It’s almost April and the rains are upon us. Well, almost. We’ve had great build-ups of cloud, huge stacks of cumulo-nimbus in ominous shades of grey and black; thunder growling all around. But oddly patchy rain: some places have had huge downpours, while others (usually us) have had very little. Jules is particularly miffed at the way each storm seems to slide past us, thumbing its meteorological nose as it goes.
Great, I can hear all you English-dwellers say; rain - who needs the stuff? Well, actually I do: I’ve got my tanks to fill before the dry season, and all those trees need a good soaking too. So, just as my father used to at this time of year, I spend a lot of time anxiously peering at the sky trying to figure out what’s going to happen and when.
Anyway, what rain we’ve had has greened everything up, and life has changed gear: the dawn chorus each morning is incredibly loud as birds proclaim their territories; frogs, katydids and crickets are all joining in. It’s LOUD out there. Butterflies everywhere, with the big Emperor Swallowtails stealing the limelight; and bugs and beetles aplenty – blister beetles in particular, munching on all the freshly emerged flowers on display right now.
And the trees: we have a huge fig tree groaning under the weight of juicy orange and red fruits; each day you can see where the fruit bats have been gorging themselves, then voiding the seeds onto the ground below. The whole place will be one huge fig-forest if even a tiny percentage of these take root.
What we have plenty of, though, is guavas: over the years, birds, bushbabies and elephant have dispersed seeds all over the place in their dung, and we have guava trees everywhere. And they’re all fruiting. Now I love a freshly picked guava, straight from the tree, biting into the pink flesh as I walk around. Jules has been busy turning a bucket load into jam this morning; everyone heads home with bulging bags of fruit at the end of work. But still the branches are laden with the things, and rotting fruit under every tree.
Luckily help was at hand. The other day, right around full moon, we heard a loud cracking and breaking. We sat quiet on the balcony, eyes trying to pierce the shadows, until all of a sudden there was a pair of tusks in the middle of my binocs.
We soon counted 5 elephant, but going by ‘noises off’ we reckon there were clearly several more. Next day we went to see the damage, and found that they had been on Operation Guava: many branches picked clean, with barely a fruit dropped.
What a blissful evening it was. We often hear elephant crashing around of course - they seem to treat our place as an extension to the Park - but we have never before seen them like this, relaxed and feeding no more than 40m from the house. Utterly at home in fact.
