Mental marathon: Liuwa to Lusaka

December 2, 2010

I swear, the days in Zambia seem to get crazier and crazier. You can’t reach a point in this country where you’d think, “hmmm, things couldn’t possibly get any more interesting. I’ve seen it all.” Working in Zambia is like facing a junkball pitcher with a 95 mile an hour fastball to boot. Curveballs, sliders, screwballs, change ups, knuckleballs, and an occasional fastball to keep things interesting, as if they weren’t interesting enough already. You could compose a highly descriptive novel about any forty eight hour span of events in Western Province if you so desired. Perhaps I will some day, when I have the time to think some thoughts and spin a few hundred pages of African tales…
 

The most recent forty eight hours in Zambia have been incredible and ridiculous. Exciting, exasperating, exhausting. Hilarious and slap happy, anxious and surreal. And occasionally sad. I’ll try to organize these past few days chronologically, beginning with some humbling anecdotes from Kalabo town, followed by an adorable wild dog and hyaena interaction in the eye of a fantastic lightning storm, a 14 hour drive in a derelict rental SUV and an interesting pair of black market petrol pushers, culminating at the fanciest hotel in Zambia and Monday Night Football. If you really are interested in reading this email, I’d allow at least twenty or thirty minutes for it. It’s a long one…
 

It started at the copy machine in the Kalabo African Parks office. Organizing a few hyena sighting and carcass identification forms to send through the copier, I overheard a young African Parks intern describing her recent conversation with an eleven year old girl she knows in town. An eleven year old girl, proudly married to a man in his thirties, with whom she shares her two children… Standing at the copier, I couldn’t have felt more like an out of place white boy sheltered from these sorts of realities, and that I truly am just a visitor among a community of unspeakably strong people. A few minutes later, one of the African Parks laborers, a local man born and raised in Kalabo, rushes in with a tired face and sad, red eyes. He asks me how I am doing and I tell him I am doing well. “How are you? I am not okay. My child. She is dead. She was very sick last night and died at 17 hours. She is dead.” Then he moved on to the park manager, asking for a vehicle arrangement for his relatives in a neighboring village to attend the funeral. And I continued to stand at the copy machine, realizing that making duplicates of hyena sighting forms felt a solid zero on the importance scale. This is the second malarial death I’ve heard about in six days in Kalabo. Both victims were adolescent girls between the ages of 10 and 12. And I only heard about them because they affected African Parks employees. Who knows how many others there have been in the past week, month, year. And for reasons unknown to me, I’m somehow the fortunate one carrying months’ worth of malaria pills… Humbling and confusing indeed.
 

Later that afternoon, I returned to our camp in the park in a borrowed African Parks Land Cruiser, complete with a closed cabin to shelter us from the driving rain that has hounded Zambia for the past week (the heavy rains have quite officially arrived). With a break in the rain and some rays of sunshine piercing their way through the thunderheads, we raced out to the floodplains to follow the wild dogs in hopes of documenting another successful hunt. We found the dogs in twenty minutes, which is fortuitous and extremely quick, and sat with them for half an hour. As we sat, reminiscing of stormy ferry trips through the Dixon Entrance at the southernmost reach of Southeast Alaska, the sun started its descent into Angola. In unison with the sunset, the dogs sprang up, greeted each other in their playful manner, and set off on a hunt underneath the thunderstorm’s huge sucker hole. The hunt lasted 1.7 kilometers (we document these things), ending with the death of another wildebeest calf. The alpha pair hoarded down a few pounds of raw flesh immediately, and then the carcass sat for fifteen minutes untouched. With wild dogs, the pups eat first, and with this hunt, the pups elected to remain behind, 1.7 kilometers away, unsupervised. The adults and yearlings crowded around the carcass, licking their lips and whining, wishing they could tear into the wildebeest but understanding they couldn’t until the pups arrived. Finally one of the yearlings took off in a sprint and retrieved the pups, who arrived like a troop of circus clowns spilling out of their clown car, one collective mass of bodies twisting, twittering, and wrestling like a bunch of agile drunks toward the carcass. With already gluttonously full stomachs, they attacked the dead carcass, feasted, and left the hide and bones for those who had actually made the kill. After a while, a clan of nine hyenas arrived, hooping and hollering, laughing the hyena laugh. Hyenas are nearly indestructible and can be twice the size of wild dogs. Yet with only three adults, five yearlings, and nine pups, the wild dogs sent the brute-sized hyenas running for their lives into the dusk. These dogs are hard not to love. Playfully goofy yet tough as nails. Pleasant badasses, you could say.
 

During this whole interaction, we were surrounded by black walls of rain and incessant lightning. 360 degrees of brutal rains and ground shaking thunder. I’m sure you could find comparable storms in west Texas or Nebraska during tornado season, and somehow we found ourselves sitting in the only dry spot. The eye, of sorts. (Maybe the dogs know a thing or two about weather?) As darkness finally set in, we followed two safari vehicles that had joined us at the wild dog scene back toward camp. Two open-topped Land Cruisers, completely exposed to the rains they were soon to be driving in. And as we finally reached the rains and were pounded and pounded by winds and violent precipitation, Matt and I laughed like a couple of idiots. We were dry as a bone sitting in our closed-cabin cruiser. We were the ones that usually got pummeled by the rain.

