The stretch of coastline from Gordon’s Bay through Rooiels and Pringle Bay towards Betty’s Bay is one of those places that needs no introduction. You just have to look.
The mountains rear up in that world famously dramatic Western Cape way; False Bay sparkles below in the crisp light; baboons patrol the road with the proprietorial air of residents giving interloping tourists the middle finger; sugarbirds, sunbirds, rockjumpers and raptors appear overhead; and fynbos covers every nook of the slope.
Rooiels on the False Bay coast is tiny. Blink and you’ve passed through it. But this minute settlement sits at the entrance to something more important (and here I imagine David Attenborough’s voice in my head): the over 100,000ha Kogelberg Biosphere Reserve, recognised by UNESCO in 1998 as South Africa’s first biosphere reserve and widely regarded as the heart of the Cape Floral Kingdom.
The smaller 18,000ha Kogelberg Nature Reserve contains around 1,800 plant species, approximately 150 of them endemic — plants that exist here and nowhere else on Earth. There are King proteas and Kleinmond proteas, ericas, restios, rare Mimetes, and flycatcher bushes. There’s even a plant called King Gustav’s sceptre, which sounds like an object Indiana Jones might be excavating in an overgrown temple, not something you’d find on a hiking trail.
Fynbos doesn’t really get its due apart from the local gin industry. From a speeding car it can look like scrub. It doesn’t offer the drama of a baobab or redwood or the exoticness of a tropical rainforest full of bright creatures. But when you look properly, anonymous bushes begin separating themselves into ericas, restios, proteas and bulbs, and plants that survive in only a handful of places on the planet — we’re still discovering them.
Last year, CapeNature and members of the Custodians of Rare and Endangered Wildflowers rediscovered Erica cunoniensis in the Kogelberg Nature Reserve. The endangered species hadn’t been seen for nearly four decades and had been feared lost. Eight plants were found sitting on a mountain.
Dine van Zyl was thoroughly charmed. The author and journalist has lived in Rooiels since 1989 and investigates her stomping ground daily on foot. She and Graham McCleland document the plants and animals they find. Van Zyl talks about her discoveries with delight.
After the 2017 fire, she was walking a familiar route when she found a large stand of the endangered yellow Erica patersonii. She’d lived in the area for nearly 30 years and had never seen it. The taller vegetation had hidden it; fire uncovered it. She’s also discovered plants that books insist belong elsewhere.
“Hello, we’ve got it here,” she sings, proprietorially. Another plant, supposedly limited to a different part of the Hangklip coast, receives the same cheerful rebuttal: “Hello? It’s right here.”
On one recent two-day survey of the WWF South Africa property in the area — held in trust and managed by CapeNature — 136 research-grade plant species were recorded. McCleland estimates that around 250 plant species occur on that property alone, alongside leopards, caracals, honey badgers, Cape rockjumpers and ground woodpeckers. Twenty-nine threatened species have already been recorded. And, he says, “there’s still such a lot of work — and what fun.”
It clearly is. Conservation can make nature sound like an intensive-care patient: threatened, endangered, critically endangered, declining. But listening to Van Zyl and McCleland, you realise that conservation is also a pleasurable treasure hunt. “We have to know what we have,” Van Zyl says in her lilting Afrikaans-toned English. “So we can know why we must conserve it.”
The Pringle Bay/Rooiels conservation corridor’s origin story is satisfyingly low-tech. Retired Methodist minister and conservationist Tim Atwell was shown a property map years ago by his daughter Emma, an intern estate agent. She pointed out a series of adjoining smallholdings around Rooiels. Atwell saw the possible ecological corridor stretching from the Kogelberg Nature Reserve to the sea and he knew he had to make it happen. Nearby, conservationist Dr Allan Heydorn, ex CEO of WWF SA, had helped secure the Brodie Link between Pringle Bay and Betty’s Bay after persuading the Brodie family to fund the land purchase which is now owned WWF South Africa. When Hangklip Mountain faced the possibility of development, Heydorn found another benefactor, fund manager Simon Marais.
According to Atwell, Heydorn took Marais walking up the Hangklip Valley and explained that developers were eyeing the mountain for holiday cottages. Marais’s response pleased Heydorn: “Not on your life.” Marais bought the mountain and today roughly 90% of that Hangklip-Brodie Link landscape is conserved, creating a crucial connection between mountain and sea. Atwell wondered why the same couldn’t be achieved around Rooiels.
