It's a wrap!

I have had an email from a regular reader saying they always try to guess what each blog is about - and they have never been right yet. But once they have read through - it all seems so obvious! Ha!

The recent rains, there have been many developmnents - but the most startling is the sudden appearance of hundreds of tsongololos.

There are many spellings of the name - from shongololo (from the Zulu) to chongololo, but basically they are millipedes. And we all call 'em chongies! The ones we get here grow from a light 'orange' to a deep pitch black. When touched, they curl into a defensive posture, and, as every kid knows, they 'poop'. They have a bunch of legs (though obviously not a thousand!) and I think I recall reading somehwere that they all have an odd number of legs. Which is indeed odd!

But it is not actually pooping - the substance they exude contains cyanide - this being a defense mechanism for the poor old chongies, who are not very fast and who tend to live out in the open because their food is fungus and plant matter. This stops the birds eating them into extinction.

Today - walking to my house, I saw a fine specimen, and so picked him up to photograph him. When I put him down again - I placed him fairly close to a baby chongie - and he made a beeline for it. Grasping the youngster by the head, he wrapped himself around it, and then caught him in a vice-like grip, all the while biting on the head of the poor widdle baby chongie.

I have left out the final pics - the decaptiation and evisceration. Just too graphic.

Death lurks EVERYWHERE on this jolly continent of ours!

So I put him down near the baby........and he bit him on the head.........

 

 

and things went from bad to worse to worser...