This is what 95778 would look like, with the satellite transmitter on her back.

She has survived the killing fields of India and if everything has gone well is most likely resting somewhere on the coast of Somalia.

To those around the world she is known simply as 95778, an Amur falcon that has a match box sized satellite transmitter strapped to her back.

In the last three weeks she has survived one of the worst mass killings of her kind and is finally on her way here to southern Africa.

On Wednesday satellites pinpointed her position as 240 kilometres from the coast of Somalia.

She was drawing to the end part of her ocean crossing.

In the weeks to come, and if all goes well, 95778 will head south cutting through East Africa to here.

A male and female Amur falcon on the wing

To understand what 95778 has had to face on this migration read this article that I wrote for The Star.

Here it is…

She has made this transcontinental crossing before, but this time the fear is that she will fall victim to a catastrophe that threatens to destroy her species.

To a small group of bird enthusiasts she is known simply as 95778, an Amur falcon that has a small matchbox-sized satellite transmitter strapped to her back.

Amur falcons are being caught by their thousands and sold for food. Picture by Ramki Sreenivasan of Conservation India.

For nearly three years this GPS transmitter has given science a glimpse into the 14 500km migratory route this pigeon-sized bird of prey makes between South Africa and Mongolia.

95778 is on a return trip to South Africa, but she has stopped over at a killing field.

Her last recorded position has her in the remote north-east Indian state of Nagaland.

The Amur falcons are kept and sold live. Picture by Ramki Sreenivasan of Conservation India.

Late last month a team of Indian conservationists travelled to the Doyang reservoir in Nagaland and what they found shocked them.

Tens of thousands of Amur falcons are being caught and sold for bush meat.

The numbers, they believe, are large enough to affect the survival of the species.

“What was shocking was not the sight of dead birds, but the scale of hunting,” says Ramki Sreenivasan of Conservation India.

The hunters, Sreenivasan says, set fishing nets high in the trees.

The birds are caught as they head to roost in the evenings. He estimates that at the height of the migration about 15 000 birds are killed daily.

“The peak of the migration lasts for about 10 to 15 days,” Sreenivasan explains. It could mean that a quarter of a million birds are slaughtered over this two-week period. Once the birds are caught, he says, hunters break the birds’ wings and keep them alive in pens made from mosquito netting.

The birds are sold for the equivalent of between R2.40 and R3.75 at markets.

“The birds that arrive here are probably tired,” says Sreenivasan. “They get stuck and hang until the hunter arrives early in the morning to disentangle them.”

Picture by Ramki Sreenivasan of Conservation India.

Dr Craig Symes, an ornithologist at Wits University, believes that such mass killings are likely to have a detrimental effect on Amur falcon populations in South Africa. No one knows what the global population of this bird species is, but a count of Amur falcon roosts in South Africa in 2009 gave a figure of 111 000 birds.

Back in 2009, German birdwatcher Professor Dr Bernd-Ulrich Meyburg and his wife, Christina, travelled to Newcastle, KwaZulu-Natal, and with the help of members of BirdLife Northern Natal caught and attached satellite transmitters to 10 Amur falcons. Now, three years later, only 95778’s transmitter continues to plot her journey.

Rina Pretorius of BirdLife Northern Natal says Meyburg told her on Monday night that the bird had been at the Nagaland site for the past two days.

“She told me that the bird is at that exact same spot [where they are killing them] and that she expected her to move off in the next two days.”

If 95778 makes it, she could be back in South Africa by next month.

“All we can do is hold thumbs,” Pretorius says.

The killing of Amurs is illegal in Nagaland, says Sreenivasan.

He says India is a signatory to the Convention on Migratory Species which is bound to provide safe passage to any migrating animal.

Conservation India has informed authorities of the hunting, and the chief wildlife warden of Nagaland has issued instructions to seize netting and warn offenders that they can be arrested.

“This will be the last year that this happens,” Sreenivasan says.

“It is fixable, by hook, crook or carriage stick.”

This is a blog post I wrote a year ago about Alf and one of this great friends.

Alf

The press always caught the other Muhammad Ali, the sharp tongued boxer who cut his opponents down with his wit and rhyming verse.

Photographer Alf Kumalo saw the other Ali.

In the garden of the Alf Kumalo museum, in Soweto, South Africa, the veteran press photographer spoke to me about the boxing giant, he came to call his friend.

