Munching ‘Magic’ Mushrooms | Snake Aversion Training | Restoring Extinct Vultures | Winter’s Tale

Crows Munch ‘Magic’ Mushrooms in Lesotho 

A new species of psychoactive mushroom found growing on cow dung in South Africa has long been eaten by crows and used by diviners in neighbouring Lesotho to foretell the future.

The mushroom, which now goes by the scientific name Psilocybe maluti after Lesotho's Maluti mountains, is known to Basotho traditional healers as koae-ea-lekhoaba. 

That word pays tribute to a fascinating interaction. The ‘lekhoaba’ part of the name refers to pied crows, and the Basotho healers told the researchers they’d observed these clever native birds regularly eating the mushrooms, which have spear-shaped, toffee-coloured caps. 

It would appear that koae-ea-lekhoaba mushrooms don’t disperse their spores via the air, but rely on animals to do this for them. Laboratory tests still need to be done, however, to see if the mushrooms’ spores can survive the digestive tracts of crows. 

While Basotho diviners mix the mushroom with another native plant to trigger a trance-like state in their patients, what effect the mushrooms might have on the birds would be speculation, one of the researchers told me. 

“These alkaloids probably work differently on birds than they do on humans,” he said.

“Another possibility is that the crows are after the bugs that live in the dung heaps and eat/interact with the mushrooms as a kind of by-catch.” 

P. maluti mushrooms grow on cow dung in South Africa and Lesotho | Cullen Taylor Clark

Livestock Guarding Dogs Trained to Avoid Venomous Snakes

Dogs trained to guard goats and sheep against cheetahs and other carnivores in Namibia are being felled at an alarming rate by venomous snakes – so conservationists are piloting a new training method to teach the dogs how to avoid them. 

The dogs – Anatolian and Kangal shepherd dogs native to Turkey – are so devoted to their charges that they’ll naturally confront any snake that approaches their herd – and invariably pay for it with their lives. 

Since the Cheetah Conservation Fund started training Livestock Guarding Dogs in Namibia 30 years ago, 84 of its dogs have been killed by the bites of snakes that include puff adders, zebra cobras and black mambas. 

The pioneering snake aversion lessons involve familiarising the dogs with the sight and smell of snakes in a controlled environment using, among other props, toy rubber snakes and dead frozen snakes. 

The latter are ones collected from roadkill sites and kept in freezers at CCF’s conservation centre in the Namibian city of Otjiwarongo. 

The puppies are trained inside a pen at the centre that is made to mimic their working environment on livestock farms in Namibia’s central Otjozondjupa region. 

Around 90% of Namibia’s 1,800-or-so cheetahs are found on farmland. And though they prefer to eat small wild antelopes, cheetahs are often wrongly targeted for killing farmers’ goats or sheep simply because they are daytime hunters and therefore the predators farmers are most likely to encounter. 

Livestock guarding dogs are therefore key to not only protecting livestock, but also cheetahs from inevitable conflict with farmers. 

CCF estimates that livestock losses have been reduced by more than 90% in areas where its dogs are used. It is now raising funds to train a new litter of puppies to avoid snakes, and to purchase snake antivenom as a back-up in case some of the dogs still get bitten.

A Namibian farmer with his dog and herds | CCF

Vultures Imported to SA to Found New Breeding Population

Egyptian vultures are birds famed for their ability to crack open ostrich eggs with stones wielded in their beaks. Two of them arrived late last month in South Africa from a zoo in the US. 

They were transported inside two large animal crates aboard a plane. 

The vultures are expected to become the founders of a new breeding population. Egyptian vultures went extinct in southern Africa decades ago. 

The region's last breeding record for the species was in South Africa’s Eastern Cape province in the early part of the twentieth century. 

Sightings of vagrant Egyptian vultures from Europe, the Middle East or East Africa are now extremely rare in this part of the world. The birds invariably cause a stir in the birding and scientific communities whenever they do show up. 

One such bird – a juvenile that hadn’t yet acquired its distinctive black and white plumage – was photographed at a safari ranch in southern Zimbabwe two years ago. 

The two vultures imported from the US are currently quarantined at a zoo near Johannesburg. Once cleared, they will be transferred to a vulture rehabilitation and breeding centre run by conservation group, VulPro, in the Eastern Cape. 

“This is just the start of our efforts to reintroduce the species into South Africa," says Kerri Wolter, the group's chief executive. 

One of the two Egyptian vultures in quarantine in South Africa | VulPro

Nature Notes: A Winter’s Tale 

I love the shades of a Zimbabwean winter. Fiery red flowers on the lucky-bean trees; grasslands turned to gold by the soft winter sun. 

There are also the striking yellow flowers of the winter cassia, a small tree that botanists refer to as Senna singueana. 

Good looks aren’t the trees’ only attributes: recent studies show that an extract of their delicate, compound leaves can be used to help ward off malaria.

The winter cassia has a wide distribution. It can be found growing as far north as Ethiopia. In fact part of its scientific name – singueana – is derived from Singu, a region in Ethiopia where it was first collected for science by French explorer Frederic Cailliaud.

Incidentally, he was also the man credited with helping to decipher hieroglyphics. 

When I came across a winter cassia in Harare’s National Botanic Garden last week, its winter flush of flowers was nearly over. Small green pods were beginning to emerge. 

Pods on nearby musasa trees that had clung on since the summer were beginning to split with loud clicks in the warm afternoon air. From beneath the musasas, an African hoopoe took flight, flashing vivid black and white wings. 

They were all signs that here, in southern African, spring is near.