There are sights I see regularly on one of my walking routes; early morning dew on  the grass, the fallen, disintegrating tree now encrusted with fungi, the mother and juvenile bushbuck who will give a start and run through the grassland beside the road. But there are days when something different catches  my eye.

On the road ahead, the dogs have come to a pause and appear to be negotiating an obstacle. This turns out to be a large colony of fire ants on the march. Previous readers of the blog may recall that these ants are not to be trifled with! We see ants often but not in numbers like this. They are incredibly quick, both to move and to bite. If I was foolish enough to pause amongst them or to stand on them unknowingly, there is about a second from the time I have spotted them, to the moment that I feel their fierce, fiery little bite on my head! Indeed I was once spotted running (in itself an extraodinarily unusual sight), stripping clothes from myself and from my child as we raced for the bathroom after stumbling into a pile of fire ants at a children’s birthday party! But even though I was going full tilt, I believe it was kindness that prevented anyone from filming this event, as speed was not a factor…

Just as it is not a factor in regard to the Giant African Snail that I come upon.  It is a small specimen compared to some, only about 10cm long. And moving at its usual pace I am able to sit beside it and take a lot of photos. With absolutely no need of sports mode. Just like photos of me. But here I would hope the similarity ends. Although at close quarters it is really quite striking, the colouring of a greenish shell and the intriguing horns at the top of the  head all  adding to its slightly other- world appearance.

There are always small birds flitting in the tall grasses but what is different today is that I am able to get more than a glimpse of one. Mostly they are too quick for me to identify and often the only evidence that they are there is a sudden movement and the bending of the grass as they take off. As they fly, they create a gently undulating pattern, dropping and rising to the next seed head. On the winding pathway that runs between fallow field and grass land, I am glad to capture on camera one such bird. I am told it is a Croaking Cisticola. It is larger than some of the other seed eaters, with a round, plump body and quite long legs. It sits most obligingly for  a time and I can see its soft brown and grey toned feathers and its small, round bright eye.

When the bird leaves, so do I. The sun is quite well up when I get home from my walk and the dogs mill around me waiting for their breakfast with some excitement. They always love their walk and seem to get something new and interesting out of it every time. As do I; because to me, the habitual and familiar can be just as enjoyable as the new and unusual.

“Morning” by composer Edvard Grieg was written in 1874, as incidental music for Peer Gynt, a play by Hennik Ibsen.