This morning we enjoyed another fabulous ‘Early’ breakfast and then packed up and set off for a slow and scenic drive home.  After the recent rains there is water everywhere and this added to the success of our bird watching.  We took the R317 dirt road to ‘Die Dam’ and stopped several times to take photographs. 

Water Water Everywhere

Red-billed Teal

Female Red Bishop

Male Red Bishop

Grey Heron on top of hay stack – some birds have made nest holes it the stack

The Wild Flowers were beautiful

Black-winged Stilt

Karoo Prinia

Levaillant’s Cisticola

Pin-tailed Whydah

It is not easy to find Purple Swamphen even when bird watching in a wetland as they are quite shy birds and hide easily in the reeds.  So it was very exciting to find the right at the side of the road in the flood waters.   Two of them flew away when I got out of the car to take pictures but one stayed and was not at all frightened of me.  I was close enough to reach out and touch him and he still did not fly away.  It was great to see him at such close quarters and to see him swim too.  These birds have long, widely spaced toes which are adapted to walking on lily pads and climbing up reeds.

The colours were shining in the sunlight

Back View

Such a beautiful bird

The Four of Us at Die Dam

We also went to Buffulsjag where Earl camped as a youngster.  He pitched his tent in the dark and when he woke in the morning found he was at the very edge of a cliff as seen in the photograph.

Buffulsjag – cliffs in the distance

We had planned to meet up with our friends Gus and Jacqui who were travelling home from Arniston.   What were the chances that as we came to the tar road they arrived at the crossroads at exactly the same time!  Instead of having lunch in Hermanus as originally planned we decided that parking would be easier in Stanford.   We found a fantastic little restaurant that offered home bakes too – and Sharon had to have her cake!

Evergreen. Stanford

The food was excellent

Gus and Jacqui were wise enough to avoid Sir Lowry’s by going via Kleinmond  so avoided the traffic jam that we had to contend with. They laughed when they heard we were caught in traffic but we didn’t really mind.  After all we weren’t in a hurry to get anywhere!

It was a fabulous weekend and we all feel as if we’ve been away for a month!