On The Road – Mike S. (now with a Democratic Congressperson!) – Namaqualand, South Africa Part 3. – Succulents and birds in

A hill or Kopje full of aloes and other succulents.

These smaller aloes more closely resemble the Aloe vera people are familiar with as a house plant. This is Aloe gariepensis.

This aloe is the plant (IMHO) has been stuck with the worst scientific name in the world of botany, at least that I have heard of. It is Aloe krapholiana, maybe if you pronounce the “ph” as an “F” it is better. Or maybe it isn’t unusual in the original Dutch or German name of the “Mister K” who is commemorated.

Aloe flowers are visited and pollinated by birds, mostly sunbirds, which are a widespread family in Africa and South Asia, that is an example of convergent evolution with hummingbirds in their ecological niches of sipping nectar from narrow red flowers  and even appearance with bright iridescent colors, but they  can’t fly and hover like hummingbirds, they have to perch. This little guys on this aloe flower stalk is a Dusky Sunbird (Cynnyris fuscus), which the exception to the “colorful” part of the sunbird family description. It is dark, charcoal gray with a small white belly area as it’s only “color”. Sort of like the color pattern of Dark-eyed Juncos here in North America. There will be more colorful sunbirds in a later post.nIt is supposed to have some coppery iridescence on the breast if you catch it at the right angle, which I never did.

Some aloes are much more dangerous looking than others. This Black-spined Aloe (Aloe melancantha) was the most intimidating one we saw.

Our explorations in dry country usually consisted of driving for  many Kilometers and then stopping in a spot that looked almost devoid of life, but we’d hop out and start searching for the rare little plants that we wanted to see and photograph, which were always there to be seen with close viewing, because our guide was very good.  Sometimes the areas were rocky and of boulders or a little hill.

Other stops were in the middle of huge plains of gravel, often white quartzite gravel. The white of the rocks in these areas keep the habitat slightly cooler for the plants in the heat of the summer.

Here in the quartzite gravel was one of my target plants, another species of Lithops. The most quintessential of the “living stones.” This is Lithops dintneri.

As lithops get older they do subdivide and get additional leaf pairs, but I’m not sure how many plants are pictured here. There are five leaf-pairs or plant-bodies in this photo it may be one two plants or even five siblings. To conserve water in the hot dry summers these little succulent plants will shrink and pull themselves down to ground level leaving only the “windows” of translucent skin uncovered to gather sunlight for photosynthesis and bring it to the chloroplasts in the cells in the center of the leaves.

Another way plants can protect themselves from water loss and too much sun is by growing their own parasol -like sun protection. This Anacampseros papyracea (syn. Avonia papyracea) has little white-looking, but translucent leafy bracts that completely hide its stem and tiny, green true-leaves which makes the plant looking like a cluster of white worms coming out of the ground. This species is in the Portulaca family and does get nice pink flowers like the annual portulacas we grow in our gardens.

Crassulas, in the jade plant family, are very diverse in the succulent plant heaven that is western South Africa. I photographed this cute little Crassula columnaris is in full bloom here in late winter in the Knersvlatke plains as we were walking back to the truck to move on.