Eyes on the Wild

Their humungous beaks make hornbills look clumsy, but they aren’t. In these photos they dexterously (can you use that word when a beak rather than fingers is involved?) manipulate food or nesting materials.

The Yellow-billed Hornbill is probably lining his partner’s nest:

tossing the leaf in the air to adjust his grip:

In the same tree, a Bradfield’s Hornbill is feeding on berries:

A Red-billed Hornbill delivers an extra leaf to his mate, to supplement her bedding while she is walled into her nest till the young fledge:

This one has a juicy caterpillar:

and here a grasshopper:

Next morning, he undertakes his toilette, tweaking individual feathers into place:

to good effect:

In flight, these birds are often given undignified names: The Flying Banana, The Flying Chilli Pepper. But they deserve better.

I rather like storks, not just because they nest on chimneys and deliver babies under gooseberry bushes. They have a sort of stately demeanor that pleases me.

In Khwai there were three I want to show you. One was new to me, the Woolly-necked Stork, Ciconia microscelis. The dark plumage is more sumptuously hued than this photo shows.

The name of the second, the Open-billed Stork, Anastomus lamelligerus, aka the African Openbill, is obvious: this is the most closed its beak gets:

It wandered along the edge of the Khwai River at dusk, looking for the tiny water snails that it favors. But it came up empty while I was watching:

The best known of these is the less appealing Marabou Stork, Leptoptilos crumenifer, a scavenger. It has found the carcass to die for (sorry):

The elephant skeleton, our guide told us, had not been there on his last visit, so it was fairly recent. The tusks are taken by the authorities so as not to encourage their trade.

I do not think there was much left to glean:

so the stork hawked* (sorry again):

and moved on:

*In British English, ‘stork’ and ‘stalk’ both rhyme with ‘hawk’.

At first glance the Hammerkopf is an ungainly bird, with a bizarrely shaped head; I photographed these in 2019 in Ethiopia, in their usual pose on a jetty at a fish market waiting for handouts.

It is in fact a species of stork, and stands about 22″ high. The overall impression is rather homely, even dumpy. I have seen them hunting like herons, wading in shallow water.

But it turns out that head is really shaped for speed:

Let’s see the proof. This is a small pond in the Khwai Community Campgrounds between the Okavango and the Chobe. The brown bird flying low over the water on the left is a Hammerkopf.

It hovers:

and then, so lightning fast that I couldn’t see it until I looked at my photos, it lowers its head, beak agape:

dips into the water:

and grabs a tiny silvery fish:

The fish is often invisible, but the beak is dripping, proof of that dive:

It carries the fish off to the bank to feast. They made pass after pass across the pond, and for the life of me I couldn’t ever see the moment of catch.

Here is a video, with the crucial portion slowed down and one frame actually frozen so you can see it.

A not-so-humdrum brown bird after all.

There are various weaver birds in the Khwai. The Red-billed buffalo weaver builds huge communal scruffy nests. The Village Weaver builds much neater individual nests with an entrance at the bottom. And they sometimes choose the same tree, as here, top right:

Zooming in,

you can see the twiggy buffalo weaver technique vs the delicate woven grasses of the village weaver:

The village weaver nest starts with a ring, a sort of trapeze, which forms the scaffolding for the finished product. You can see one bottom left in the photo below.

Confusingly, the bird in photo above is a buffalo weaver, close to the village weaver nest.

We were admiring the nests, when TJ, cleverly looking down, noticed movement in a hole at the base of the tree:

It was a Nile Monitor, aka Water monitor, Varanus niloticus, related to the Komodo Dragon. It is Africa’s largest lizard, at up to 220cm long, and is not endangered.

It poked its head out and looked around,

but although we waited it decided not to fully emerge.

Monitors are carnivores, and its nesting hole was cleverly chosen, within easy reach of falling eggs or baby weaver birds.

