Highlights of a stay at Bartholomeus Klip are the morning and evening game drives through the 10 000 acre nature reserve.  There are many animals in the game reserve, easily seen in the low fynbos or on the grassy plains, but the most important inhabitant of the reserve is a far smaller creature:  the endangered geometric tortoise, one of the world’s rarest reptiles, safe here in its last remaining viable habitat near Cape Town.

The reserve is teeming with herds of eland, springbuck, black wildebeest, zebra and bontebok.  Many other animals, such as baboons, bat-eared foxes, lynxes, and smaller species of antelope, live here too, and it is known that leopards still occur in the mountains.  In the old days these fierce and beautiful animals regularly used to kill sheep, up to 25 at a time, but nowadays all the sheep are kept safely on the farmlands farther away from the mountains and the leopard has to live on the smaller wild game.

Among the birdlife at Bartholomeus Klip is the world’s largest bird, the ostrich, once farmed here in large flocks at the height of the ostrich feather boom in the 1870s and today one of the leopard’s favourite foods.   The magnificent black eagle (correctly known as Verreaux’s eagle) nests in the mountains, and the enormous dam near to the farmhouse has a spectacular array of water birds, some resident like the fish eagles and the kingfishers, and others such as the pelicans and the spoonbills less regular visitors.  Flamingos have also been seen in some of Bartholomeus Klip’s smaller dams and there are a host of interesting large and small birds out in the reserve and on the wheatlands, including large flocks of the blue crane, South Africa’s national bird.

Also to be seen at Bartholomeus Klip are zebras from the Quagga Project, which has aroused enormous interest around the world.  This revolutionary project is aimed at re-breeding the extinct quagga, a zebra-like animal with no stripes on its rump and legs, and reintroducing it into reserves in its former habitat.

Quaggas originally occurred in great numbers in the drier portions of South Africa on grassy plains, and the reduction in striping has been explained as an adaption to open country.  The name ‘quagga’ comes from the Khoikhoi-speaking indigenous people of the South African interior and is an imitation of the animal's call. 

By 1878, when the last wild quaggas were shot, they had been ruthlessly hunted to extinction in the wild for their meat and leather, and also because they were seen as competition for domestic livestock.  A few quaggas remained alive in captivity, but there was so much confusion between the quagga and other zebras that when a mare died in 1883 in the Amsterdam Zoo, it was not realised that she was the last of her kind and the species was now extinct.  All that remained of the vast herds of quaggas were the twenty-three specimens preserved in various museums around the world, including one in Cape Town.

The Quagga Project was set up in 1987 by Reinhold Rau, the taxidermist at the South African Museum in Cape Town.  He had dismantled and remounted the Museum’s specimen, a foal, in 1971 and at that time conceived the idea for the project, but could not find any support for it.  However, the results of DNA studies (the first on an extinct animal, based on tissue samples from the Cape Town specimen and two others from Mainz that he remounted in 1980/81) proved that the quagga (Equus quagga quagga) was not in fact a separate species at all but a subspecies of the extremely variable plains zebra (Equus quagga).  It differed from other zebras mainly in having been striped on the head, neck, and front portion of its body only, and having been brownish, rather than white, in its upper parts.  This meant that it should be possible to recreate the quagga by selective breeding, and formed the scientific basis on which the Quagga Project was founded.

During March 1987 nine zebras, chosen for their reduced striping and brownish colouring, were captured at the Etosha National Park in Namibia.  Their arrival at the specially constructed breeding camp complex at the Nature Conservation farm 'Vrolijkheid', near Robertson, in the Cape, on 24  April 1987, marked the start of the quagga rebreeding project.  The animals bred so successfully that zebras from the project were translocated to different reserves, among which was Elandsberg, where ten animals arrived in 1993.  This population too has increased and populated other reserves, and has to date produced some very quagga-like foals.

An important milestone in the 13-year history of the Quagga Project was reached on the 29th June 2000, when the Quagga Project Association and the South African National Parks entered into a co-operation agreement. This has changed the Quagga Project from a private initiative to an officially recognised and logistically supported project.
See the website www.quaggaproject.org for more information

At Bartholomeus Klip we are part of the Cape Floristic Region, which is one of the world’s six floral kingdoms and the smallest of these by far, but extraordinarily rich in species of flowering plants. The particular flora in our reserve is so special that it has been declared a provincial nature reserve, as well as a Natural Heritage Site, to safeguard it.  This is because the vegetation in the reserve consists largely of highly endangered renosterveld, which is particularly threatened since it grows on rich soil which has almost entirely been ploughed up for agriculture. 

The reserve, with its rare and unusual plants, is the subject of many ongoing studies by local universities and other institutions. An in-house project has already identified more than 820 species of plants at Bartholomeus Klip, at least five of which, including two discovered in 2010, have only ever been found in the reserve. 

It is the earnest desire of all connected with Bartholomeus Klip that the reserve with its unique and precious plants should be protected and conserved in perpetuity.