Monday, May 17, 2010

In and around Urikaruus - part 3

Well day two (April 2nd 2010) dawned in Urikaruus, this was after an interesting evening sitting on the veranda cooking our evening meal on an open fire. As night was starting to set in my daughter Claire Marie spotted (no pun intended :-) ) a leopard strolling down out of the bush, almost directly opposite from us, towards the watering hole. She, that is the leopard, was quite nonchalant and disinterested in the hum of exitement stemming from these wide-eyed invaders of what was clearly her home territory. Unfortunately it was too dark, and she was too far away to get any kind of photo of her, so we just sat and watched in the gathering gloom, for as long as we could see her and then returned to our evening meal, as she set off to find hers.

Well, having spent so much time in the car over the first few days of our trip we decided to relax on this morning and see what may make an appearance in and around our camp. I tried to get a few landscape shots from our bedroom veranda just after the sun rose, but I won't bore you with those attempts having already posted some views in my earlier post. Having looked out front and not seen much other than the great view, I then turned my attention to behind the chalet and saw this in the rays of the rising sun!


It must have been there the day before, but it needed the early morning light to reveal it to my human eyes. What an amazing web! The top anchor line stretched probably nearly two metres, you can see it running almost horizontally accross the top of the image. The overall web was about 40-50cm high and about double that in horizontal diameter. One of the amazing things about this web was that it was virtually invisible once the sun got up into the sky.  If you look really closely you can see the spider in the top left part of the middle circle of the web. It just give you a perspective on the size of construction this little lady made!


Still struggling to see her? Well, here's an even closer view.


What amazing colours and shapes she has. She blends in with the natural surrounds incredibly well too.

I'll leave this post here, but this day started well and got better and better. So stay around and I'll tell you more :-)

all the best,
Ivan
http://www.andersen.co.za/

No comments:

All content of this blog is copyright owned by Ivan Andersen. Should you wish to use any text or images, please request permission by contacting the author.