The African Harrier Hawk, or Gymnogene, Polyboroides typus, is a bird I have shown you once before, but this time we saw it in action. It preys on nests, seeking the eggs and baby birds. As a result, if it comes anywhere near a nest the smaller birds mob it.

This is a juvenile gymnogene, just hanging out in a tree, crest erect.

The starlings noticed it, incoming from the left, and all hell broke loose:

It didn’t retreat, but you can actually see it flinch in this shot:

The following day, we saw an adult on the hunt.

It was slowly exploring a dead tree, looking for holes with nests inside.

As it hunted, the starlings dive-bombed it:

It seemed to have found something :

round the far side, though we couldn’t see the result:

Then it clambered up the tree on those long legs:

posed:

and flew off:

To close, a not-very-good movie to show you what mobbing involves, for anyone who has never seen this behavior.

You’ve all seen hippo photos before, I’m sure, but we were lucky to find ourselves on a stretch of the shallow Khwai river where we were at water level, eye-to-eye with the hippos, and also close. They are notoriously the biggest killers in Africa, but apparently the water is their safe place, and they are unlikely to leave the water to attack someone on land. This appeared to be true!

The first we saw had a very very tiny baby, quite possibly a newborn, and too small to cope in the water without help, which may be why they were on land in the daytime:

This 50-100lb baby will grow up into a huge animal, a megaherbivore. Males can weigh up to 7000 lbs, and be 16 feet long. To convey a warning, they yawn, displaying impressive tusks:

The youngsters practice their yawns: this guy has hardly any teeth yet, let alone tusks, but you can get a good look at his fleshy tongue. :

The tusks can be a nuisance, a place for water lilies to get caught:

although they are after all herbivores, and he may just be trying to get the food back in his mouth, like any incompetent spaghetti-eater.

They have extremely strange-looking tails:

The design has a function, as is usually the case in nature. When hippos defecate, they deliberately spray their dung over as large an area as possible, wagging their tail energetically and using it as a sort of paintbrush. The scent is clearly appealing to other hippos:

including to the kids:

In fact, they eat the adult poop. Baby hippos are born with sterile guts. To populate their guts with essential bacteria, they practice coprophagy. (My spell check corrected “baby hippos” in the previous sentence to “baby hippies”…)

The primary function of the spreading behavior to the hippos is probably territorial, at least when they do it on land, but this unsavory habit is also thought to have positive ecological side-effects. Schoelynck et al 2019 show a fascinating food chain effect. Hippos ingest large amounts of silicon in their grassy diet, and defecate it in their dung. Much of this goes into the river, where it is quickly spread by the hippos, and it has been shown that the presence of hippos drastically increases the silicon levels in the rivers, and thus in the downstream lakes. Silicon is essential to the skeletal structure of diatoms, which in turn provide food for fish, so high silicon levels contribute to the richness of the lake waters and their ecosystems. Read more details here:

https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/sciadv.aav0395

I end not with the Flanders and Swann Hippopotamus Song, but with this video, which is spliced together from footage by me and two of my friends Jane and Annie, who are available to hire as sound engineers. It is 2 minutes 37 seconds of soothing soporific hippo splashing and sighing, climaxing in a fine baritone chorus worthy of a Welsh Male Voice Choir. If you can see it in full screen, so much the better.

After our retreat from the Kalahari, we drove back to Maun through slightly more populated areas:

Our guides suggested we change our itinerary and head for the Khwai Community Campsites. This is a small game reserve owned and run by the Khwai people. It has no lodges, only campsites. It is sandwiched between two of Botswana’s best known wildlife areas, the Okavango Delta and the Chobe River. Game travels between the two, through the Khwai. It was an inspired choice, even if we did then see one or two other vehicles per day, rather heavy traffic compared to our previous stops.

The Khwai in February was lush and green, and full of life, though still very, very hot and pretty humid.

