Wilkinson's World

Drive down almost any country road in Southern Africa  and you are bound to see a small grey and white raptor sitting in a slightly hunched position and looking somewhat gull-like, on a roadside telephone pole, or, more spectacularly, hovering above the ground and peering downwards for prey below. This is the Black-shouldered kite, one of the most common of the raptors in most of the region, at home in grasslands, woodlands and semi-arid areas, avoiding only the extremely dry areas and the forested areas. Its range is extensive, and these little raptors are found throughout Africa south of the Sahara, as well as parts of Asia, and its range may well be extending.

Quite small for a raptor, with a length of around 30 cm, the Black shouldered kite is pale grey above and white below, with a black patch on the upperwing. The legs and feet are yellow; the bill black and the eyes red. Their forward-facing eyes and soft plumage is somewhat owl-like. Sexes are alike in plumage, with the female being slightly larger than the male.

Seen during the day, Black-shouldered kites are usually solitary, or in pairs, while they gather into flocks and roost communally at night. As mentioned, they very often hunt from telephone poles or other convenient perches, or may hover, very much like a kestrel, over open ground from where they descend quickly when prey is spotted. Food is mainly small rodents, grasshoppers, lizards and small birds.

They are generally fairly quiet and their range of calls includes a high-pitched squeal and a much quieter whistle.

The nest of the monogamous Black-shouldered kite is a small platform of sticks, usually lined with grass and typically located near the top of a thorn tree, just below the canopy. The female lays a clutch of three or four cream-coloured eggs that are spotted with red, and which hatch after an incubation period of about 31 days.

The scientific binomial for the Black-shouldered kite is Elanus caeruleus; Elanus being the Latin for “a kite” and caeruleus being the Latin for “blue”. Thus a blue kite, which is fairly close.

On several visits to the Erongo Mountains of Western Namibia we have been fortunate enough to catch a few glimpses of black mongooses, usually as they streak across the road in front of the car in some remote and rocky area. Twice Jane saw a specimen while I was looking the other way and I missed it altogether. But then our luck changed.

A bit of background. The slender mongoose (Galerella sanguinea) and the yellow mongoose (Cynictus penicillata) are fairly common in Namibia and the slender mongoose in particular seems to have adapted well to the presence of humans.

We often see slender mongooses in Windhoek and regularly find them playing on the sports field of the school just a few blocks from where we live. In the northern part of the country the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo) is quite common in the riverine forests and in the woodlands. So mongooses, then, are not a rarity in Namibia.

The black mongoose, though, is something else.

First described some 75 years ago, the black mongoose (G. nigrata) is not a common beast. During the intervening years it has at various times been considered to be a subspecies of the slender mongoose and of the small grey mongoose (G. pulverolenta). In 1993 however, it was given species status within the same family as the slender mongoose.  This made it the largest carnivore that is endemic to Namibia. It is largely restricted to the granite mountains of north-western Namibia and has been quite extensively studied since 2004 under an initiative known as the “Shadow Hunter Research Project”. (You probably don’t know this – unless you are a biologist – but animals that live in rocky habitats are called “petrophilous”. Not a word that you find in everyday conversation.)

Walking through the rather isolated veld near our wilderness campsite on the farm Omandumba, in the Erongo Mountains, we found a little waterhole in the rocks where there were an assortment of birds stopping off to drink. We took a few photos – the exquisite violet-eared and black-faced waxbills were particularly plentiful – and decided to return later in the afternoon in the hope that more birds of different species would visit the spot, and perhaps even some of the animals that are fairly plentiful in the area.

Well, we came back and parked the car in a suitable spot, and within a few minutes a black mongoose came wandering onto the rocks. It glanced round and disappeared after just a few seconds, without approaching the waterhole, but gave us a really good sighting. Brilliant! As I was prepared to take photographs of birds, I had my camera ready and in spite of the short display was able to take a couple of photos. This little animal was not black, but rather a wonderfully deep chestnut. To our untrained eyes it looked very similar to the slender mongoose in all but colour.

We waited another two hours, until dark, convinced that the mongoose would return and perhaps come closer, but it never put in another appearance. Not then and not the next day when we spent another few hours in wait. A troop of baboon spent quite a long time on the rocks above us, watching us watching the birds. But of the mongoose, not a trace.

Aren’t these opportunities fleeting?

The history of the village of Kolmaskop in Southern Namibia is typical of the boom-and-bust history of many mining towns around the world; towns founded on the presence of exotic minerals that are collected and sent elsewhere for further processing and sale. When these minerals run out the very reason for the town’s existence vanishes, and the citizens move on. In the case of Kolmanskop, the exotic minerals were diamonds and the boom lasted less than 50 years.

History has it that on 14 April 1908 a railway worker by the name of Zacharias Lewala, who was working on the railway line between Luderitz and Aus, found a “shiny stone” lying on the sand and showed it to his supervisor, the railway inspector August Stauch, who recognized it as a diamond. Stauch obtained a prospector’s license and as soon as it was confirmed that the stone was indeed a diamond, the rush to Kolmanskop was on.

It turned out that the stone found by Zacharias Lewala was far from being an isolated example, and diamonds lay on the surface of the ground in great numbers. It was apparently common for prospectors to lie on their bellies and slowly crawl across the sand, picking up diamonds by the dozen.

The German Government quickly stepped in and declared a large area surrounding Kolmanskop a “Sperrgebiet”, or forbidden area. This Sperrgebiet, which still exists today, stretches from the Orange River in the south for  some 350 km northwards and from the sea in the west for some 100 km eastwards.

The village of Kolmanskop, named after Johnny Coleman, a transport rider who abandoned his oxwagon near the spot during a sand storm, and located some ten kilometers east of Luderitz in the dunes of the Namib Desert, was soon flourishing. Fuelled by the wealth that lay upon the sand, the village quickly grew to include a hospital (which housed the first x-ray unit in the southern hemisphere), a school, casino, theatre, ballroom, gymnasium, skittle-alley and even an ice factory. Mansions were built for the senior mine officials in the midst of the sand dunes and Kolmanskop became one of the wealthiest communities in Africa at that time.

Of course water was in short supply and some had to be shipped from Cape Town to Luderitz and then carried by mule to Kolmanskop. The balance of the water came via a pipeline from Elizabeth Bay and even from a small desalination plant. Every morning an ice block and fresh water was delivered to each of the houses, bringing some comfort in the heat of the desert. At its peak, some seven hundred families resided in Kolmanskop.

Shortly after the First World War, Sir Ernest Oppenheimer, the Chairman of the Anglo-American  Company established the Consolidated Diamond Mines (CDM) by buying up the small diamond companies that had operated in the area. CDM, in fact controlled the diamond mining in this area until 1995 when NAMDEB was formed under the new government of Namibia.

It wasn’t long after the First World War, though, that diamond sales began to drop, and with the discovery of rich diamond fields to the south, near the mouth of the Orange River, prospectors began to leave Kolmanskop. The last residents left in 1956 although mining had stopped some years earlier, and the desert soon began to reclaim its own.

Today it is a “ghost town” and a tourist attraction. Many of the buildings have been restored to show something of their former glory, but the real interest probably lies in those that have been more or less abandoned to the desert. The massive sand dunes have moved forward, depositing many tons of sand into the formerly proud residences, providing ample evidence of the effort that must have been applied to keep them clean and livable during the boom years.

Kolmanskop is well worth a visit, and the little museum provides a wealth of information on the boom years of the diamond industry in the area.