Nature at work again

After a perfect day yesterday, I was woken at 4.30 by thunder reverberating overhead as it bounced around in the clouds. Although I kept my eyes closed, the brilliant blue flashes of lightning were more than a match for puny eyelids trying to catch the last few hours of shut-eye and I counted the seconds before each roll of thunder - some were only 6 seconds after the flash. I was too lazy - having just spent an hour reading a book between 3 and 4 - to get up to have a look and it was soon over and all fell quiet again.

A little rain did fall, sufficient to relieve me of the daily potplant watering, but so far it has been a very dry May. As the sun rose, the clouds scudded away towards the East, and by late morning the last clouds disappeared. In fact, the very last cloud was an incredibly high sheet of ice, patterned like a DNA helix with the rungs of the ladder twisted in ovals and a spectacular double rainbow formed two rings around the sun as it tried to hide behind this unusual cloud formation. Beyond the outer rainbow, the clouds themselves shone in pale pastel green and pink, a stunning vision which I regrettably could not capture on camera due to the position of the sun. I hope some of you were lucky enough to observe this phenomenon.

This afternoon I saw a strange sight out to sea through 'the gap' which is my sea view - a raft of cormorants floating on the sea in such numbers that they appeared to form a single mass, and as I grabbed the binoculars, a seemingly endless string of birds flew in from the North and joined the feathered flotilla. Hundreds and hundreds arrived and then suddenly they all took flight as if they had gathered for some kind of mass display and a black cloud took to the skies - I made a guesstimate as they flew away and reckon there must have been 1 500 birds. This is in itself not a lot, but certainly more than I have ever seen. My father has counted a flock of 20 000 in False Bay and up towards Dassen Island you will find more than 100 000 at a time.

In such numbers, there must be some competition between the fisherman and the birds for our dwindling resources and one can only wonder who will win in the end.