I’ll start with a highlight for me, an animal I had never seen before, a sable antelope, Hippotragus niger. We saw them twice, in the same wooded area. The first time, there were perhaps three or four of them, inside the woodland, peering out at us and hard to see.

They have the most glorious horns, although I think we saw only females (maximum 40 inch horns). The males’ horns are even more impressive, up to 65 inches long (as long as an elephant’s tusks, and a big attraction for trophy hunters).

They also have a horse-like mane on the back of their necks,

and a white rump:

boldly marked faces:

with liquid dark eyes

Those facial markings are surprisingly good camouflage in the dappled sunlight. There are two in this photo:

The second encounter was a group of seven, mixed in briefly with the three greater kudu in the foreground:

The sable stayed in the open this time, grazing, perhaps remembering from the previous day that we were harmless:

The herd included a young one, on the right. The adults were probably all females, though there was likely to be a single alpha male somewhere standing guard over his harem.

Males can measure 55 inches at the shoulder, and weigh 520 lbs. Sables are found from Southern Kenya to South Africa, and they are not endangered. Their only predators are lions, but their speed and stamina (up to 57kph for up to three miles) means the lions must catch them quickly or not at all.

PS Before Rhodesia became Zimbabwe, the rather handsome national flag showed two sables:

Before I leave the very dry regions of the Makgadikgadi and then the Kalahari, let me share a few more delights.

The Leopard Tortoise has a beautiful shell, both top:

and bottom.

We started to speculate as to how the shell grows. One suggestion was that, like a lobster, it sheds its shell and a new bigger one is waiting underneath. No. In fact, each scute grows outward in rings. The tortoise’s bony shell is attached to the spine and ribs, so just as bones grow when a child grows, so do tortoise shells. The keratin scutes are a covering, and they too grow with the animal, just like our fingernails do. This shell of a dead tortoise has lost some of the keratin scutes, so you can see the bony carapace underneath.

When the tortoises are young, up to 6 or 7, counting rings gives you their age, but after that they may grow a lot in good year and not at all in a dry year, so it is an unreliable gauge.

Moving on, there were butterflies, some extracting minerals from elephant dung,

others more photogenically on flowers:

There was an amazing species of enormous beetle, in both places, which our guide told us was a Blister Beetle, and shouldn’t be touched (though in fact he picked one up). On my return, I identified it as a quite different, and harmless, species, the Giant Jewel Beetle, Sternocera orissa . Here is one feeding on acacia:

and here it is on our guide’s hand, to show its size (about two inches).

The male Shaft-tailed Whydah, Vidua regia, in breeding season is a small but spectacular bird, with 20cm tail plumes twice as long as its 10cm body:

And I’ll stop there, without showing you the Bateleur eagle or the black-winged kites or the ….. so much to marvel at.

After three days in the Makgadikgadi, our itinerary had us moving to the well-named Deception Valley in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the second-largest game reserve in the world, bigger than the Netherlands.

I start with a saga, one that brought home to us how helpless we are without the skilled support team that shepherds us around these wild, places. If you’re interested, read on; otherwise, skip down to the wildlife.

After breakfast we set off in our safari vehicle with water and lunch; the team struck camp after we left, and sped off in their lorry to get there ahead of us and set up anew in the Kalahari. After a day’s driving in 40C temperatures, the last four hours of it on dirt roads and out of cellphone range, we arrived at dusk. No welcoming tents, no truck, no team, no food, no beds…. although it did turn out that the large duffel-bags on the ground contained folded heavy canvas tents, and many many different length tent poles. It was getting dark, there are lions in the Kalahari… so sleeping under the stars was not an option. We set to work, under the leadership of our guide TJ and the 5 foot tall housekeeper, Mighty.

It took us an hour per tent (more like marquees than tents, in terms of weight, and technique).

Once we had two tents up, we decided that we could fit in four people per tent, and it was time to stop, so that’s what we did, sleeping on the floor of the tents (the beds were in the missing truck). Our guide slept on the roof of the safari vehicle, and the six of us plus Mighty slept in the tents. We had enough water, and a single bottle of wine, one apple each, and half a packet of biscuits to share.

