Natures wonders: Kalahari adaptations (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 01, 2021, 00:58 (1209 days ago) @ David Turell

Extreme heat, little water:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/rising-heat-puts-the-kalaharis-ecos...

"Massive bird nests made by sociable weavers in camel thorn trees may be decades old, sheltering generations through the Kalahari’s extremes. Hungry Cape cobras and boomslange often enter the chambered nests looking for chicks to eat.

"The Kalahari is the world’s largest expanse of unbroken sand, a rolling ocean of windblown dunes across Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, and beyond that are topped with savanna, a mostly grassy landscape dotted with occasional trees. Here on the region’s southern edge, air currents have swept up a series of north-south–running dunes lapping against the flanks of bare, quartzite hills that rise like whalebacks from the deep.

"Decades of farming have thrown the region into disarray, and now it seems that the freight-train effects of planetary heating are bearing down too. What Panaino and Phakoago learn about the secretive lives of creatures out here on the dunes will give conservation managers emergency signals to help them better protect this vestige of the Kalahari.

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"Homebuilders enable collective survival in the harsh Kalahari. Sociable weavers share their nests with African pygmy falcons, skinks, and foraging snakes. Aardvarks are prolific burrowers that excavate underground chambers also used by jackals, porcupines, wild cats, warthogs, ground squirrels, and swallows, among others."

Comment: If the website will let you see the pictures the woven nests are huge