Video Two-;A walk with O'D and an encounter with a mystery bird

We’ve had to open several paths through our little forest to make it quicker to get to our firebreaks when we hear the awful telltale crackling sound of flames.

These paths make for delightful shady walks, especially during the very hot, steamy summers we have here in Mozambique. And as well as that, we often come across some pretty interesting, scary or mysterious things during these walks.

On this particular walk that you’re about to see, O’D comes across Grumpy, our white cat that was kidnapped in 2002 by some locals and Spike, a furry bulk weighing over 20 kgs and who is eyeing a Kingfisher in an extremely predatory way. A Samango monkey, sitting in a most unladylike manner, is in a nearby tree.

Towards the end of his walk, O’D catches sight of an unusual bird high up in a tree above him. It’s making a purring sound and keeping its green back turned towards him. He’s unable to identify it and because of the way it’s sitting, he thinks it’s sick.

It was only very much later that we were able to identify it.

One afternoon, when Douglas, our cook, was busy making shortbread biscuits in the kitchen, he looked up from his rolling pin and saw the mystery bird. It was perched on a branch of the kapok tree right in front of our sitting room window and revealed itself to be none other than a Narina Trogon! (Apaloderma narina)

The Narina Trogon, we discovered, usually perches with its green back towards you in a forest and, as a result, is a very difficult bird to see. So, what a stroke of luck that Douglas just happened to look out of the kitchen window at that particular time!

Trogons make a low, slow ‘hoot hoot … hoot hoot’ sound during the breeding season (October) and also the purring sound you heard while O’D was standing underneath it and filming it.

Apparently, these birds are very delicate. Poor things, they have weak feet, their skin is easily torn and their feathers drop out if they’re handled!

To Watch Video Click The You tube link below-:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddOQYdKBGxE

Video One -: Our Forest

Hi everyone,

We thought we'd begin this first segment of our blog with brief clips of the Nhamacoa forest and some of its inhabitants, as well as showing you what it was like when we first came to live here.

It was rough living then, without a phone up to 2005 and with only a short wave radio and books to entertain us. Is living without a television for eighteen years a world record??

When people started invading the forest and setting fire to it to clear machambas (fields), life became wilder, especially when they waved their pangas (machetes) up in the air and threatened to cut us up into little pieces when O'D told them to control their fires.

It was all a big adventure for O'D and his Mozambican partner Caetano. As for me with drums sometimes drumming for days and nights and my new primitive lifestyle of cooking over a mud brick oven in a pole and grass cook hut and bathing with water from a hole we had to dig in the dry Nhamacoa river, i sometimes had the mad feeling that i had somehow and was living not in the 1990's but in the 1890's

Till Next Week,

Val

To watch Video click the You Tube Link Below -:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhRxzUhUanE&feature=channel

Meet O'D & Val living In Mozambique, Africa

Hello from O'D and Val especially to all our family and friends around the world.

I've called this blog O'D Pixley's forest blog because if it hadn't been for O'D, this forest around us would have disappeared ages ago.
It was once part of a very large forest of indigenous hardwood trees but the people came into the forest and between 1995 and 2005 chopped down about 30 000 hectares, slashing and burning to open machambas ( fields ).

They turned the trees into charcoal and a very beautiful forest went up in smoke.

With the destruction of their habitat, all sorts of animals, birds and reptiles fled into our trees and took refuge with us. Their existence im sorry to say depends solely on our continued presence here in the Nhamacoa.

At the moment we are in a holding position but if we were to leave, the last of the trees would be cut down and the animals would either be killed for food or die because of their loss of habitat

All the films you are about to see were taken by O'D and edited by Lee Shoniwa an aspiring filmmaker.

My contribution comes in all form of writing.

We hope you will enjoy seeing how we live and that you will find the inhabitants of this last little remnant of a once great forest as fascinating and as beautiful as we do.

Val.

Contact us on our email-: nhamacoa@gmail.com