Botswanabugs

Joined: Jun 4, 2017 Last Active: Mar 28, 2024 iNaturalist

I really enjoy looking at and documenting the plants, insects and spiders in and around a very large village called Serowe in Central Botswana.

From Bessie's Introduction to Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind :

I renamed Serowe the village of the rain-wind. We have more
drought years than rain years. During my ten-year stay here, the two or
three seasons when it rained for a whole month in one long, leaden
downpour were so exceptional and stunning that I cannot even describe
them. I am more familiar with the rain pattern of drought years. It rains
sparsely, unpredictably, fiercely and violently in November, December and
January. Before the first rains fall, it gets so hot that you cannot breathe.
Then one day the sky just empties itself in a terrible downpour. After this,
the earth and sky heave alive and there is magic everywhere. The sky
becomes a huge backdrop for the play of the rain -- not ordinary rain but
very peculiar, teasing rain.

A ring of low blue hills partly surrounds the village; at least, they look
blue, misty, from a distance. But if sunlight and shadow strike them at a
certain angle, you can quite clearly see their flat and unmysterious surfaces.
They look like the uncombed heads of old Batswana men, dotted here and
there with the dark shapes of thorn trees. It is on this far-off horizon that all
through December and January, the teasing summer rain sways this way
and that. The wind rushes through it and you get swept about from head to
toe by a cold, fresh rain-wind. That 's about all you ever get in Serowe most
summers -- the rain-wind but not the rain.

Even so, summertime in Serowe can be an intensely beautiful
experience, intense because with just a little rain everything comes alive all
at once; over-eager and hungry. A little rain makes the earth teem with
insects, tumbling out of their long hibernation. There are swarms of flies,
swarms of mosquitoes, and swarms of moths -- sometimes as big as little
birds. Crickets and frogs appear overnight in the pools around the village:
there is a heavy, rich smell of breathing earth everywhere.

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