Volunteer Day

Across the pond in the UK, volunteer days in villages seem to catch the imagination of the citizenry. Put up a poster in the local, and the next Saturday they seem to have people flocking to help tidy up the town or the stream, or the park. Our colleagues at Adopt-A-River have a monthly beach clean-up right here in KZN, and that seems to go well. It does perhaps help that the location is in a big city, from which it must be a bit easier to get a group of volunteers. In the highlands, the sites needing help are out in the countryside, and a volunteer has to travel there….in so doing, displaying a new level of commitment.

Nothwithstanding these fears, we have organised a volunteer day on the uMngeni River on Saturday 12th June 2021. The task at hand is to clear small sapling growth (wattles) off a very steep slope, on Brigadoon Farm on the uMngeni. This small cliff (about 15 metres high and around 200 metres long) was cleared of big trees in 2018. That task was completed by a specialist tree feller, with guys roping in with chainsaws. Of course the big trees are gone now, so it doesn’t make sense to pay a tree feller (upwards of R12,000 per day!) to cut small saplings.

In the last 2 years, follow up teams have cut saplings away either side of this cliff, but for safety reasons have avoided the slope itself.

Enter the Pine Busters!

Pine Busters are a fantastic group of volunteers who remove pines from hard-to-reach places in the Drakensberg. The thing they have in common is a love for mountain climbing, and they put these skills to work removing trees while hanging on ropes. While our site in the Dargle is tame compared to the cliffs they encounter in the berg, their skills are exactly what we need to get the job done.

They have offered to help us, and we are in return collecting a donation to help them out.

Volunteers to drag away the cut saplings, help fetch and carry gear, and maybe just get them a hot cup of coffee, are invited to join us for the day, or part thereof. We don’t mind if people come along to educate their kids, and all they do is re-fuel a chainsaw or go fetch a rope from the bakkie, we just need some hands on deck to make things go more smoothly.

So here is the invitation to you:

We meet at Taste Buds Farmstall at 8:30 am. Get there a few minutes and Sue or Nicky at Taste Buds will sell you a hot coffee and something delicious to eat. Then we leave any extra/unneeded cars behind and drive up to the farm (16kms) . Once there, we can leave low clearance cars near the dairy, and pile on any bakkies in the mix, and drive through the farm (2kms) to the site, which is right next to the farm road.

Anyone wanting to join for just a few hours, or anything up to the whole day, is most welcome to come along. The site is not dangerous, so we encourage you to bring your family and kids along. When you are there you can see what work has already been done on the river, and enjoy the spectacular views.

If you have any questions, please call or whatsapp Andrew on 082 57 44 262.

REPORT BACK:
Our small band of committed volunteers got a great job done. Most of the slope was cleared. A special thank-you to the members of “Pine Busters” who made it happen.

And as seen 5 months later in November 2021

The Plight of the Poort

This mini project is not yet funded. It is just a few weeks before we can expect some heavy rain, and we would like nothing better than to be able to get into this valley and get some eco-logs in place.

Take a look at this short video. If the initiative grabs you, and you would like to contribute to making it happen, drop us a message on the “Contact us” page…….

D.U.C.T. on the upper uMngeni

The Duzi uMngeni Conservation Trust have done considerable work on the uMngeni in the Dargle valley in recent years. Andrew Fowler meets up with Alfred Zuma on site and we take a tour of some of the work being done there:

Replacing Indigenous Forest Patches in the Riparian Zone of the Upper uMngeni River

•          “The promotion of indigenous deciduous trees for rehabilitation of clearing programmes may be important as there would be no transpiration during periods when water resources are limited” 

•     “The total accumulated sap flow per year for the three individual A. mearnsii and E. grandis trees was 6548 and 7405 La  respectively. In contrast, the indigenous species averaged 2934L a, clearly demonstrating the higher water use of the introduced species”

From: Water Use dynamics on an alien-invaded riparian forest within the summer rainfall zone of South Africa ....Scott-Shaw and Everson 2019.

The above statements are just two statements extracted from the publication mentioned above. While one has to be careful not to extract just the information that proves a pre-conceived notion, having read the paper, I think these take-outs are a fair representation of the whole, albeit overly summarised. The paper displays graphs in which is demonstrated how the alien (evergreen) species have a continual high water demand during the year, whereas the deciduous indigenous species, with their winter dormancy, show a very low water demand in the dry winter months. The dry winter months are those in which the river experiences its lowest, or ‘base’ flows, and is also the time of highest irrigation demand along the river.

This additional seasonal understanding of matters goes a long way to fully comprehend the extent of the demonstrated hydrological benefits outlined in the report. This also serves in justifying the expense and difficulty of removing alien invasive species in catchments generally, but more particularly along immediate riparian zones.  The applicability of this report to the projects of Upland River Conservation  is leveraged even further by the fact that this two year study was done in the heart of our Upper uMngeni Super Catchment project area, on New Forest Farm.

Before having been alerted to this study, we had identified seven small areas where alien invasive species have been removed, and where we hope to establish small indigenous forest patches. There are no doubt other suitable sites as well, but these are the first seven that have been mapped.

This was prompted by the notion that having removed the tree canopy from the river banks, we may have caused a sudden warming. While the river banks were largely unshaded a hundred years ago the more recent slow ingress of the alien canopy may have mitigated slight global warming. With the sudden removal we may have caused the environment to “catch up” on that warming in a short space of time. This has made us mindful of re-establishing tall woody river bank vegetation to achieve a natural level of shading. This shading would comprise mainly tall grassland and some Nchishi , but in at least in some places it means re-forestation with indigenous species.

The sites have been carefully chosen based on observation of where forest patches do occur, and where they might have occurred before the severe alien wattle infestation, which might have displaced them. In several cases, lone indigenous trees were found left standing after the wattle had been felled. In all cases the sites are steep, south-facing slopes along the river or tributary course. These areas are cool, and remain moist enough that they tend not to burn in winter.

In fact, money has already been raised to re-establish one of the seven envisaged forest patches.

With advise from a local indigenous tree nursery, and armed with a species list from another scientific study in the same forest, we plan to first establish the forest precursor shrubs. Once these get going, they are likely to form a frost- free micro-climate and canopy in which the trees themselves have a better chance of surviving the critical first few years. Once that is achieved, we plan to plant the trees themselves. These will of course include evergreen indigenous species, in the interests of maintaining the natural biodiverse mix, so the hydrological benefits may not be as stark as those reported in our opening quotes. The initiative does however represent a return to what conditions may have been before the invasion of alien trees.  

In the interim, erosion control and re-grassing has been a priority for the bulk of the cleared river bank areas. Much has been achieved, but there remains a lot to do, especially along the banks of the Furth stream. Re-grassing efforts, and any required erosion control will continue parallel to our reforestation ambitions. We are currently exploring innovative funding solutions for each of the remaining six sites.

We certainly believe that the distinct and easily identifiable outcome of a forest patch, visible on Google Earth from anywhere in the world, might have appeal to funders who would like to be able to see the fruits of their contribution. Added to that, these small  forest patches are between 800 and 5000 square metres only, and are therefore not expensive to create.