West Coast Spring Flowers and Birds

2 September 2012

It has been a busy term and the past week saw me under pressure to get assessments done and reports written. I was tempted to leave the latter to the weekend but my darling husband pushed me to work in the evenings as he wanted to head to West Coast National Park to see the spring flowers come Sunday. So I did as much as I could and then spent Saturday catching up with marking and other admin work.

The weather had not been very spring like during the week but Sunday dawned crisp and clear. The air felt like winter but the sky looked like Spring.

We stopped at a Woollies Garage Store and got take away coffees, muffins and pies for breakfast and then had a comfortable drive to WCNP arriving at 9:30 – no queue at the gate we were relieved to find.

Before getting Postberg where the flowers are in bloom we stopped at the Hide at Abrahamskraal and spent a cold half hour watching coots, weavers, shelduck, dabchicks and shovellers. A few white-throated swallows skimmed the surface of the water and canaries fussed in the bushes but there was not too much activity.

Red-knobbed coot

What a profusion of colour we found in Postberg. Fields and fields of brightness – sometimes all yellow, sometimes pink, splashes of white, clumps of blue and fields of orange and then all mixed up together. It was visual overload.