We were again lucky with big game. There must have been a dozen Eland sightings, mostly singles, with plenty of other evidence including broken Buddleja salviifolia bushes – their favourite winter food. A group of six Mountain Reedbuck was the largest we have ever seen. A bushbuck near the hotel garden appeared to have no […]
Hospitality rocks. It has to be the one business which is never dull; there are daily challenges and there is always a good glass of red in the evenings when the chaos subsides. Yesterday our Orla had too close of an encounter with a baboon and then a small fire brought life to a head
Sheila Hyman was the Junior School Head when we were students at St John’s Diocesan School for Girls in Pietermaritzburg. After completing my first year at St John’s I was shocked to hear that the Headmistress had decided to spend Christmas at The Cavern with her almost 95 year old mother. I was completely blown
The weather was perfect, birds responding full bore at sunrise. The highlight was seeing three Half-collared Kingfishers at once on the bottom pond. Although this is a regular haunt the kingfishers usually flee if approached too closely. Not today. This was a breeding episode, mom, dad and junior – easily identified by mottled beak and
All our children are teens and our youngest has requested to go to the movies with her friends on Saturday night. This got me thinking…
Our Big5Hike took place this past weekend and we had almost 100 hikers summit the 5 peaks surrounding The Cavern. It was a weekend of incredible sunshine and was such a success with R1m raised to go towards educating the children from our rural amaZizi Village. We gathered on Saturday evening for our Home Coming
We’ve all heard of the African Big Five (fierce and hairies), and Cavernites know of the Cavern Big Five (high peaks to be walked consecutively in a single day). Now it’s time to introduce the Cavern Feathered Five. These are the birds which most epitomise The Cavern birding experience. How to choose them? Endemism is
Dear Friends We are a quarter of the way through the year and it’s true that life seems to speed up once your children have passed 6 years of age. Those early years seem so long and getting to the end of nappies and bottle washing seems to take an eternity and then suddenly they
I always preferred numbers to words. In fact I often read news articles on our travels to and from Boarding School and have to spell out words for Hilton to pronounce for me. I find English to be properly hard and confusing so when we decided we’d have a blog I was terrified of doing
The weather was not kind. A howling gale dominated the Saturday. Most birds don’t like wind. Heads down in the bushes. But luckily swifts and swallows have the opposite view. There’s probably more aerial plankton in windy conditions. Anything small and light gets swept up, and this is the best time for spiderlings to disperse
