by Dominic Chadbon | Aug 18, 2020 | Conservation |
They say it used to take two days to haul an ox wagon from Cape Town harbour across the Cape Flats to Somerset West. At a modest distance of some 45 kilometres (28 miles) you might be wondering why it took so long. Until you visit Zandvlei Nature Reserve. Tucked away...
by Dominic Chadbon | Jun 19, 2019 | Conservation |
Not many visitors to Cape Town go to Bellville. A splodge of light industry and housing north of the city, it is perhaps ‘Jersey-side’ to New Yorkers; to Londoners it is Croydon. But travel to the University of the Western Cape’s Bellville campus and something...
by Dominic Chadbon | Jul 18, 2018 | Conservation |
The next time you visit the Cape Winelands and crack open a bottle of Chardonnay, take a look around you. The landscape today is a pleasant agricultural medley of vineyards, orchards and wheat fields but 400 years ago it was shrubby grassland covered in big, wild...
by Dominic Chadbon | Aug 28, 2017 | Conservation |
It’s been burnt by countless fires, over-grazed by generations of livestock, commandeered as a military camp and used as a cricket pitch. Urban development has nibbled away at its edges, reducing it to 40 hectares (100 acres) in size while alien grasses continue their...
by Dominic Chadbon | Jan 26, 2017 | Conservation |
Talk about a narrow escape. Until the arrival of the European settlers, the bontebok antelope once roamed the hills of the southern Cape in large herds; by the 1930s their numbers were down to a few dozen. From these wide-eyed survivors, seventeen were taken to the...
by Dominic Chadbon | Dec 22, 2016 | Conservation |
I’ve just moved house from the outskirts of Cape Town’s central business district to the Cape Flats. When I saw my new garden, a windblown, sun-baked sandy wasteland, tears welled up in my eyes. Not out of disappointment you understand, but out of pure excitement....
