Artslink fame brought his walkie-talkie radios and the front of the nearly one kilometre human chain was able to communicate with the back, which helped a lot. The weather was cool, and we were rained on slightly, but most people were too hot to notice.

We probably haven't had such numbers on the Koppies since the mid-1960s when more than 700 people attended a Sunday open day. How they coped is unimaginable. But people were docile then. The government of the day made sure that there was nothing at all to do on a Sunday.

Coming up this weekend is bird ringing on Saturday morning (starting at 5:30 so you don't need to worry about being early), but please confirm ahead of time with Gail Schaum (Wits Bird Club 011 782 7267). For novice birders this is a must-see. Bring the kids to see how it's done and even hold a wild bird. (Entrance at Kafue Road Gate).

Also on Saturday is a geological walk with Professor Kim Hein of Wits. Start time 9:00 at Kafue Road entrance. Please book with Wendy on 011 482 4797. Our geology is stunning. Don't miss it (it might go away).

The pictures below of the 1 May hike are courtesy Axel Dietrich, Wendy Carstens and Norman Baines.

April 2009

As of 15 April our arrangement with Wits Bird Club is now final. Here are the details:

"The Witwatersrand Bird Club will be ringing birds at Melville Koppies on the second Saturday of every month. Mist nets are set up very early. The birds which are caught are then put in cloth bags to await their turn to be measured and ringed. All the data is meticulously recorded and then sent to Saffring. A special bonus is that the public are invited to observe and learn more about these beautiful little creatures from the experts. Booking is essential: with the Wits Bird Club 011 782 7267 (am only). Costs are only R30 per adult and R10 per scholar."

For weather fanatics committee member George Hofmeyer has been keeping rainfall statistics. The graph is below. It reveals that the weather is rather unpredictable, but you can find that out on TV any day...

We always welcome photos from guests, and here are two (of many) taken last week by Gena Orfali: a young visitor at the summit with a bouquet of Red Top Grass, and a close-up of the Boat Grass which is colouring the veld with autumn hues. (Click on graph and photos to enlarge.)

The best news in a long time is that Wits Bird Club has resumed bird ringing at the Koppies. They were there with their nets on Saturday 11 April.

They intend to do this every second Saturday of the month from now on, and we are planning to invite the public - details still to be finalized.

Below are pictures of a Blackcollared Barbet objecting, a leg being measured (note the ring), and an Olive Thrush. (Photos Wendy Carstens). It was a good weekend for birds - the swallows are still with us, and the Sunday walkers heard the "click-whistle" call of the Puffback, and actually saw the bird in the dense bush near the spruit.

There is a discussion of the call of Blackcollared Barbet, and a view of the more painful aspects of bird-ringing in articles published in the Northcliff Melville Times on 14 March 2008 and 28 March 2008 and reproduced on this site.

March 2009

There were five Sundays in March, and on the fifth Sunday of the month Melville Koppies rests. This does not mean that everyone rests, so here is the conservation team, who work all week. This rainy and confusing summer has produced a greater than usual crop of the weeds which we battle every summer. Opinions are divided on whether we should devote 600 person hours a month on pulling weeds. There is some evidence in favour, however. Ten years ago the path parallel to Judith road was a nightmare of blackjacks and khaki weed. Today the indigenous Leonotis species are moving into the those areas as pioneer plants. We think that every summer the seed banks of Bidens pilosa and Tagetes minuta are being depleted through our efforts.

The first photograph below shows the conservation team, Wendy Carstens, Lucky Mdluli, Joseph Kasonga, and Clement Ndlovu, armed with traditional weapons. The second shows the results of their work. This is a view of the old Muldersdrift Road, the only surviving part, which runs for a few hundred meters through the Koppies. It was replaced by Beyers Naude drive in 1960. In 1960 it was actually D F Malan Drive, but that is an unsavoury interlude, better forgotten.

On Friday 20 March 54 learners from Sekolo sa Borokgo (School of the Bridge) visited. The weather and their bus proved fickle. The bus declined to climb the steep roads up to our Kafue Road entrance with a full load, so the kids walked while a thunderstorm broke upon their heads. All (even the bus) arrived soaked but cheerful and it was a pleasant morning. Unfortunately we have no photograph - the photographer describes her pictures as "gloomily interesting" due to the weather, but not publishable.

Sunday 22 March was the last visit by UJ students, who can find their pictures here and also here

Two Wits students also arrived to collect insects, and were fortunate to find that one of our guides was Bernice Aspoas, a professional entomologist. She educated them vigorously for some time, and all three parties seemed happy.

On the walk we saw a remarkable fungus, a so-called "bracket fungus" or "shelf fungus". Fungi have had a good time during this wet summer. This rather spectacular one is distantly related to a European species called the "beefsteak fungus", and our specimen shows why. To give an idea of scale, the upper one is probably the size of a "ladies' steak" at a steakhouse, the middle one would be a gentleman's portion, and the lower one would require a special understanding with the chef. Seriously, fungi are detritivores - a vital part of the food chain because they decompose dead matter (in this case dead bark) into still smaller particles which join the essential nutrient cycle.

The photos below show Bernice brandishing a flower at our guests, the two Wits students, and the beefsteak. (Photos Norman Baines, Wendy Carstens and Norman Baines again.) (Click to enlarge, of course.)

On 13 March 40 pupils from de la Salle school came to the Melville Koppies as part of the environmental component of the Life Skills curriculum. The newly trained Melville Koppies rangers accompanied them. They saw a hedgehog, which is a rare sighting. Below are pictures of David Carstens explaining the Iron age, the hedgehog asserting its right to privacy, and our rangers in their new uniform. The hats give them a certain panache which belies their true fierceness.

The UJ students on Sunday 15 March can see their picture by clicking here.

On 7 March there was a large group on the monthly Saturday morning hike. This completely dispassionate observer feels that we are attracting a better class of dog. The group is seen here taking a break at one of the church circles. Taking breaks on Saturday hikes has been unusual in the past, but should be encouraged.

UJ students visited for a third week on Sunday 8 March. Thokozile Dietrich also visited, but alas there is no picture.

Lucky Mdluli and Clement Ndlovu, two of the conservation team, went on a security training course at Black Star Security during the week. They are seen here with their certificates. This is part of our continuing effort, in cooperation with Johannesburg City Parks and SAPS, to formalize our security situation on the Melville Koppies. (Click on images to enlarge.)

UJ student groups are still visiting on Sunday Open Days. Here is the group which visited on 1 March (Click to enlarge):

There is beginning to be a late summer feel to the Melville Koppies. The late grasses Red Autumn Grass (Schizachyrium sanguineum) and Boat Grass (Monocymbium ceresiiforme) are appearing. The beautiful bronze spathes of Boat Grass can be seen in a photo on our flora page.

Wendy Carstens and Norman Baines attended a Veld Management course conducted by Fritz van Oudsthoorn (author of the well known Guide to the Grasses of Southern Africa). A first take, based on the quality of our grasses on the Koppies, is that we could at most run a modest herd of 24 cattle. Herding them back and forth across Beyers Naude will be a problem.