About Me

Zxqn85e4_400x400

Welcome to Fauna Park Tales!

Here we blog about things to do with animals, birds, children and all the good things which happen around us.  My name is Maretha Botha and I’ve written and illustrated four books in the series to date. This series is primarily written for Middle Grade, striving to bridge the gap between Early Readers and Picture Books.  Each book in the series has approximately thirty illustrations – hopefully keeping the interest of better readers between 9-13 years, providing an enjoyable, reading experience!

At present the books are available as eBooks and black-and-white paperbacks.  I’m working on a plan to get the paperbacks in colour as well.  Meanwhile, I hope you enjoy the photos!

  1.  Here is a smiling young reader with the first three books of Fauna Park Tales.  Her class enjoyed listening to stories from book one, called Flame and Hope: An African Adventure is available for sale.

Lalitah and Fauna Park Tales Books2.  Here are  few pictures of the books and some of the characters.cropped-fauna-park-tales-illustrations-and-book-adverts-019.jpg3. This is the area in Botswana which inspired the setting for Fauna Park Tales.  Here is the real ‘Plump-Grump’ – a goat who knows what he wants when it comes to eating in the best spot! And this is the area where we lived for three years before emigrating to the United Kingdom.003

004Kgali Hill in the backgroundcropped-007.jpgThis big bull – inspiration for Mafuta, ‘the big one’ – in book four and the rest of his herd often stopped by at our fence at night to drink water from our hosepipe which we kept ready for them.  They came and went like ghosts in the night.


This donkey is the inspiration behind Dudu – a rescue donkey who plays an important role in book three.002The road into the village situated next to a game reserve.  The ‘Molodi Valley’ of Fauna Park Tales has a road like this one, leading in and out of the valley.  Notice the ‘Llokodi Hills’ in the background.  This photos was taken during the dry season when finding suitable grazing for the cattle and goats becomes a challenge.Latest pics- 14 Jan 2014 651

This large African Acacia is bare in winter, but this is where Hope the narrator perches – just outside the backdoor.  If you look carefully, you’ll spot a crimson-breasted shrike in the next photo.Latest pics- 14 Jan 2014 503

This acacia was struck by lightning the next summer – split in two – it finally succumbed to nature  and came crashing down on one of our cars. Notice the height of the tree above our roof top.005

If you want to know more about me and my books, please visit my author page at http://myBook.to/Friends

and Fauna Park Tales – the Series https://www.facebook.com/flameandhope.co.uk 

You are most welcome to leave a comment and follow our blog. Thank you!

My hometown, Worcester in the Western Cape – August 2018- Photo from FacebookF034D62A-FA52-4C0C-A603-2168AA9E9FA0

6 comments

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.