I returned to my tent in anticipation of reflecting on the day’s events. The conversation at the office in Kalabo, the humbling malarial realization, the adorable dogs, the storm. But I was too drained to reflect, and within minutes I was sleeping the sleep of the exhausted.
 

Waking up at three in the morning, I laid in my tent wondering how in the world we were going to drive from Kalabo to Mongu after such heavy rains. The road to Mongu crosses the Zambezi River floodplain, and is accessible only by boat from January to August. From September through November, the road is open for vehicles, and December lies in somewhat of a transition period. Sometimes the road is under water, other times it’s not. Most days it’s a little bit of both. For a Land Cruiser outfitted with appropriate suspension and a snorkel kit, the road is no big deal. But for us, with a rental SUV from Lusaka that came in with a biologist from Bozeman a week before, the road was a questionable proposition at best. But the car had to get back to Lusaka, so we woke up early and set off for Mongu. Kalabo is remote and Mongu is inaccessible for most of its residents. So whenever any vehicle is headed toward Mongu, most of the town knows about it, and soon you are hit with multiple requests for a ride. We accepted three strangers, all teachers who needed to get to Mongu to collect their paychecks (Kalabo has no bank, and for anyone with a government-paid position, the only way to collect a paycheck is to figure out how to get to Mongu and back). We figured we could use the additional hands in the event of burying the suspensionless SUV in the mud somewhere along the way. The ride started out with a few laughs, as the first fifteen minutes were fun as we rocked helter skelter down the quickly deteriorating mud road. We traveled through standing water, divots and holes, up and down angulated ravines. I felt like there should have been ESPN cameras, girls in bikinis, and sensationally-voiced commentators announcing our performance scores in the four-wheel drive championships. I’m not kidding. The road was in nearly undrivable condition, and to my knowledge, has all but officially closed until August of 2011. Over the next three and a half hours, the laughter faded, replaced by increasingly irritated one-liners. I’m interested to see how the expedition back to Kalabo will look in a few days. It will likely include a dug-out canoe, a tent, hopefully an operable rain fly, and a few days paddling upstream through a combination of intense heat and intense rain. And that’s if it all goes smoothly…
 

Finally back on the paved road in Mongu, we celebrated with a couple cold Cokes, whose bottle necks of course shattered when we opened them with a bottle opener. Then it was off for Lusaka in hopes of arriving before dark, considering the rental car had but one functioning bright headlight. Along the way, we passed over the Kafue River, where I spotted my first wild hippos surfacing somewhat like whales in the muddy river below the bridge. A few minutes later, we encountered my first wild elephant browsing the vegetation near the roadside (Liuwa has a very low density of elephants, and I haven’t seen any in the park as of yet). Making good time toward Lusaka, we were all laughs, yet there was the feeling that everything had gone too smoothly, and a curveball was just around the corner. Not surprisingly, that curveball arrived when we stopped for gas. As mentioned in previous emails, nothing here goes to plan, so I’m not sure why we assumed that the gas station would have actually been open in Myumba. Realizing it was closed, we drove around town, asking anybody if they knew where we could buy some petrol. Nobody knew, and we sat in the car temporarily defeated, until a local street entrepreneur appeared out of thin air, approached the car, and asked if we were looking for petrol, oblivious to the fact that we’d been searching for it for the last thirty minutes. We told him yes, and he got in our car and directed us to a sidestreet that was sufficiently grimy, but not really any grimier than any other roads in town, including the main one. When we arrived at our curious back alley location, he took off on a sprint into the darkness and left us waiting for about ten minutes. Everything is more curious when it’s dark, and the building facades on the street and the characters moving about in the shadows gave me the feeling that we were here to buy drugs or women. Or both. Finally, our man with the gas arrived with his friend from an entirely different direction than the one he disappeared into. After haggling over the price per liter, assuring us that it wasn’t diluted with water or kerosene, they gave us about four gallons, assuming that would bring us all the way to Lusaka with fuel to spare…
 

Forty km from Lusaka, the gas light illuminated. With no idea how much fuel the vehicle had once the gas light went on, the next half hour was spent wondering if we were going to spend the night sleeping in this derelict old vehicle on the side of the road. And with each passing mile without any sign of a gas station, we assumed we would be. Yet somehow we coasted into a gas station that amazingly was both open and had staff on hand available to make the monetary transaction for gas (gas pumps here are only open when staff is present; there are no credit card operated machines). As we grabbed a few more gallons, Matt received a phone call from a friend who happens to manage the nicest hotel in Lusaka, and despite the international banking conference being held there, he had an available room for us for free if we were interested. Letting out a few joyous screams and bursts of the car horn, we were on our way toward featherbeds, hot showers, ground coffee, pizza, beer, and complimentary breakfast. And Monday Night Football on the large, flat screen tv in our air conditioned room.
 

So here I sit, in Lusaka, finally with time to sit and think about all that has happened in the past few days. A cup of coffee to my left, a hot shower nearby, and a storm of approaching contemplations and reflections headed my way…  Nothing like a blatant juxtaposition to make you question this whole concept of equity and fairness.
 

