Eyes on the Wild

[Back to Botswana!]

Vervet monkeys, Cercopithecus aethiops, pop up from time to time in my blogs. They’re widely distributed in Africa, and often hang out near lodges where they raid the tables and kitchens. These were nowhere near any lodges, I’m happy to say.

The mature males have famously blue scrotums, and this guy (and his family) were close enough that you can see them rather clearly in the closeups below!

He was hanging out and grooming, while acting as a lookout for the females foraging in the long grass below.

Sleepily, he allowed us a good look at his rather intimidating dentition.

They mostly eat flowers, leaves, and fruit, but as you can probably guess, his diet includes meat. They have been seen killing and eating tree squirrels, and francolins.

There were some youngsters behind him,

and one was getting brave:

They have exquisite fur, and a fearless gaze:

and a very long tail:

Walking along the brook (in shadow on the right in the photo below), I saw something tiny and bright red by some twigs:

Upon inspection, I realized that I was looking at the remains of an otter repast. The ground was littered with fish scales, and the tiny red thing was a small bone or cartilage, probably from the gills, with remnants of bright red flesh still attached:

Most interesting of all, there were small clusters of bright yellow eggs left behind:

I asked fishing friends if they could ID the fish, and eventually with the help of a State of Maine biologist they converged on a fallfish as the most likely victim . They do spawn at this time of year, and one friend had recently caught one a mile or so downstream from my brook. This last photo was taken a couple of winters ago, and the fish in question (half a mile upstream from the dining debris) is definitely a fallfish (a type of chub native to New England).

My other favorite aquatic mammal has created a new perfectly symmetrical sculpture:

In the woods, the red maples have been flowering. Some trees bear only male flowers,

and others only female ones.

The pollen is spread by the winds to the female flowers, which eventually produce the seeds as winged samaras. The male flowers fall gently off into the streams, where the waters had gathered them into a heart:

I found a strange plant called Snakeskin Liverwort, or Snakewort, Conocephalum salebrosum:

It is a non-vascular plant, a primitive small creeping thing whose name is very descriptive. Each leaf (or thallus) is covered in polygonal bubbles which are air pores:

It has a distinctive smell, and is also called Great Scented Liverwort or Cat’s Tongue liverwort. It needs moist places (this was right next to the stream), partly because of the lack of veins to transport water, but also because for reproduction the sperm must swim through water from one plant to find another plant with eggs.

And the very earliest blooms, as always are the trailing arbutus:

I still have more to show you from Botswana, but spring is finally here in Lovell, and I have a few things to share with you. Today, my topic is waterbirds.

Ducks pass through here en route to breed in Canada. The males are in breeding plumage, so they look very smart. Here is a ring-necked duck, a close relative of the UK’s tufted duck

and a pair of buffleheads:

In flight, you can see that the two buffleheads closer to the camera are much smaller than the ring-necked ducks behind them.

One male had a head patch that was half white and half grizzled gray. I haven’t been able to find out if this is a juvenile, or an unusual variant . He is staring into the depths below.

A little stretch:

and a wave of his deep magenta feet:

Other types of duck stay and breed here, like the hooded mergansers:

And don’t ignore the mallards. For most of my life I thought all ducks were mallards. and although I know better now, they are still among my favorites. This pair were having a private moment on a tiny secluded pond deep in the woods, and they strayed into a sunbeam.

Great Blue Herons stay all summer. In years of watching them, I had never seen one actually catch a fish until last week. As luck would have it, I was in the midst of moving to get a better angle, so this photo is rather wobbly.

Next time, I’ll move on shore.

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: