Frogland and Whale Deck

The Munster Wetland Project, a.k.a. "Frogland"

By Anthony Balcomb

Once upon a time there was a car park opposite a simplex block in Munro Drive, Munster, that was more like a bog than a car park. The "manne" with their 4X4’s used to like testing them out there and ordinary cars sometimes got stuck.

Then one day, back in about 2022, Felicity Balcomb said: "I think we should turn that area into a firefly sanctuary." The idea began to float around, but we never thought it would be a possibility, so we didn’t entertain the idea very seriously. We thought that the people in the flats across the road would complain, it would be a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and so on and so forth.

Somehow it came up again when earlier this year Annelize Slabbert from the MRRA announced that she was putting together a proposal for funding from Lottoland and thought it would be a good idea to include it in the project, along with a whale deck next to it on the seaward side.

We decided to get the advice of our local wetland expert Clayton Cook and several of us met with him on site. He said it would be a perfect spot for a wetland because that was what it actually was before it was being used as a car park. He suggested that we cordon it off, dig some shallow holes as basins to hold the water, plant some indigenous wetland plants and leave the rest to nature.

We transplanted some waterlilies from Secret Sithela’s beautiful dam and Simon Woodley gave us some wetland plants. Corrie Lotter oversaw the project and he and his son JP, Nelson, and Ayanda, from the MRRA did a lot of digging, shoveling, and carting of lovely black clay backwards and forwards.

Then the rains came down, the floods came up, and all the holes and trenches and basins got filled with lovely water.

And voila! Along came the frogs, up grew the plants, and down came the water birds!

This wetland is now one of Munster’s special treasures, an absolute haven for numerous species of frogs, insects, birds, and snakes, as well as water mongooses and other small mammals.