Christmas is definitely in the air here, and I’ve seen plenty of decorated Christmas trees and Christmas lights in the neighborhood. I’m considering a movie at the cinema tonight, and perhaps a robust dinner at a place I never thought I’d be caught dead in: the local expatriate hangout. The Rhapsody Café. It feels good to be back in Lusaka, if only for a few days. I hope everyone is doing well, and thanks for all the emails! It’s great to hear from everyone so regularly; it makes Zambia feel rather close to everyone back home! In my sixth week here, I feel like I’m finally acclimating. Transitioning into an acceptance of the pace of life here and the constant onslaught of unforeseen delays. Curveballs, fastballs, and change ups. I’m realizing that although the next few months are going to be a challenge, a test of mental and physical endurance, my time here is indeed short and I’d better make the most of it. If only I knew how to put my thoughts together coherently, and if I had the time to try, my experiences here sure would make for an interesting book… I’ll end this email with a short list of “There’s nothing likes…”
 

There’s nothing like:

Getting blasted in the open eyeball by several flying dung beetles the size of fun-sized Snickers bars while driving in our open-aired four wheeler at forty miles an hour.
 

Sitting with a pack of endangered African wild dogs with no sounds other than croaking frogs, crickets, cranes, storks, Egyptian geese, songbirds, and approaching hyena laughter. And thunder.

Keeping your eyes peeled for roadside wildlife to avoid an accident, except the roadside wildlife aren’t deer, they’re elephants.
 

Walking to your tent at night on the vigilant lookout for lions, armies of red ants, and snakes. You want to walk as quickly as possible but you can’t, because you must first scan the ground at your feet, the ground in front of you, and the woodland surrounding you after every other step. (Don’t worry, the only thing to really worry about are the ants, but your mind can easily sensationalize your surroundings when it gets dark)…
 

Passing through a roadless, subsistence-dependent village in southwest Africa in which the residents have likely never seen a four wheel drive machine like ours, let alone a man with white skin driving one.
 

Leaving a malarial town without immediate access to the global economy, only to arrive in the capital city to spend a night in an excessively luxurious hotel, knowing that nearly everyone you left behind in Kalabo will likely never dream of such an opportunity for some reason or another, and all it is is pure luck of the draw and circumstance that allows you to be in that hotel and not at home in Kalabo.  Some things just don't make sense...
 

Enjoy the snow, the wind, your dogs (or cats, I suppose), friends, family, and the warm, cozy places you all call home this December, and be sure to appreciate the warmth that the wintry Christmas season often ushers in. I wish you all well and I can’t wait to see you all again!

Cheers,

Daven

Heavy rains approaching a lone wildebeest from the south. The dark area beneath the cloud is a sheer wall of rain...

Looking to the north, a hungry wild dog from the Sausage Tree pack looks longingly back toward the pups. A different storm cell approached us from this direction, funneling us into the eye of multiple descending storms.

The pups feeding on another wildebeest calf.

This muddy situation was from a different Kalabo-to-Mongu excursion, but it gives you an idea of the Mongu Road terrain. This truck was much more equipped with four wheel drive essentials, including a winch, good tires, shocks and suspension (which our rental didn't have), and a snorkel kit. Despite this, we managed to bury it in the mud. It might look absurd that we even tried to drive through this. But this is the road; you have no other options. Thankfully we winched ourselves out using a second Land Cruiser that caravanned with us.

It was always nice to pause for a moment or two and absorb the enormous African skies and the sun descending into Angola. The sunsets were regularly spectacular, but with them they brought darkness. And darkness in Liuwa is an exciting experience, to put it lightly...

Lady Liuwa, Queen of Beasts (and her fellow kings)

"With only 23,000 to 40,000 lions remaining, the African lion population is half of what it was in the early 1950's."
-Wildlife Conservation Network

"World peace is threatened not only by regional conflicts and by injustices between peoples and nations but also by the lack of necessary respect for nature, by the disordered exploitation of her resources, and by the progressive deterioration of the quality of life. The ecological crisis has assumed such proportion as to be everyone's responsibility... greed and selfishness, individual and collective, have gone against the order of creation."
-Pope John Paul II

"Sustaining people, sustaining nature--it is one cause, inseperable."
-James Gustave Speth

"In 1908, [Teddy Roosevelt] called the governors of all the states to a White House Conference on Conservation, now often regarded as the beginning of a true national conservation movement. One breakthrough of that historic conference was to establish the protection of human health as a legitimate goal of conservation."
-Philip Shabecoff

"I am myself and what is around me,
and if I do not save it, it shall not save me."
-Jose Ortega y Gasset

"Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself."
-Chief Seattle

"We have traded the idiosyncratic story of our land and people for the sake of a financial transaction. This trade leads us away from quirky human history and toward the extinction of human experience."
-Peter Forbes

Lady Liuwa, a National Geographic celebrity. National Geographic has published two documentaries featuring this lioness and the history behind her isolation in Liuwa Plain National Park and surrounding Game Management Area. As has been the fate of most wildlife populations across the world in recent history, complex economic, political, and social problems arose in the latter 20th century, and regional populations of various species were extirpated or decimated. Consequently, by the 1990's, there was only one remaining lion within Liuwa Plain: "The Last Lioness." Here she is, relaxing in the shade near camp in Liuwa. As many viewers have already discovered through watching the Nat Geo documentaries, this lion developed somewhat of a familiarity with a filmmaker who spent a fair amount of time in Liuwa Plain. Without a pride of lions to return to each morning, it has been argued that the lioness developed a sense of longing for a pride, and that the filmmaker and his campmates became her de facto pride. As a result, the lioness continues to spend a large amount of time relaxing in camp, near its human occupants. I heard her calling and roaring from within camp regularly, most often in the middle of the night when I was tucked away into my sleeping bag. An electrifying experience to have a lion roar within two hundred meters from your tent!

