Nature never fails to leave you with a sense of wonder – that’s probably the reason atlasing appeals to me so much as there is seldom an atlasing outing that doesn’t come up with a surprise or two, often ‘ordinary’ birds behaving in an extraordinary manner, or an out-of-the-ordinary bird popping up unexpectedly.

But atlasing is not what this short post is about – as so often happens while searching for birds, something else altogether caught my attention. Well actually, it was grandson Christopher (visiting from Australia with our son and the rest of his family) who encountered this particular insect and drew my attention to it.

We were taking a walk along the nature trail near our home and had seen or heard a number of the birds that I often encounter including plenty of Cape Sugarbirds, often so numerous during the Protea flowering season that I have come to call that part of the trail “Sugarbird Alley”

Christopher was up ahead at one point and called us to come and look at what he had found – it was an extremely well camouflaged grasshopper among dry stick and grass litter at the edge of the trail.

Take a careful look at the heading photo and the one below and you will see just how well camouflaged this particular grasshopper is in its carefully chosen environment. To enhance its camouflage it has placed itself partly underneath some of the dry sticks, giving the very convincing appearance of being part of this random scattering of sticks and grass – just wonderful!

In case you cannot find it, I have circled it in green below

When it moved away from the sticks it became a lot more visible.

Some later research (aka Googling) suggested that this is a Common Stick Grasshopper (acrida acuminata). I like the Afrikaans name of Spooksprinkaan – literally ‘Ghost Grasshopper’

Normally it would be all but invisible to someone passing by, but it happened to hop out of the way just as Christopher approached, giving away its presence but still requiring sharp eyes to pick it out among the real sticks.