Wildlife Gardening

Grey-headed Bush-shrike: photo Anabel HarriesThe Afrikaaners named it Spookvoël, and so it is. Seldom seen even by 'the African rustic' its three mournful, ventriloquial and tremulous whistles, each lasting almost a second: "hoawwww ... hoawwww ... hawwwwip", repeated every minute or so, have been the ornithological highlights, these past two weeks, in our 'wildness garden' on the western edge of little Arusha - the safari city.

This ghostly whistler arrives, at more or less the same time each day, mid-morning. First it calls out to us its version of "trick or treat" from somewhere above the big red gate at the southeast corner of the driveway. Then the spook enters and proceeds to haunt the garden for about an hour moving, virtually unseen, from one Silver Oak to another. Each tree is festooned with wild creepers, a variety of yellow-flowering african cucumbers for the most part, which have sneaked-up this past wet season into the very topmost branches. The sorrowful whistling follows a fairly fixed circuit of the property each day, so an ambush is possible.

Baglafecht Weaver: photo Martin Goodey

So this is the week of our shortest day. It hasn't rained for ten days. Now we're really slipping into the cool, dry season. "Mighty Meru" our snoozing neighbourly volcano (the fifth highest mountain in Africa) each morning garners grey shawls of shallow swirling cloud off the eastern breeze. Spinning almost, around the huge dark cone, a wheel of shade is cast until after noon over the clustered human settlements, scrambling ever more untidily, onto Meru's green and fertile apron.

Right now, in our acre of semi-ecological sanity it's Sunday - nine o'clock. The ground view from my study window is also swirling all around. With "ndege kabisa" - as they might say here in Swahili culture - "birds completely". So at this arbitrary, right angle moment on the analogue clock face, what can I see?

Southern Citril: Martin GoodeyA pair of dark-faced, lime green Southern Citrils (Serinus hypostictus), lovely canaries are flitting from one loosely purple flowering (Gutenbergia cordifolia) a delicate, leggy and native composite, to another in search of nourishing native pappus. Four brown and creamy Streaky Seed-eaters (Serinus striolatus) with stubby conical bills agape, are seriously engaged in a territorial dispute in the outer branches of a Flamboyant tree (Delonix regia), a red flowering beauty native to Madagascar, which stands outside the adjacent end-room of the house. One of these pairs has a new nest, they are lining it with thread-like rootlets, in full view of this window; it's in what was once a rather more formally presented, pencil-shaped Cypress (Cupressus sempervirens - tall and skinny in the 'Aegean style'). Ever present bouncy black and golden yellow Baglafecht Weavers (Ploceus baglafecht - of the form reichenowi) whirr on stumpy wings from bush to bush, they are noisy and busy, as always. Alongside the four kinds of sunbird in our garden these weavers, in search of nectar, are the preeminent visitors to the scarlet blooms of birdman's best friend: a neotropical shrub, that in English is called Cardinal's Hat (Malvaviscus arboreus), and also known as the Wax Mallow.

With one billion households on the planet, and greed the dominant world religion we desperately need weedy gardeners. Now there is a plant you may have heard about - Ageratum conyzoides - the Billy Goat Weed. Moist grassland and woodland edge in hilly areas of the Neotropics used to be his only home. Yet someone, sometime past brought hairy Ageratum east, deliberately or unwittingly, with food crops to Africa (and many place besides) so that nowadays this cute yet highly pungent blue or mauve or pinkish white pom-pom flowered Aster is an alien par excellence and currently dominates my day .. Outdoors. Indoors, as now, my life is dominated by the mercurial magic of another alien in Africa - electricity! Something strange and new that is colonising this continent somewhat less effectively than bad old Billy Goat Weed.