Two years ago, two male lions were introduced to Liuwa Plain in an attempt to encourage lion reproduction in the park. Here is one of the males on a late afternoon in January.

As the sun rose on my first morning in Liuwa, we loaded up our field gear in hopes of finding the Sausage Tree pack of African wild dogs. Within twenty minutes of departing from camp, we encountered the two male lions in the plains, with full bellies, apparently having just killed and fed upon a female wildebeest.

Retreating into the shade of the woodland. We stumbled upon the male lions just after sunrise, as we were searching for one of four of the collared wildebeest. The lions appeared to have fed overnight and were moving into the shade for a post feed nap.

This picture puts predators into perspective. Lions do not chase their prey for long distances; they rely on highly developed ambush techniques and the ability to blend in with the environment. These lions were no more than forty meters away, yet only one was clearly visible. Had we not seen the visible male, we would never have realized another adult male lion (hiding in the grass on the left side of the photo) was lurking in the tall grass at such a close distance...

Liuwa Plain African wild dogs

"With so many consumers of the fertility of the earth, and so little attention to the means of repairing the ravages, no one can be surprised at the impoverished face of the country."
-James Madison, 1818

"The central thing for which Conservation stands is to make this country the best possible place to live in, both for us and for our descendants."
-Gifford Pinchot, 1910

"...the modern technoscientific revolution, including especially the great leap forward of computer-based information technology, has betrayed Nature a second time, by fostering the belief that the cocoons of urban and suburban material life are sufficient for human fulfillment. That is an especially serious mistake."
-E. O. Wilson, 2006

-The grand and ultimate illusion would be that man could provide a substitute for the elemental workings of nature."
-Fairfield Osborn, 1948

Full-bellied and happy, a pup from the Sausage Tree Pack of African wild dogs.

African wild dogs are incredibly social and intelligent. Several hours out of each day are used by members of the pack to play and interact. These two wrestled for nearly a half hour near a wetland in the late evening.

After a big wildebeest meal, the pack's pups played keep away with an older subadult dog. The subadult carried a stick in its mouth and ran from the pups, resulting in the entire group of pups forming a collective unit to chase down the subadult and its stick. Watching this behavior, it was rather evident that the subadult was teaching the pups how to hunt as a pack. In order to get the reward (the stick, the wildebeest, the oribi), the pups had to form a unified group and coordinate a series of flanks and attacks. The subadult would concede the stick to the pups from time to time and let them wrestle with it amongst themselves. But not to be left out of the fun, the subadult would dive back in and wrestle with all the pups, ultimately grabbing the stick again and running from them. The expressions in these wild dogs' eyes, mouths, and tails were reminiscent of dogs at home playing fetch or keep away in the backyard... In a world far from home, these dogs were good company.

Three subadult wild dogs "stalking." Wild dogs will stalk each other as a form of social greeting, as an indication of the beginning of a hunt, or just simply as an enjoyable thing to do in the evening. On this occasion, the wild dogs were beginning to stalk a small herd of wildebeest.

Packmates. Allies. Friends.

Liuwa Plain hyaenas

"If we are to balance and direct our remarkable technological muscle power, we need to regain some ancient virtues: the humility to acknowledge how much we have yet to learn, the respect that will allow us to protect and restore nature, and the love that can lift our eyes to distant horizons, far beyond the next election, paycheque or stock dividend. Above all we need to reclaim our faith in ourselves as creatures of the Earth, living in harmony with all other forms of life.
What a sign of maturity it would be for our species to acknowledge the profound limitations inherent in human knowledge and the destructive consequences of our crude but powerful technologies. It would mark the beginning of wisdom to pay attention to ecosystems delineated by nature--mountain ranges, watersheds, valley bottoms, rivers and lake systems, wetlands--rather than regions determined by politics or economics. "
-David Suzuki, 1997

