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The Peninsula’s Peregrines

- ANDREW JENKINS

It’s November 2017 and I’m driving with two young colleagues, Kyle Walker and Claire Marchant, to do field work at a stone quarry on the rural fringe of Cape Town. We turn off the main road at our destination and wave to the security guy as we breeze through the gate. Even early on a Saturday morning there is work going on, generating a shroud of fine dust that populates the first rays of sun with gilded particles. As we bump along the rough track, the road becomes steeper and wider and takes us up and then along a sunlit fence line. To our left is a harvested wheat field; to our right the cavernous maw of the quarry is becoming more distinct, revealing layer upon layer of blue-grey stone, hacked and stripped naked by yellow machines. The resulting injury is a deep, ragged bite out of the hillside.

We park near the top of the quarry, gathering our gear as the engine ticks into rest and the dust we’ve kicked up settles. Outside, the sounds of crunching rock and clunking metal echo around the blasted amphitheatre. The overall impression is of a dead place, ravaged by human industry and beaten into apocalyptic submission. Remarkably, however, there is life here. Helmeted Guineafowl cluck and fuss in growing panic at the top edge of the quarry, a pair of Blue Cranes call from a fallow field nearby, Egyptian Geese honk raucously from the bowels of the pit and a Familiar Chat flits from perch to perch among the rubble.