The end of last week was the 37th anniversary of the Rumble in the Jungle, Alf was there at the Mai 20 Stadium in Kinshasa, Zaire.

Alf has been everywhere, the walls of his museum carry 50 years of his work.

There are prints of Nelson Mandela playing with his dog in the garden of his house in Vilakazi street.

Alf’s lens also documented the 1976 Soweto riots and so much more.

But Alf wants to talk about the The Louisville Lip.

Back in the 1960s and 70s, Alf use to shoot and write about boxing, that is when he met the champ.

Ali use to call Alf his African brother.

“No one has written about the soft spoken Ali,” remembers Alf. “Ali at his home, was a very quiet person almost inaudible, his voice thick”.

Alf remembers joy rides in Ali’s chocolate brown Roll Royce. They talked boxing, Alf had boxed for a while.

His boxing had helped him anticipate the action in the ring, he would know where the next blow would land, and his camera would be ready for the shot.

Once Alf was invited to visit the boxer in the early hours of the morning. “Ali said to us that his schedule was tight but he would talk to us, he said that we should meet after 1am, because up to 12:30 he would receive phone calls,” says Alf. They sat until 3.30am, listening to Ali recite poetry.

“He kept asking us “Ya’ all like that.’ We felt guilty keeping him up so late and eventually we left”.

Then for a moment Alf pauses.

“It is a pity that he cant talk that way anymore”.

Red Cross Parcel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

He was working in a coal mine and he needed someone to look at his tooth.
But medical care in wartime Poland wasn’t free.

“I had to go and see the German dentist and was told to bring a slab of chocolate,” he told me.

“You see, we use to get chocolate in our Red Cross parcels. The local population never saw the stuff”.
At the door uncle Morris handed the dentist’s assistant the bar of chocolate.
The German dentist took one look at my uncle and asked him what he wanted.
“I said I want you to look at my tooth. He says No no, what do you want.”
Morris pointed to his tooth.
“What do you want, the dentist asks me again. I said my tooth.”
“No, no, do you want fraulein I have got women”.
The dentist had a job on the sideline, or was it the pimp was moonlighting.
My uncle never said if he got that tooth sorted out.

But the 30-year-old police constable who lay dead beneath the medic’s space blanket, last night I knew.

He was a communications officer and in the past I phoned him to check if I had missed any crimes in Hillbrow.

Journalists and police communications officers play a game.

We ask if there is any crime in the area, they tell us everything is quiet.

He died where he fell.

In police talk, he was shot in the upper body. From the blood that had pooled on the pavement, I suspect the bullet hit him in the back of the head, maybe the neck.

An ambush.

He didn’t have time to react, someone at the scene suggested.

His shoes, polished to a parade ground sheen, shone in the half light of twilight.

Perhaps he had children, I don’t know.

A woman escorted by police, was taken onto the cordoned off crime scene.

A detective lifted the space blanket and allowed her a final glimpse of the dead man’s face.

The worst day of her life, an image that will burden her until her dying day.

Crying hysterically, she had to be held up and led away.

There are no photographs with this post.

The police don’t like you snapping pics of their fallen. Wide eyed, they threaten with arrest, even violence.

The motive, the last night is not clear. The constable had left a flat on Bok street in Joubert Park.

He was walking with his partner, a reservist, back to their patrol car, when they were shot.

The reservist was seriously injured.

The shooter or shooters took the constable’s service pistol.

Perhaps that was motive, criminals killing cops for their guns.

Turn the corner and walk up Wolmarans street and block away is the scene of another cop killing.

About a month and half ago two policemen were shot when they stopped a vehicle.

One of the policemen died at the scene, the other later in hospital. Their firearms taken.

Palaeontologist Dr Adam Yates is heading off to Darwin in Australia to find something that once looked like a giant hamster.

This is a reconstruction of what Diprotodon looked like. The drawing was done by Dr Adam Yates

This beast weighed in at about three tons and is called Diprotodon. What makes palaeontologists like Adam interested in Diprotodon is that it died out fairly recently, about 40000 years ago.

Its extinction occurred shortly after the arrival of the first Australians, and many scientists believe this was more than coincidence.

Scientists learnt about this particular ancient marsupial when a manager on a remote cattle station, near Darwin brought in a large leg bone he had found in the bank of a dried river.