We found this clan of hyaenas during the peak of the flood season. Matt and I went into Liuwa Plain in late January, as the floods were in full force, just to see what we could see and maybe even get some work done. No researchers had ever been in Liuwa Plain in the flood season; we were the first to do so. In one week in January we accomplished a lot; we located more than a dozen of the study animals and determined they were alive and downloaded GPS information from three of the four collared wildebeest (unbelievable that we managed to do so, given the flood conditions, the massive amount of land in which the wildebeest could be, and the sheer volume of wildebeest in the region at that time; how we managed to locate three specific wildebeest out of potentially 35,000 from the ground, without air support, during flood conditions is beyond me...). The last night we were in Liuwa, we searched for this specific clan of hyaenas. The sun was setting over Angola, and the angle of the light lit up the golden grass on the floodplain in almost a radiant sort of way. The light, sounds, and smells alone were enough to wash away any difficulties we might have encountered, and allowed us both to take a step back and realize how unbelievably beautiful Liuwa Plain is during the flood season. As we traversed through the floodplain, we picked up a signal for one of the collared hyaenas. We zeroed in on it and came ever closer. Quietly, and almost stealthily, two of the hyaenas poked their heads up out of the grass behind us, one of whom was holding a wildebeest leg in its mouth. A few more hyaenas picked their heads up and watched us, some of whom casually strolled 15 yards further away, and others who simply laid back down in the grass. Seeing this clan in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but the rich smells of grass, the sounds of thousands of migratory birds, and the angle of the Angolan sunset was among the most incredible moments of my time in Zambia.

Slowly repositioning herself to further gnaw on her wildebeest leg. A yearling hyaena cub proceeds her in the background.

This hyaena appeared to have been caught in a snare, with the resulting scar around its neck quite obvious. Snaring is a regular occurence in Zambia for a few reasons: villagers will set snares to catch antelope species and other mammals for food; villagers will also set snares to catch species pestering their farmland, garden, or livestock. I'm not sure how or where this hyaena was snared, or just as curiously, how it got out of the snare..

Hyaenas are powerful animals. Their jaws are powerful enough to crush bones. And not just any bones, but big bones like zebra femurs. That's a lot of pounds per square inch of jaw power. With that in mind, it's easy to see how hyaenas might lose an ear in an inter or intraclan altercation..

My first morning in Liuwa Plain and we came across this scene. We first found the smalll pride of lions, sometime around 6 am. Then in the distance, no more than 200 yards away, we saw some frenzied movement. We drove closer and found these hyaenas devouring the remains of a wildebeest likely killed by the lions that night.

December brings the rains

December 2, 2010
Hello hello!

I trust that not everyone on this list is sick of reading my electronic novellas, so I'll fire off another dispatch from the booming megalopalis that is Mongu. A town of 30,000 that feels more like a refined village than a city. The same size of Juneau or Bozeman, yet it still feels like there are only a few thousand folks around these parts, pushing their tomatoes and kerosene in the market nearby. There are some incredible furniture builders in this town, and they display their finely handcrafted chairs, tables, bedframes, and doors along the side of the main road. I'm not sure if Mongu is known for its fine furniture builders. But it should be.

Anyhow, for those I've talked to in the last week and a half, you're quite familiar with the frustrations I've had. For those that I haven't spoken with or emailed, I'll relate some quick backstory. The pace of efficiency here is simply different than what I've known in my own hometown. I mentioned it in my previous email, but it truly is noteworthy. It's a fine line of being deflating and completely humorous. And for a while, I was allowing myself to dive deeper and deeper into the former. It got to the point where I had my bags packed and was ready to head out. I felt like I wasn't helping to accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things, and I was just another hand on deck, bailing out the constant wave of problems breaking over the bow. However, my supervisor and his comrade Meagan, both from Bozeman, helped me make the transition of being frustrated with myself to being downright amused. These two have spent years and years in the Ugandan, Botswanan, and Zambian bush, and they know that when you're in the bush anywhere, nothing goes to plan, and nothing works. They have a saying that makes me laugh harder and harder every time I hear it when we make a plan for the day: "what could possibly go wrong?" Every time I hear it, I burst out into laughter, harder with each subsequent time it's mentioned. Having those two around to laugh with, to daydream about hash browns from the Cat Eye Cafe or dark coffee from Rockford in Bozeman has been quite the medicine.

One thing I have noticed in the face of all of these constant, repetitive amounts of regular problems is the camaraderie that people here develop. Everybody helps everybody. Is it because nobody has anything to do at that specific moment, so they might as well help? Perhaps a little bit. But also because everyone is so used to dealing with problems that they understand a helping hand is much appreciated. And they're offered without question. You have a problem? You have two or three people in there to help you resolve it. That's a new phenomenon for me, and I'm liking it.

On the other hand, Matt, my supervisor, described how we actually are making big strides in Liuwa Plain, despite all the obstacles. Liuwa Plain is home to the second largest wildebeest migration in the world, yet nobody knows anything about it. Nobody has ever studied it, nobody knows where the wildebeest go/come from, how big the migration is, and how expansively their migrations range. It's estimated that there are between 30,000 and 40,000 wildebeest in the park, and four of them have GPS downloadable collars that track their movement, report that information to a satellite high in the sky, and store it all in their neat little unit around their necks. We managed to find all four of those wildebeest, four amongst potentially 40,000, on the ground without air support. We downloaded the information collected from the past four months, and now we have a map of where some of these wildebeest travel after they leave Liuwa. A first! A contribution to science; information regarding the second largest wildebeest migration. And we're the ones doing it. Not bad.

