Nature reserve, game drives & accommodation
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 here, 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 it's last remaining viable habitat.
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.