This is the leg bone that was found in that river bank

At first, it was thought the bone belonged to a more contemporary animal like a horse or perhaps a water buffalo.

When he bought the bone into a museum in Darwin, scientists suddenly realised they had something special.

This is the first time that a Diprotodon has been found so far north in Australia.

Now the mission to excavate the rest of the skeleton has become a race against time.

Soon the monsoon will arrive and the danger is that the river will flood and wash the bones away.

If Adam and his team are lucky they might just find, at the site, evidence that will solve why this two metre long giant disappeared from the landscape.

The smoking gun might be cut marks on a bone, maybe the presence of spear tips.

The theory that man might have wiped out Diprotodon and other ancient Australian animals, like the marsupial lion, is a controversial one.

Hunter and gathers have been accused of wiping out other big game like the woolly mammoths in North America.

However in Australia, its first inhabitants have a reputation of living in harmony with their environment. Only taking what they needed.

But there was a lot of meat on Diprotodon, and while risky, a bit of hunting strategy and couple of throwing spears could have brought the beast down.

Adam told me that Diprotodon probably had a low reproduction rate and taking out even a few individuals would have had a catastrophic effect on the population.

But these mysteries will perhaps be answered when the bones emerge, from a hopefully still dry riverbed.

Black and white pictures that through the World Wide Web and some help from fellow journalists are beginning to tell their story. As I have told in the two previous posts, my grandfather William Findlay Smillie took these photographs off a senior Italian officer during World War Two.

Italian journalist Fabrizio Morviducci has been able to decipher the faint pencil scratchings on the back of this photograph.

Fellow Star journalist Anna Cox helped with the translation

It reads: Ti sei indignato troppo nel posare è così?

Meaning: “Did you “undignify” yourself too much posing like this?

On the back of this photograph is the word Turin and the date 26 June 1933.

Google helped in tracking down the site where this photograph was taken.

That water feature is the Fontana dei 12 Mesi or the Fountain of the 12 months,in Turin.

This is what it looks like today

Google Images also nailed where this picture was taken.

This is the Castello di Rivoli and that soldier passed by those arches on the right.

Perhaps this was taken in Abyssinia or somewhere in the Western Desert during World War Two.

The back reads Rivoli June 29 1933. That is the Castello di Rivoli in the background.

This is what is written on the back of this photograph:

BC scuola Allievi ufficiali gennaio 1933 servizio di ramazza

Meaning: BC School cadet officials January 1933 broom service.

Written on the back is

Rovigno d’Istria 25 aprile 1933 Nei dieci minuti di intervallo dopo la pulizia degli (????)

Rovigno dÍstria 25 April 1933 in the 10 minute interval/break after the cleaning of the (I believe it says automatic cannon)

Rovigno is now the sea side town of Rovinj in Croatia. In the 1930s the region was occupied by the Italian army.

Ten photographs that caught glimpses of the lives of a group of young soldiers at the height of fascist Italy.

These were the good years, ahead of them lay a war that I am sure changed their lives forever.

As I have said before, if you have any ideas in tracking who these nameless faces are, let me know.

Nelson Mandela’s scrawl, notes jotted in an exercise book. A speech imperfect in its scratched out words, perhaps written on the fly.

The jottings of a speech

“It is an ideal for which I have lived; it is an ideal for which I still hope to live and see realised. But if it needs be it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die. “

A first draft that was to change when Mandela gave it voice from the dock on April 20, 1964.

The final two sentences of a famous speech.

That was the first day of the opening of the defence case in the Rivonia Trial.

A world changing speech seen in its raw form, before it was cleaned up and eagle eyed by a lawyer. The nucleus of an idea already there.

This is a piece of history, that now sits in the Wits Art Museum, in Braamfontein and is part of a display of 90 artefacts to celebrate 90 years of the university. Nice to witness.

Rioting had broken out in the informal settlement of Kya Sands to the north west of Johannesburg. Foreigners had had the doors of their shacks kicked in and their belongings looted.

On patrol with the Rand Light Infantry

It was time to bring in the army.

The Rand Light Infantry (RLI) arrived in Kevlar body armour with R4 semi automatic rifles.

Their job was to enforce a 10pm curfew. By 8pm

they were telling people to go to sleep.

“Go to bed on the double,” barked one private.

Generators had to be switched off.

