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A camera trap at a waterhole on Uli Trümper’s farm Safari captured a lappet-faced vulture together with a black-backed jackal on 29 January this year. The clearly visible plastic tag on the vulture revealed that the bird was ringed about nine years ago. Pictures taken by other camera traps also prove that the vulture was successfully rehabilitated and that it is in good condition. 

Last week, we launched our #itsup2us campaign at the Delight Hotel in Swakopmund. The Gondwana Collection Namibia has adopted a “Zero waste to Landfill” goal together with our partner in this venture – Rent-a-Drum (RaD) who originally adopted this initiative. 

They often appear in huge flocks and descend on waterholes like a cloud. In their thousands they invade fields and destroy harvests – from Senegal across to Ethiopia and down to southern Africa, where vast swarms are on the move in search of food and for nesting. They are the largest population of a single bird species on the planet. Experts estimate their numbers at 1500 billion birds after a breeding season. We are talking about the red-billed quelea. 

The discovery of over 500 million year old small fossils in southern Namibia, are today supporting scientific research of living organisms that dwelled on mega-continents like Gondwana, Pangea and Rodinia. Namibia’s southern mountain ranges near Aus provide fascinating fossil finds – witness to dramatic happenings like the Cambrian Fauna Explosion eons ago. Renowned international scientists are currently researching these fossils. Would you like to know more? Read on.

Something large and ungainly was lying just above the high-water mark on a beach in Skeleton National Park. Some vehicles had driven past, probably because the brown lump looked like one of the many tree trunks that get deposited on the beaches. But then the ‘trunk’ turned out to be a young bull southern elephant seal. The bulky marine mammal seemed unperturbed by the people around him.

Visitors to the coast sometimes find penguins on the beach that seem to be sick and try to put them back into the water. When the little fellows look scruffy and unhappy they are not sick but in moult. A number of these flightless birds are sometimes brought to Swakopmund or Walvis Bay where they eventually make it to Dr Sandra Dantu and in Lüderitz to the rehabilitation centre of the Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources.