Date: 11/01/2013
Team: Hendrik Steenberg, Taki Tsonis, Dave Dawson, Dimitri Kambas, Kyle and Ian Engelbrecht.

Hendrik and Dave have arrived at my place ready to pack the Amarok and ready for a quick nap so we can wake up around 3am to meet Taki and hit the road. Plans seem to always change when Hendrik is in the picture so instead we suprised Taki at his house forcing him to pack quickly so we can have a quick dinner in bedfordview and hit the road at 12am.

As always it took approximately 1 hour for Dave to fall asleep in the car. About 1:30 before reaching Gundani we stopped to have a quick pee. Its kind of a cliche everytime i need a pee because some how i always spot a burrow. The time is 4:40am and the first burrow tickle started as to see what is hiding inside.











As we are trying our best tickling for abour 10 minutes, Taki starts shouting check what i got





We where all shocked :happy: and of course so happy that before even waking up we found our first tarantula a beautiful Ceratogyrus brachycephalus (Greaterhorned Baboon)




What a start to a weekend. And extermely happy to add another African beauty to our Tarantupedia!

The awesome discovery was not just the Ceratogyrus brachycephalus (Greaterhorned Baboon) but the fact that nearly 1m away we found another burrow and guess what was in there:











All excited about our find we headed for our next stop up north. At least we had something to debate about for the next 1:30 hours: How come Ceratogyrus brachycephalus (Greaterhorned Baboon) and Ceratogyrus darlingi (East African Horned Baboon) live right next to eachother. I mean we found approximately 15-20 burrows in that area so who know how many are Ceratogyrus brachycephalus (Greaterhorned Baboon) vs Ceratogyrus darlingi (East African Horned Baboon) ! What do the males do? (That for a different topic)

So we got to our next destination where we met up with Kyle and Ian. Found some awesome scorpions, some massive and some tiny.





This was one massive scorpion!!!!!






This scorpion caught a little ghecko as we lifted the rock. Crazy...






As well as other spiders





Then Hendrik managed to find another much smaller Ceratogyrus darlingi (East African Horned Baboon) in a very dry and rocky area.





I think we where searching for about 4 hours when we decided to move onto another random area. The place we stopped at was completely dry and "dead". I even told the guys that we are wasting our time.

After about 20 minutes searching Dave and myself where walking and he suddenly stops me and says LOOK :



The burrow was soooo dry that when we called Hendrik to check it out he said "Don't waste your time, there is nothing in there!" and he walked off. Dave and myself looked at eachother and nodded. So out came the little piece of grass... 1 minute later out came the longer piece of grass... 5 minutes later came out even longer piece of grass and viola there was a bite. I think we sat there for about 30 minutes fishing it out with this piece of grass and here is what finally came out:



What a beauty! We where obviously doing our little happy dance. As you can see from the picture below it was bone dry and a very lonely burrow.



To be continued...

Jeez! Looking at these pics the jealousy wants to make me say things.
Like marmalade and halitosis.

Nice finds guys!

At the end of the day, if you have good company its so much fun and enjoyable. You learn so much and appreciate the country we live in!

Great pics and really cool specimens !! A. junodi is really stunning. Great job guys !!

If you go on another trip it's going to have to be pretty spectacular to compete with this one! Absolutely awesome guys! Very jealous of what you managed to find.

The most amazing part is that we managed to add 4 new species (pictures) to our Tarantupedia:

Ceratogyrus brachycephalus (Greaterhorned Baboon)
Augacephalus junodi
Ceratogyrus darlingi (East African Horned Baboon) sling
Idiothele nigrofulva Mature Male