Buck gazelle back in the herd

Sept 06

Patience and persistence.. not to mention positivity, pay off yet again. How's that for alliteration?

Temperature 22 degrees C and falling, humidity 70% rising.. wind from the west varying 12-16 kt

To our joy and relief a fully grown male was seen with the herd today which caused interesting and lively behaviour, but I'll get to that.

The first gazelle we saw was standing under the pines at the far north east corner of north valley. This one had medium length thin horns. I check out the view to the east regularly to see if any are over in east field since they seem to love the little stand of olive trees over there. A well grown gazelle emerged from the eucalyptus grove at a run and headed north to the hillside, and didn't stop running till it was about a third of the way up the hill. This is way beyond their usual comfort distance, something other than ourselves must have really spooked her. Shortly after, two quite young gazelle together emerged from the eucalyptus grove, saw us, ran up the trail by the cistern till they reached their comfort distance of over fifty feet, then ambled casually back into the grove again, grazing nonchalantly and slowly making their way back to east field. We were amazed such young gazelle seemed so unafraid away from other gazelle and hope that the feral dog pack don't get to them like this.

A little later a small group emerged onto the lower hill slopes north of us and not far from the trees of north valley, we're talking several hundred feet, and we watched a couple of chases. It was wonderful to see how fleet they can be when they really move. Usually it's 'lope lope munch munch' but when they run they seem to leap like dancers. I know how rough that hill slope is in terms of rocks and thorny scrub but that doesn't slow them at all. The first chase we noticed involved the full grown well horned buck in the back. Husband postulated he was chasing a female but it could also have been a young buck that got a little too fresh with him and alpha male just wanted to let him know who was boss. Behaviour after that tended to support that idea, though husband could have still been right.. I need to do some research on gazelle behaviour.

The group then settled down to grazing but a few times we noticed a pair engaged in head butting behaviour.. face on and sparring as if they were in a serious challenge though they didn't have any serious horns to speak of. Again I believe these were just well grown youngsters practising the kind of behaviour they'll take more seriously later. Teenage horseplay, or in this case, gazelle play. This could get interesting, even difficult for the herd when the males grow older, with all the new field boundaries they may need human intervention in dispersing properly assuming plenty males survive. Still early to be concerned about that yet, but we shall be watching.

Hard to get the count today because of their movements (turning about more than yesterday and because of the camouflage effect if you so much as blink you have to start all over again) and we weren't sure we were seeing all of them. There were definitely at least eight in that group (not counting the two young that headed back to east field and the one that headed up the hill to the east, which as far as I could see did not join the others.) - so at least 11 individuals today. Very nice!

Between sparring episodes they stopped to graze, again all facing east as usual. This probably gives them maximum security.. they receive the most visual input from the east and plenty from north and south and since they face downwind they'll get the scent of anything behind them to the west and are already in position to run from it.

Birdlife is pretty quiet today.. blackbird alarm calls heard, they have been keeping very low profile lately. Quite a few hoodies and some feral pigeons on the wing, Collared doves about, one was chasing another- they're evidently still in that mood, plenty jays about as usual and syrian woodpeckers vocal. Sunbird singing in the Bauhinia a little and 'playing peek a boo' as it were amongst the Bauhinia leaves.

Murgatroyd the chameleon has been renamed Randall (from Monsters Inc. ) and put on his prettiest coat yet of a repeating autumn leaf design, that's how I can describe it. Sons are busy making a fruit fly culture for him (great!