His reasoning was ecological, but pragmatic. “There’s something about human beings,” he says. “When they see something beautiful, they’ve got to build something big there.” He didn’t want Rooiels stopped in time or hermetically sealed from humanity but he didn’t want urban development creeping up the mountain. The point of the corridor isn’t to save a collection of pretty plots. It’s to maintain connection.
“We humans like lines. We draw erf boundaries, municipal borders and fences, then behave as though nature should adhere,” he says. Leopards didn’t. Neither did otters, birds, insects, seeds or rivers.
Atwell points to a place called Leopard’s Cave, where camera traps regularly record Cape leopards. These animals have huge territories and move inland beyond the Bot River. They need to travel to hunt, breed and survive. “In nature, things move,” Atwell says. “An ecological corridor provides a functioning landscape with connectivity.” Not only for glamorous predators but “from plants through to every kind of animal”.
Forming the corridor has taken years.
Former CapeNature conservationist Steve Geldenhuys helped put the initial properties through CapeNature’s stewardship review process. The first proposal involved 10 properties. Then came attempts to find funders, a conservancy approach and eventually a more ambitious plan involving more than 40 properties between Rooiels and Pringle Bay, with a second phase towards Betty’s Bay.
A breakthrough came through a combination of persistence, money and one man’s final act of generosity. Landowner Mike Harrison had been negotiating with the City of Cape Town over his 22ha property south of Rooiels when he died. In his will, he left the land to WWF South Africa. For ex-WWF biodiversity extension officer Shaquille Benjamin, the property could now become the “anchor” from which the rest of the corridor is protected.
The timing was perfect. Years of biodiversity assessments and planning had already been completed. WWF simultaneously secured donor funding for stewardship work and could begin collaborating with the dozens of private landowners whose properties make up the larger corridor.
“You can’t buy all this land,” says Jan Coetzee, WWF’s head of the Cape Floristic Region Landscape. Property is too expensive. Instead, conservationists have to persuade owners to become part of the solution.
And the corridor is now tantalisingly close to becoming physically connected. WWF has secured another important property stretching towards the R44 along the coastal road. “There’s only one property between,” the group explains. “So we just have to get that one property to complete the corridor.”
An ecological corridor provides a functioning landscape with connectivity.
— Conservationist Tim Atwell
One property. After years of maps, surveys, donors, negotiations, assessments and people refusing to give up, mountain and sea can now be joined.
The City of Cape Town has its own reason for wanting this to happen. Its Steenbras Nature Reserve adjoins the Kogelberg, and Cape Town’s biodiversity management branch manager Cliff Dawes describes the corridor as a “no-brainer” ecologically. The city already owns two properties in it and is working on a third. There’s also a climate argument. Connecting landscapes from low ground to mountain and sea gives species somewhere to move as conditions change. These are the reasons for conservation: preventing extinction, protecting water catchments, maintaining wildlife corridors and preserving a biological inheritance we’d be spectacularly arrogant to squander.
There’s also the selfish argument. It’s really wonderful to go there. The Kogelberg is magnificent for tourism precisely because so much of it hasn’t been usurped by commerce. It’s a joy to travel to paradises that haven’t been paved into submission. Sparsely populated hiking trails climbing through flowering fynbos, mountain pools and rivers, extraordinary birds, beaches backed by mountains, are the best form of luxury — eagle overheads and baboon troops come at no extra charge.
We build accommodation in beautiful places to enjoy the view, then more development begins for all the people who came because of the view, leading to roads and shops to service the guests, until the view is of the accommodation.
Conservation interrupts the cycle of self-sabotage. Visitors enjoying the area stay in guesthouses, eat in restaurants, hire guides, hike, birdwatch and spend money. At Honeycomb Mountain in Kleinmond, bordering the Kogelberg Nature Reserve, Ashleigh van Zuydam and her husband Ian are taking their property through the process of becoming a nature reserve while two off-grid eco-cabins allow visitors into the landscape, subtly, so that it’s all still there for others.
Dawes says projects like this can take 15 years or more. “At the beginning, 50% of the people thought we were nuts. The other half said, ‘let’s go for it’.”
Fifteen or so years later, here we are.
“The only way you can do that is with partnership and thick skin,” he says. And thanks to the botanists, bureaucrats, retired ministers, landowners, residents, donors and conservationists who were foresightful enough to imagine a leopard’s route across a map decades into the future.
People often think that discovery requires travelling further, to far-flung places. Sometimes it requires looking closer at what’s on our doorstep. The closer we look at this comparatively untouched corner of the Cape, the more value there is to see. Why did they ever imagine another housing development would improve it?
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