We've also recently managed to determine that there are not two, but three packs of African wild dogs in the park. We managed to follow the Sausage Tree pack (the most easily found pack) again for two days. Another four wildebeest taken down, followed by hours of puppy-play. It was interesting to see the yearlings at work in the pack. They look after the pups, regurgitate mass quantities of meat for the pups (as if the pups haven't eaten enough already with their fat ol' bellies), and teach the pups essential hunting behavior through play. I watched one yearling wild dog play keep away with the pups with a stick for over an hour. The yearling would taunt the pups with the stick, much the same way you and I do with our own dogs when we have a toy it wants. The pups go wild, bark and tweet incessantly, and chase the yearling in circles. Eventually, the yearling will allow one of the pups to snatch up the stick, chew it for a while, and then it's back at it again with a different stick. It's interesting to see that the yearling is teaching the pups to not only chase, but to chase as a collective unit. A pack. And he rewards them with the prize. These pups are going to be great hunters!

It's also hilarious to see the dogs stalking each other. Anybody with a dog has played the game in which you slowly, ever so slowly, stalk up to your dog who is watching you with a secret service style eye. Eventually your dog can't take the built up excitement any longer and springs up like a rocket and goes crashing into the nearby table with a big grin on its face. These wild dogs do the same thing, but with each other, without any humans playing the game with them. So next time you play keep away with your dog, or stalk up on it like a sly ol' trickster, just know that you're teaching them how to behave like wild dogs on the African plain!

Apart from the wild dogs, I managed to go on a few flights over the park last week. Our goal was to find a few specific animals, including one wild dog that dispersed a few months ago and hasn't been seen since. We saw huge herds of wildebeest running wildly at the approach of our little Cessna, herds of zebra doing much of the same, big old eland lurking around on the woodland fringes, and wild dogs and hyaenas sleepily sharing a big wet pan in the baking midday sun. The pilot of the plane is a filmmaker. You've seen his work if you've watched Planet Earth. He was the camera man for the African wild dog sequence (a very cool sequence). If you watch the behind the scenes, he's one of the main guys talking about the difficulties of finding these animals and actually filming them. He's filmed all kinds of animals for the BBC, most recently a film called "Elephants Without Borders," tracking elephants across Zambia, Angola, Namibia, and Botswana. A pretty savvy dude, and as humble as they come.

I'd like to write more, but I have to jump into the back of a Land Cruiser and cruise three hours into the driving rain, over the potmarked "road" back to Kalabo in thirty minutes. Didn't forget my rain gear this time! Halfway through, we'll cross the Zambezi, the place where I huddled with the family in their reed hut a few weeks ago fending off a tropical grassland dose of hypothermia... It's crazy to see how much the Zambezi River has risen in the last four weeks with the rains we've had. We're getting more and more, and before long, the roads will be inaccessible, and it'll be swampthing amphibious vehicles for the duration..

Hope everyone is well and not entirely insane with Christmas music already! I heard "Feliz Navidad" in the supermarket yesterday afternoon and it made me laugh. Yet it was comforting to hear a familiar old tune in such an otherworldly grocery store... Have a great week everybody, and hopefully next time I'll finally have some photos, eh?

Cheerio,
Daven

Flying overhead with the camera crew, we caught a few good glimpses of herds of wildebeest munching their way through the freshly sprouted vegetation.

Although hyaenas and wild dogs will fight over the tasty remains of a carcass, they decided to share the cool environs of a wet pan this afternoon. The hyaenas are to the upper left in the water and mud. The wild dogs are toward the right and the bottom of the image, lounging in the cool mud or green vegetation.

At play with full bellies.

If you've ever played fetch with your dog, or wrestled with it for what seems like hours, you've probably thought, "this dog could play all day and never get tired!" These wild dogs are the same. After a successful hunt and a good feed, some of the dogs wrestled and played keep away with each other literally for a full hour or more.

Somewhere in this landscape is the Angolan-Zambian border. It is believed that the wildebeest migration travels outside the Zambian border and into Angola. If we can prove these movements using the information obtained from the four wildebeest GPS collars, it could mean further habitat protection not only for wildebeest, but for all other prey and predator species that depend upon the same land.

The "roads" traveled

A few of the sights along the route from Mongu to Matemanene, our field camp in Liuwa Plain.

Along the Mongu to Kalabo road, you'll see hundreds of people walking in either direction. For most, walking is the only form of transportation available. Many have bicycles, which are mostly pushed along the Mongu road due to difficult terrain, or perhaps due to the load of water, parafin, grain, and fish they've strapped to the bike's frame. This fellow was out in the midday heat, shielding himself from the rays.

The Zambezi River bisects the flood plain between Mongu and Kalabo. Here we are waiting for the pontoon to empty its eastbound vehicles, soon to board and head across the river toward Kalabo. The pontoon only runs during the latter half of the dry season, when the Mongu to Kalabo route is dry enough for vehicles. The huts near the pontoon are mostly fishermen, but some of them have set up small shops offering hot soda, salty snacks, and talk time for Zambia's pay-as-you-go cell phones.

