There are veld fires burning through the farmlands of the Vyeboom Valley and eating up through ravines of wattle and acacia, great crimson pillars of flame visible at night from 70 or 90 kilometres away. Yesterday afternoon, the roads out of the valley were closed ecept for firefighting teams.
This is nothing on the scale of the Australian tragedy, but destructive enough for farmers and livestock and the vegetation. The birds are wheeling and scattering over the sky this morning, diving through the pall of grey smoke that smells bitter as ashes.
No arsonists here, but there are things we could do and we don’t. The Earth Mama is wringing her hands in despair. Monocropping is bad for the ecology of any area and fields of GM maize and rapeseed stretch across hillsides to the horizon. Exotics like eucalyptus and acacia ( Port Jackson wilow, imported from Australia) go up like Roman candles because of the volatile oils and are still planted everywhere as windbreaks. Areas denuded of fynbos and left barely clothed in dry grasses are highly flammable and exposed to the full brunt of winds fanning the flames. Too many mountain streams have been dammed or diverted.
But paradoxically the wild fires of the Cape mountains are necessary in that much of the fynbos – the grey shrubs and protea and leucadendron bushes and fine succulents, similar to the maquis and chaparral in the Mediterranean or California — needs the phoenix of flame in order to renew itself. Restio seeds propagate through smoke, a mysterious and astonishing process. The veld fires clear the deadwood of the shortlived leucacdendrons. Finely wooded fynbos plants are obligate seeders, which means that the whole plant dies after fire and can only reproduce through seed. The balance of survival and renewal is a delicate violence. The evergreen heathlands of fynbos comprise more than 8 600 flowering plants, most of them unique to the Western Cape and dependent on pollination by the endangered Cape sugarbird.
This tightrope we walk above the flames –
The astonishing feats that Mother Nature has either orchestrated or adapted to ! In Northern California, the giant Redwoods need fire to crack the seed pods. Although the bark itself is relatively flameproof…curious, isn’t it?
Thinking of you and the fires and toasted buns, somehow.
xoxoxox
Pingback: Cape Sugarbird - Promerops cafer | Birds of the World