The invasive alien tree Hakea sericea remains an ominous threat to the Klein Swartberg Mountains. As a small part of bigger coordinated effort to control hakea in these beautiful mountains, Hugh Sussen and I headed up the Waterkloof valley on Saturday morning, 16 March. We didn’t let the disappointment of only being two in number detract from our enjoyment of the weekend. After about two hours walk up the kloof we reached our campsite at a shallow overhang, where we left our backpacks.
Hugh Sussen savouring the enjoyment of a good hack in progress
About a hundred metres of steep scramble up from our camp brought us our first hakea victims, from where we continued gradually up the slope sawing down the hakeas as we went (hakeas do not require any herbicides to prevent them regrowing provided that cut low enough to leave no remaining twigs
with leaves. It is also very encouraging to see that after returning to other areas where we cut hakea a few years ago, the growth of young plants is very limited and it would seem that rodents are doing a sterling job in eating most of the (tasty) hakea seeds shed by the recently felled trees).
After sawing our way up the slope and clearing about 2 hectares in total, by 3 o clock we had worked our way back down to the river to enjoy a refreshing plunge and relax in the splendour of the kloof. The next day after “collecting” a few more hakeas, we headed back out the kloof, ring-barking three lone wattle trees encountered on the way. Hugh posted our clearing on the iNaturalist Project “The Ten Thousand Tree Mountain Fynbos Challenge” (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/202799193) where some of the other clearing can be also seen in the Klein Swartberg and further afield.
Meet Leader ~ Donovan Kotze