Page 24 - Irene Farm Villages Issue 1 2022

Book Review

our liVing Deserts

By JAMES CLARKE

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

22 • Issue 1 2022 • The Villager