Blog-ordinate - Arusha - December 19, 2007

We on Mount Meru wait for our essential nurturing rainfall; it's been nearly a week since the last liquid visitation.  However humidity's increasing and Met.officers predict falling temperatures (max. 25 C) and heavy thundery showers for tomorrow and Friday - at 3 degrees south - cool fragrant rain for our longest day.

As I write this, trying not to look out from my window, Streaky Seedeaters, anticipating the hike in moisture, are building a nest with withered grasses in the same tree as last year; a Mediterranean pencil cypress that was briefly occupied by some Bronze Mannikins two weeks ago before someone, probably one of the gangs of hooligan Speckled Mousebirds, destroyed the nest.

Each morning when I walk around the garden checking on the work by the nightshift of the almighty I find something of considerable interest. Today a new African bird came to the garden, one painfully long overdue.

A male ruby-eyed Black-backed Puffback (a small afro-shrike in the family Malaconotidae) calling loudly "chek-weeo - chek-weeo" as very carefully he worked the hedge tops searching for decently large invertebrates in the Grevileas and Kei Apples (both are exotics at this location - yet both are of considerable value to birds). So often the new birds (no matter their provenance) arrive seemingly overnight, or else at very first light.

Our comestible invertebrate population is increasing nicely thanks to the recent rain fall and to our relatively benign, yet robustly active, management of this - nature's resurgent acre. Certainly so, if one measures such improvements by a noticeable population increase in one insect order i.e. the Orthopteran community - the crickets and grasshoppers who in abundance are a staple - bulking-out the reproductive diet - of so many insectivorous birds. Often brown birds, that sing so sweetly; for me gardens are no fashion-mediated visual experience; as if they mean to brighten our dawns and entice us out of bed well before a quarter to six. It's easy to quantify this increase, as each week the line-up of our Orthopteran orchestra gets a little more diverse. In truth, at dawn and dusk, the splendid sound of bush-crickets in the herbage is probably my chief crepuscular joy. I am especially fond of the 'drummer boys' - the grass green cone-headed katydids (probably Ruspolia sp.) who have a tinny percussive drum roll which ends with a wonderful little cymbal flourish.

Add to this the fact that our buoyant population of Zebra Mice has pulled-in a pair of Barn Owls who shriek and churr around the house after sunset at about 7.15 and we find our evenings are getting  better and better under this gorgeous waxing moon.

Yes the grassy areas of the garden are improving day by day. Relentless, painstaking weeding by myself and Dismas Aloyce (he's 34 today) has reduced the two principal vegetative invaders, two naturalized annuals, who of all the foreign botanics most threaten biodiversity in our one acre plot.
These are the "two South American conyz" in the Asteraceae - Hairy Fleabane (Conyza bonariensis) an amazing plant, worthy of HG Wells, which is increasingly resistant to every agrochemical weapon of mass destruction in the Monsanto-Bayer-Novartis-DuPont bio-tech arsenal; and Billy Goat Weed (Ageratum conyzoides).

Incidentally, I have just emailed a few friends asking, do we know why so many of the world's worst tropical weeds; including and especially tropical aquatic weeds; originated in the New World i.e. they once were neotropical endemic plants?

Certainly in our area of C21 existence (Arusha in northern Tanzania) most of the commonest terrestrial weeds; not only the woody (e.g. Cassia spectabilis and Lantana camara), but also the perennial (e.g. Datura stramonium and Nicandra physalodes) and even the annual (Conyza and Ageratum) appear to have been shipped to Africa from the neotropic realm.

Is it that they contain uniquely different chemical compounds (from those found elsewhere) that somehow 'fool' our Old World invertebrate browsers? "Our Veg Browsers", no kids this is not some cyber savvy guff - veg browsers - they're an, utterly essential to your life, reality thing.

They're some of the top guys who really run the planet.

You know something? That Cristobal Colon, he has a lot to answer for!

Good Yule, to every northern one of you, at the eco-realist roundtable of Gaia.

Why not invite an old black suit, an old grey man - and dead to nature, say Gordon Brown - to join you!