Back in the day, there was a Grand Idea to connect Mongu to eastern Angola by paved road. I'm not entirely confident I know the reason behind the proposed road, but I heard more than once that it was to service the diamond traffic between mines in Angola and Lusaka, Zambia. Angola has a fairly ugly blood diamond history, and apparently the idea was to ship diamonds to Lusaka to make them easier to buy and sell, but also perhaps to try to wash away some of the Angolan blood diamond reputation along the long route. This section of road was an anomoly. Paved from Kalabo to the beginning of the Zambezi flood plain, it was a stretch of 17 or so miles of isolated asphalt. Indeed, it was quite strange. The road was complete with kilometer markers and pullouts for naps, bathroom breaks, whatever. The road continued on as a paved surface to the Luanginga River in Kalabo, despite there being no gas station in Kalabo, and not many vehicles either. In the other direction, the pavement terminated at a collection of huts, where the four wheel adventure begins.

The end of the pavement in Kalabo, and one of the few regular vehicles in town. Behind the white truck is the Luanginga River pontoon. The Zambezi pontoon is equipped with two motors that zip you across the big river. This pontoon is equipped with one rope, which breaks from time to time, that you use to pull the pontoon across. Boarding the pontoon was generally easy, unless it was done at night, which made for more than one exciting evening... On the other side of this river and across a few miles of sandy four wheel drive trail is the boundary of Liuwa Plain.
Matemanene, our field camp in Liuwa Plain, has a large radio tower placed smack in the middle of the camps' woodland. I climbed the tower to use our telemetry receiver to pick up signals from collared animals throughout the park. It eventually dawned on me to bring my camera with me and snap off a few photos of the landscape immediately surrounding our camp. The water in the background is the Munde Stream, and during the heavy rains it presented a huge obstacle to getting in and out of camp. In dry conditions, you could drive from the Munde to our tents in five minutes. In wet conditions, it took us a couple hours to try to find a reasonable crossing in which we wouldn't sink our vehicles in the swampy stream.. And again, these crossings were made all the more interesting at night!

Thanksgiving dispatch from Zambia

Noember 22, 2010

Aloha!

Where to even begin... This past week has been a complete pipe bomb of stimuli; an odyssey of events, reactions, and improvisations through which I've somehow managed to navigate and arrive back in Kalabo town on a pleasantly balmy yet fresh November evening in Western Province...

After spending three weeks in Zambia, I'm beginning to generate some moderately informed impressions. At risk of falling into the trap of forging down the road of over simplified generalizations, I take it upon myself to produce the following characterizations of my time in Zambia:

Highs and lows.

Frustrations.

Highs. The highs in Zambia are truly indescribable. It is hard to put into words what it feels like to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of two male lions calling at each other, 200 yards from your tent. It's not necessarily spooky, but it gives you goosebumps. It's chilling. Alluring and intoxicating. You don't want the lions to come snatch you out of your tent (which isn't going to happen, so don't worry), but you don't want them to stop roaring under the Zambian moon. It's nice to know that lions don't scavenge campsites the way bears do, so we don't have to worry about falling into the lion's clutch if we leave a few boxes of porridge strewn about on the kitchen table. (We do, however, keep our camp clean as a whistle. The vervet monkeys are especially advanced thieves, and the hyaenas don't mind a free lunch either)...

Highs. We finally found one of the two known packs of African wild dogs in the park (if you don't know what African wild dogs are, google 'em. They are supremely cool). Since they are elusive little canids with a monstrous home range, we had to stay on them/follow them until we lost them. We managed to keep up with them for about 36 hours before they gave us the ol' slip... Don't wag the finger just yet; it's nearly impossible to follow a pack of small, dark creatures that move a couple of miles at the drop of a hat under the starry night. Anyhow, as we followed them, we witnessed not one, not two, but four successful hunts. Two wildebeest calves, one wildebeest adult, and an oribi (a small, insanely fast plains antelope). Wild dog behavior is also somewhat intoxicating. They have very interesting social structures, and downright cute, playful behavior. After a successful hunt, the dogs wag and shake their tails/entire bodies uncontrollably, wrestling, jumping, and playing with their pack mates. The pups always eat on the carcass first; they're usually the ones with the fullest stomachs and the ones most inclined to play. Considering there are 9 pups in this pack, it made for quality pup watching. At any rate, as we followed the pack to a shallow pan during the midday Zambian sun, we thought we could take a break and relax. Just as soon a s we put our feet up and our caps down over our eyes, a couple dogs leaped up and sprinted at a small herd of approaching wildebeest. The chase was on, and the entire pack was soon racing after an isolated wildebeest cow and her calf. We followed as quickly as we could in our land cruiser, which isn't easy in this unspeakably and unpredictably rough terrain. The chase somehow managed a mid-session 180 degree spin and began sprinting back directly toward us. The calf was taken down literally 20 meters from our cruiser and consumed in about 5 minutes. The cow stood in shock nearby, calling to the calf (which isn't uncommon behavior for an animal to exhibit after it's lost its calf). Unfortunately for the cow, some of the pack took it upon themselves to trap her in the pan and eventually dog-piled her to the ground. The groans, moans, girations, and desperate attempts at escape were vivid beyond description. It was a murderous scene, truly violent and savage. A spectacle. The dogs began consuming her at the pan's edge, and she emitted her last groan about twenty minutes later. Seeing the predator-prey dynamic live and in color, all literally within 50 meters of our truck was extraordinarily rare and quite amazing. In my years in Yellowstone and Alaska, I've never seen anything even close to that. Matt, my supervisor, who has worked in Africa for years and did his PhD work in Yellowstone on wolf-elk-bison dynamics, said he's never seen anything like that, within such close proximity. In that regard, witnessing the natural predator-prey dynamic was unreal. Yet witnessing the entire interaction. The calf sprinting wide-eyed for its life, finally falling in endurance to the pack of hungry dogs, observing the mother's behavior and her eventual downfall, and listening to the gurgles and groans being emitted from two dying wildebeest certainly drew on some less-than-happy emotions. Raw, wild. Exciting, yet saddening. Pleasing to see a healthy and wild system, yet always a tinge of reality when you reflect upon your own life as you see it taken from another creature. An interesting bag of emotions, for sure. Regardless, I obtained some ridiculously great photos from the dog hunt! I wish I could attach some, but I can't upload them to this computer unfortunately... Later this winter, they'll be up online!

