Page 37 - FourWaysGardens Issue 10 2021

Nature

our living Deserts

B y Ja M es c la R ke
iving, as most of us do, on the high thousands of species of plants – hundreds
inland plateau of Southern Africa, found nowhere else in the world.
what do we consider a good rainfall?
LA summer storm can often bring Each living thing has its ingenuous way of
20mm of rain in an hour. That’s good. We surviving the searing temperatures and the
often experience twice that, even three rainless months.
times more.
Lovegrove has forebodings regarding
But consider this: in the dry half of South climate change and its potential effects
Africa, 20mm is as much as people expect on such a finely tuned ecosystem. He is
in a year. Some, in the far west, record as worried because, during the years he has
little as 5mm a year. worked in the deserts, retrograde changes
have already manifested.
How do the animals and plants survive?
Call it evolutionary ingenuity. Some, for He writes for fellow scientists as well as
instance, tap the nightly fogs coming for students and for the growing mass
in from the cold Atlantic. The fogs roll of people interested in natural history.
westwards only to evaporate at sunrise. He writes of the amazing adaptations
There are beetles that cling upside down shown by creatures in order to survive in
to leaf stems allowing the fog to condense desiccated environments.
on the surfaces of their hard-shelled outer
wings. The droplets accumulate and trickle One of the most astonishing adaptations
down to their heads and mouth parts. he mentions concerns the Namaqua
sandgrouse. Although its chicks are able to
There’s a marvellous picture of weevils run around and feed on seeds from the day
doing this in Barry Lovegrove's The Living they hatch, they cannot drink. They can’t
Deserts of Southern Africa. The book is a drink because they can’t fly and the nearest
greatly expanded revision of his 1993 water might be 50 to 60km away. The male
bestseller of the same title. sandgrouse then has to carry water to them.
It sits in the water fluffing out its feathers to
Lovegrove, an evolutionary physiologist, absorb as much as possible – these feathers
writes with an easy style and is unafraid of can hold more water per unit weight than
emotion or offering forthright views. He a kitchen sponge. Daily it flies back to its
writes as a lover of desert life and describes young, which take the wet feathers in their
how our barren wastes teem with life just beaks and strip the water. Very little water
as varied and species-rich as our coastal is lost during the return flights to the nest
forests. The diversity of creatures in these because the bird holds the soaked feathers
arid regions varies from ants to elephants. against its body effectively reducing the
The birdlife is amazing and there are airflow over them.

Fourways Gardens • 35 • November 2021