So as most of you are probably now aware, I am living in a national park, so that means I am surrounded, more or less, by wild(ish) creatures. God knows that makes me SOOO interesting, so I thought it prudent to share with you some of my wildlife experiences.
In essence I have traded squirrels for warthogs and the occasional dog for an occasional baboon. Maybe it’s just the mefloquine (anti-malarial) talking, but I am increasingly convinced that the baboons look like dog-people. They have those certain humanoid characteristics that all primates have, yet they have dog-like faces. Go look at a picture of a baboon and think about what I’ve said. I swear its true!
As for the warthogs, there are two sows that each have 3 piglets (or warthoglets). One group is slightly, maybe a week or two older. There is also a male or two around. I know one male is quite old and is contented to plop himself any ol’ place for a siesta. The first time I found him in a “traffic circle.” (I say it in quotations because there is hardly any traffic around here). I asked Jim, one of the managers or Red Chili, if he was ok, or if he’d been hit by a car, or what?? He just chuckled and said, “Oh no, he’s just old. He sleeps where he wants.” I’ve also found him wallowing in the mud on the side of the road. Anywhere is fine for the old guy.
The sows I think are getting used to me and starting to approach me with increasingly less apprehension. My nerdy side says that it would be really cool to have one walk up to me, but my commonsense reminds me that they can still be dangerous and they have tusks, and the wildlifer in me reminds me that its most likely a horrible idea to habituate wild animals to people cause it tend to do little other than create problems. But just like with the elephants, as long as you keep a calm energy the animals really seem to be aware of the fact that you are calm and are content to carry on with their business.
I have a toad that comes on to my back porch. And I have a pair of lesser striped swallows that have a nest under the overhang on the side of my house. There are some really cool birds that hang around “my back yard.” There are blue-napped mousebirds, weavers, common bulbuls, and occasional honeyeater and several others. I had some sort of francolins at the edge of the scrub the other morning making ear-piercing calls. There was a small group of them and they seemed all worked up about something!
There are other really fantastic birds here, but I don’t see them in my yard. I don’t have photos of everything, but as most of you are probably gifted with the graces of high-speed internet, I would suggest that you Google the critters I talk about and have a look for yourself……grey-headed kingfisher (I don’t know why you would focus on its grey head when it has electric-blue wings and tail, but eh, until I find my own species who am I to criticize?), pygmy kingfisher, pied kingfisher (these kids have an amazing ability to stop and hover in mid air while they look for fish), goliath heron, black and white casqued hornbills, Abyssinian ground-hornbill (freakin monster dinosaur birds! males are distinguishable from females my the red versus blue skin, respectively, on their heads), white-faced whistling ducks, lilac breasted rollers, African green pigeon, pin-tailed whydal (gorgeous little birds that seem highly hindered by three incredibly long retrocies (tailfeathers)), red-cheeked cordon-bleus, black-bellied firefinches, two species of lapwings and numerous other long-legged water birds, in addition to a great variety of birds of prey which I have yet to distinguish between yet. It is also very common to see nightjars and owls on the road at night.
In general diversity here is amazing. Even dungbeetles! They are any number of sizes. Some are small and metallic green and work in pairs (yeah for teamwork!), and others are larger, metallic purple-merlot colored and work alone. I have found a great many kinds of Io moths (I reckon that is what they are; it’s what they are at home). These are generally large moths with eye or “scare spots” on their wings. Typically these spots are on their lower wings and remain covered by their upper wing. They are also typically brightly or contrastingly colored. When a hungry predator like a bird or frog comes along to eat said moth it quickly spreads its wings and reveals its eyespots. To the predator, they believe that they are now somehow staring into the face of something much larger…something that as serious consequence on their place in the food chain. They believe that they are now they prey and will often to their best to quickly get out of dodge, thereby sparing the clever moth’s life. (Ok, moths really aren’t that clever, but nature is cool, predator diversion/survival tactics are more remarkable the more you understand how they work).
Last week we went out to “check the game tracks,” this means we drove around the park all day on more or less one big game drive. And yes, I was giddier than a school girl the whole bloody time. We saw several different species of antelope- waterbuck, oribi, Ugandan kob, and hartebeest. Some of them had come down to the water and were there in huge herds. There are no Zebra here; however, there are dikdiks (the smallest of the antelopes) and leopards, although they are rarely seen. There was also reports in 2003 of a cheetah in the park, so who knows what you might see. There are also lions, but I still haven’t seen any, YET. We also saw a couple herds of giraffe and elephants, plus hippos and Cape buffalo. (I learned the other day that water buffalo are the Asiatic equivalent of oxen….I’d been calling them completely the wrong thing. There are only Cape, not Water buffalo here.)
Part of our purpose for the day was also to drop off some workers to clear a bush camping site down on the delta. The site they slashed (“cut the grass”) is right on the river under some huge trees. After you cross the river, you are out of the park. Fishing is legal here. Some local fishermen came up in their wooden boat and sold some tilapia to the UWA staff I was out with. I think I have some amazing photos of this, but its on film, so everyone, even me, will have to wait to see these photos.