“Mama you have to put out that fire now, and you have to go to bed,” said another.

As the RLI patrolled through the shanty town, a police helicopter circled above, its search light flitting and blinking on the corrugated iron roofs.

The soldiers walked past shacks and the occupants inside sniggered like naughty children.

“Hey you in there, go to sleep and keep your boots on.”

The rest of the patrol laughed.

“Yea, and no hanky panky in there, go to sleep,” added another soldier.

This was a night for wise cracks

In the Night Fever Nite club five patrons were searched. They are lined up on the ground and frisked by a policeman. The policeman finds nothing, so they are allowed to get up and told to go to sleep.

Nothing criminal appears to be going on tonight but the citizenry of Kya Sands, like toddlers on sugar highs just don’t want to go to the land of nod.

A man peers over a fence.

“Hey you, why aren’t you in bed” a sergeant shouts.

Finally, the dusty streets begin to empty, generators splatter and die and silence descends on the informal settlement.

With the inhabitants tucked in bed, the RLI had accomplished their mission, an hour before curfew. It’s time to troop back to the armour cars and head to headquarters. Time for  one more wise crack.

“And one more thing,” shouts a sergeant, “You must all wake up at 6am for inspection.”

The sniggers from the nearby shacks were drowned out by the laughter of the soldiers of the RLI.

Everything dear to him, was taken off him, including those black and white photographs I now have.

My grandfather, William Smillie and grandmother Betty on their wedding day. They married just before my grandfather headed off to war.

That act took place somewhere in the Western Desert probably in 1942 or 1943. The Italian, a career soldier perhaps a major or even a colonel had been forced to surrender to a unit of the British 8th army.

The soldier who stepped forward to accept that surrender was my grandfather William Findlay Smillie. What happened next ensured that those pictures landing in the possession of my family.

Now I am trying to give that Italian officer a name and discover his fate. So far it has been a difficult journey, and as I have said before any suggestions or tips are welcome.

This is how my grandfather, came to have those pictures.

When World War Two broke out, my grandfather thought it would be over soon.

That is why when the British navy wanted him to sign up for five years, he turned them down.

He believed the war would be over by Christmas. Maybe if he knew what was ahead, he would have opted for those five years on the open seas.

Granddad signed up with the Royal Tank Corps and was sent to Egypt to fight in the Western Desert. He trained as a tank driver but soon volunteered for an outfit that was to gain a fierce some reputation.

Two LRDG trucks armed with water cooled Vickers guns (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The Long Range Desert Group or the LRDG were a multi national bunch of volunteers who moved hundreds of miles behind enemy lines on reconnaissance and raiding missions.

At its peak the LRDG only numbered about 350 men.

They attacked airfields and ferried the then newly formed Special Air Service (SAS) on commando raids deep into enemy territory.

One such mission, which my grandfather said he was a part of, was Operation Flipper.

During this operation the LRDG assisted in an attempt to assassinate the head of the German Afrika Korps General Erwin Rommel. They missed the Desert Fox.

Rommel conversing with his staff near El Agheila, January 12, 1942. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Granddad didn’t talk much about his war experiences , I suspect he witnessed a lot of horrible events.

But one of the stories he did tell was of taking an Italian officer prisoner. I don’t know where this happened, if he told me I have since forgotten.

A high ranking officer I recall him telling me, who didn’t appear happy at having to surrender.

As my grandfather approached, the officer did something that could have cost him his life. He spat in my grandfather’s face.

My grandfather reacted by slamming the butt of his rifle into the Italian’s face.

He then did something, he said he had never done before, he stripped the officer of all his belongings, including those ten photographs.

One of those looted photographs and the Italian officer

What happened to the Italian after that, he didn’t say.

His actions were brutal, yes. But this was war, and I suspect that just minutes earlier that same officer and his men were probably trying to kill him and comrades.

My grandfather went on to take part in the battle of

El Alamein

then chased Rommel through Libya and Tunisia.

His war ended in July 1943 when his Sherman tank took a direct hit from a German 88, in Sicily. The first shell hit one of the tank’s tracks disabling it. The second hit the Sherman in the turret. He was the only crew member pulled out alive.

Severely wounded, he took no further part in the war.

He died in 1998, aged 80.

As for that Italian officer, all that remains of him is an image on a series of photographs, his name and story obliterated by an act in the desert.