Early August in Matabeleland feels like an ecological inflection point to me. We’re about halfway between rainy seasons. The cool, dry season is all but over – and with it the bulk of the cold weather that we usually experience – but we’re still subject to the south-easterly cold fronts that provide bitter wintry rebukes all the way up to September. With no measurable rain since April and intermittent cold snaps over the past few weeks, any grass not irrigated has turned a pale straw colour, neutralized by water stress and frost. In deciduous woodland, a few leaves cling futilely to branches, daring the building winds to cut them loose. Grass and leaves crunch underfoot. Dust and smoke have turned the sunsets fiery and midday skies from the impossible azure of early May to a pale whitish-blue.
Days are getting incrementally longer, and the August winds are harbingers of flowering Dombeya trees, their flowers changing from snow white to rust as they age. As temperatures increase, we fidget excitedly at the thought of the miombo woodland flush in September – the reds, yellows and golds a cheerful announcement of spring. We dread the dryness, veld fires and stinging heat of October. Everything is focused on the future – the heat, the rains, vegetation starting over. But perhaps it’s important to pause and celebrate what is here now instead of anticipating what is to come.
With the landscape palette dominated by grey and brown, one might believe that everything is dormant or dead. Intriguingly though, Nature has its act together, ensuring that everything can scratch a living until the vegetation starts to flush and the rains arrive.
Along watercourses and in the shelter of trees, there’s still a blush of green grass. Grasses that were seemingly rejected by grazers in the wet season (Panicum maximum being one) are sought after like perfectly aged wine. Seed-eating birds scrounge from the dusty ground now that seeds have fallen, adding energy-rich harvester termites to their menu as the latter venture from their nests to gather dry grass.
Dotted across the landscape, aloes are clinging to their glory days, the apices of their inflorescences still beckoning brightly to bees and other pollinators desperate for a sugary meal. The orange fruits of buffalo thorn and donkey berry have ripened, and fruiting fig and Euphorbia trees are bustling with mousebirds, starlings and barbets. Closer inspection of the canopy reveals insects and birds swarming flowering mistletoes.
All this demonstrates that in this lean season, choices are available, albeit restricted. This philosophy was taken to heart by a brave and desperate mosquito (wearing a woolly jumper, surely?) that visited me on my veranda the other evening, vainly hoping that her proboscis was sturdy enough to break through my layered defences against the cold… I left her to battle another day, confident that her value to Nature outweighed my temporary annoyance at her insistent whine interrupting the deliverance-begging call of the fiery-necked nightjars.
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