We rose in the morning (to say we felt rested would be an exaggeration), and agreed to do a two hour game drive, then drive back the way we had come until we could make contact with the truck. First, we proudly photographed ourselves with one of our laboriously erected tents!

Until this logistical glitch (debacle?), we had not realized our guide had no satellite phone for emergencies, which was somewhat unnerving. After two hours, we met the youngest member of the camp team, who had hitchhiked from the broken-down lorry to tell us what was happening. It had two flat tires, and only one spare. It was suggested that we could wait for the lorry, then head back to the camp again… but we declined, and asked for a hotel with a bed, a shower, and food! Or even a spa…

None of us (combined age about 430 years) really wanted to be in the Kalahari desert without emergency contact capability, and it had also turned out to be so dry we saw very little, including no aardvark or aardwolves, the principal goals of the trip. Instead, we asked for options, and ended up spending the remainder of the trip in a lovely camp site near the Okavango… of which more later.

Back to wildlife. We did see a few things worth telling you about in the Kalahari, so here goes.

This is a Kori Bustard, Ardeotis kori, the world’s largest flying bird. Males can weigh up to 20Kg.

He struts along, big enough not to worry much about predators, though he has very poor forward binocular vision, with extensive blind spots.

He was hunting for insects in the dry grass:

A fine figure of a bird:

Smaller, and more nervous, the Cape Ground Squirrels, Geosciurus inauris, live in holes, and emerge to feed.The female in the movie below may be pregnant, her nipples are enlarged and she has a big belly:

To get a better view, they stand fully erect:

and when it is too hot, they turn their backs to the sun and use their tails as sunshades:

There are bigger mammals too; here is a splendid Gemsbok (aka Oryx):

And of course there are lizards. This is a breeding male Ground Agama, Agama aculeata:

After a few minutes those bright red spots faded and the head coloration also shrank and dimmed:

The brighter colors are probably associated with courting or excitement, but they make the lizard more conspicuous, so when it is not courting the colors fade. Unlike chameleons, they are not thought to change to deliberately match the substrate, but once the colors fade it is astonishingly well-camouflaged:

Two birds to end with. The Lanner Falcon, Falco biarmicus, is a favorite of falconers. It preys on birds , some quite large, like ducks:

and a male Red-Backed Shrike, Lanius collurio, which winters here but breeds in Europe:

PS I usually give full credit to our trip organizers in these blogs, but this time I’m keeping quiet. Once they knew of our plight, they handled everything very well, and we would travel with them again, so I don’t want to give them a public negative review.

The elephants hereabouts in the Makgadikgadi find shallow muddy pans and roll in them. Here is a fully dry pan:

When the salty mud dries, the elephant looks almost white.

But as the sun sets, they are gradually transformed:

This was a small breeding herd of females and youngsters. The sun is quickly getting lower:

No rose-tinted spectacles or tot of gin is required to see this effect.

But at this time of year, most of the elephants here are solitary aging males. This one is in musth, shown by the secretions leaking from the gland between his ear and his eye.

If he were still young and virile, he’d be quite dangerous at this time, rampaging around in search of females. But he is near the end of his life, tusks broken off, too tired for all that fuss.

As the elephants move through the landscape, you sometimes find their bedrooms. They choose a small sloping bank, and scrape a depression in it. They lie so that their feet are lower than their head, making it easier to get up in the morning! In this shot, TJ is standing near the head rest area, the feet would be in the foreground.

Here you can see the impression of his wrinkled trunk, and a single tusk:

My final shot of this story is a rare view of the underside of an elephant’s trunk. The sides fold inwards, so he can get a good grip on a bunch of grass or a mouthful of twigs.

Farewell for now, as he and we leave the Makgadikgadi for the Kalahari.