Wild Systems

Southern Africa's rarest, endemic bird of prey spends most of its life unseen, hunting low over the fynbos it depends on. More often sensed than seen, the Black Harrier nests on the ground and disappears back into the landscape before it can properly be studied.

Fewer than 1,000 mature individuals remain, and the population is still declining as agriculture, invasive vegetation and urban expansion continue to erode its habitat. This is the story of that elusiveness, and the satellite tracking now helping researchers understand what it will take to secure its future.

Most raptors hunt from the sky. The Secretarybird hunts on foot, walking open grasslands on crane-like legs and killing snakes and other prey with a stamping kick powerful enough to strike with five times its own body weight.

Uplisted to Endangered in 2020 as its grassland habitat continues to fragment, the species is now the focus of ongoing research with HawkWatch International into its movements, breeding and territory, which for a single pair can span up to 50 km². This is the story of a bird that seems to belong as much to the ground as it does to the sky.

For more than a hundred and fifty years, no elephant walked this part of the Southern Cape. Today, a free-roaming breeding herd, the southernmost in the world, moves once again through fynbos-covered valleys where their ancestors once did.

Their return is doing more than restoring a single species. As they wallow, browse and disperse seeds through their dung, elephants are reshaping the landscape itself, opening habitat for everything from dung beetles to amphibians. This is the story of a decade spent watching that return unfold at Gondwana, season by season.

Long before the elephants, lions and cheetahs, there were the plants. Gondwana sits within the Cape Floristic Region, one of the richest botanical kingdoms on Earth, home to more than 9,000 plant species, most found nowhere else.

More than 1,200 plant species have been recorded across the reserve, over 50 of them threatened with extinction, including Gladiolus roseovenosus, a Critically Endangered geophyte with fewer than 200 plants left in the wild. This is fifteen years spent photographing that botanical richness alongside Gondwana's conservation team, telling the story of the reserve's least celebrated residents.

Cheetahs are built for speed, but their return to the fynbos of the Southern Cape is really a story about place. Once absent from this landscape, they now move through mountain valleys and open plains far removed from the savanna most associate them with, and cubs are being born here for the first time in generations.

Years of observing these cats has revealed something beyond the famous chase: male cheetahs often form lifelong coalitions, hunting and defending territory together through cooperation rather than competition. This is the story of a Vulnerable species finding, once again, a landscape large enough to let it belong.

No two African wild dogs share the same coat pattern, each animal marked in its own combination of black, gold, white and russet, as individual as a fingerprint. What holds them together isn't appearance but an intricate social language of calls, posture and touch that makes the pack function as one.

Photographed across the red earth of Madikwe, one of Africa's most endangered large carnivores can travel 30 to 50 kilometres in a single day, bound by trust rather than hierarchy. This is the story of a predator whose real strength was never speed or size, but belonging.

Lions are usually pictured on open plains, hunting by sight and speed across the horizon. In the fynbos of the Southern Cape, they've had to relearn almost everything, trading long chases for patience, ambush and the cover of dense vegetation a lion can vanish into within a few steps.

More than a decade spent following one pride here has revealed how much of that skill is taught, not instinctive, passed from mother to cub through observation and play. This is the story of a Vulnerable species rediscovering an older, more complicated way of belonging to a landscape.

Some of the Western Cape's rarest orchids spend years dormant beneath the soil, waiting for the exact combination of rain and season before flowering for only a few days. Over five years, this self-published photographic book followed those brief, easily missed appearances across the fynbos and renosterveld.

Ephemeral is part natural history study, part poetry, and part reflection on what it means to notice something before it disappears again. This is the story of the Cape's most overlooked botanical treasures, and the patience it takes to find them.