Late August seems to be the nesting season for white-breasted cormorants and those ones at the Cape fur seal colony of Boulderbaai were ferrying a lot of nesting material from the beach to this rock.

Some posts don't need legends...

Seen the Cape fur seals playing in the waves??

The Namaqua NP was recently created along the Atlantic coast of Northern Cape and his famous for it's flower bloom in August-September. Roads in the southern section of the park take you along the coast and beautiful scenery...

The beach at the foot of the Namaqua Flower Beach Camp, close to the Groenriver entrance

Namaqua Flower Beach Camp

View from our tent

Sunset from the tent

Driving along

Boulderbaai campground

The beach behind Korinkorrel campground

Along the Atlantic...

Very close to Springbok, there is a small nature reserve called Goegap. It's really lovely and quiet. It offers herd of gemsboks, mountains zebras and springboks as well as many quiver trees of various species and even of "forest" of them. It also has dirt roads, 4x4 trails and even walking trails taking you through the mountains and a nice and cheap camping ground.

On the reserve main road

Mountain zebra herd

Driving along

Quiver tree with a few of the Namaqua flowers

View from the top

Aloes

Quiver tree forest

Sunset over quiver trees

Like most of us, when I started my postdoc, my PhD work was far from finished.  But I'm  still working on it and we recently managed to publish a new paper.

We show how changes in lion population density and composition affects hyaena diet and foraging strategies. It's published in Journal of Zoology and you can find it here. Let me know if you want a pdf copy of the paper, I'll be glad to send it to you.

The very good news is that the following picture is also making the cover of the journal issue! The journal will also be featuring a podcast interview in which I answer questions about our work. You can check it here, it should be aired in January.