Highs. Giving Nicolas Muzembi, a hitch hiker from a nearby village, a ride to Kalabo in our little four wheeler. He was all smiles and told me he was working for the Zambian Census to try to earn enough money to go to university. He wants to become a teacher, like his father, and he was ecstatic about his dream. He wanted to share it with me, and he did. He described how he was very poor, how everyone in his village is very poor. He described his perceptions of white tourists, how they are very good people, very fine. They have everything, and he wished they could train him and his village mates to have everything also. But he also noticed that whenever he hitch hiked, no one with white skin would ever pick him up. Until today, when I picked him up. He smiled and said, "Ah! Yes! You LOVE! Keep th at spirit! Keep the loving spirit!" I dropped him off at his reed hut near the Kalabo market this afternoon with a couple of smiles and a handshake.

Highs. Huuuuuuge sunsets over Angola, which rests only 40 km from our camp. Just the thought of watching big sunsets over Angola is a surreality in itself. Who knew?

Highs. Big moons. On nights without clouds, the big moons light up the plains to the point of driving without headlights. You can see massive herds of wildebeest and zebra grazing frightfully through the night, ever fearful of packs of wild dogs, clans of hyaenas, or the small pride of three lions lurking in the tall grass. There are many other highs, but this email has the potential for Iliad proportion, so I'll jump ahead.

Lows. I could combine this with frustrations. Feelings of ineffectiveness or personal inadequacy. Liuwa Plain is a unique ecosystem in its present stage. Lions were nearly extirpated in the 90's by poaching, leaving only one lioness in the park (if you want, you can go to youtube or hulu.com and download "The Last Lioness." It's a National Geographic documentary about Liuwa Plain). Currently, there are three lions, two packs of wild dogs, hundreds of hyaenas, and thousands of wildebeest and zebra. This is a unique opportunity to study a system basically void of a natural predator (lion), what the impacts are of the lack of that predator (to the populations of wildlife as well as nearby villages and their livestock), and the effects that lion reintroduction will have on the system in coming years. There is a ton of research to be conducted, endless data to collect, and an ever-expanding list of work that needs to be accomplished. Yet we don't ever seem to get to go to work, and I often feel that it's because of some lack of know-how on my part. I was warned by many people that I will have to learn a different brand of patience if I work here. And I am slowly learning that. Something that should take 10 minutes, like filling a vehicle with diesel, usually takes 2 or 3 hours. Something that should take 1 hour, like eating dinner, can sometimes take 4 or 5 hours. Something that should take half a day, like locating a clan of hyaenas, generally takes several days. Something that should take one day, like locating a spare tire, has taken, thus far, 14 days. There are always delays. Always. The diesel was put into petrol jerry jugs, and now we need to find a jug that hasn't been contaminated with petrol to put into our vehicle. We need to be out at the hyaena den by 5 am, but someone from Zambian Wildlife Authority has run out of fuel and we need to locate some and deliver it to him 15 km away. We need to drive to the west boundary of the park, but our leaf spring has collapsed and we don't have any appropriate spare parts to make a fix for the next two days. We need to change the oil in the four wheeler, and somehow get side tracked into greasing 75 miscellaneous nuts and bolts that will never be used, and rolling up ratty rope to put into storage rather than just changing the oil and getting out into the field. Etc, ad infinitum. Or, more often, we just wait. For no real apparent reason. We just wait, standing around. Nothing happens on time, and I'm not quite sure why anybody even gives estimates on what time things will be accomplished. In that regard, I have been beating myself up quite a bit.  Initially, I beat myself up thinking the delays are my fault.  Then I reflect and feel like a total jackass for coming into someone else's homeland and attempting to transplant a way of knowing and a way of interacting with the world that fits my home but not necessarily everyone else's.  It makes me feel like a missionary at times.  Almost dirty, yet with an unending desire to still get all the work done. I came here to see amazing things, to build relationships, to meet people and learn their perspectives, definitely. But I also came here with the understanding that populations of wildlife, of fish, and clean water are diminishing at incredible rates worldwide, and with the goal of hoping to contribute to an organization that is making great strides in ecological restoration, social and community inclusion (rather than exclusion) and collaboration, real attempts to solve real problems that have already plagued other places, people, and the wild systems they depend upon. And thus far I've found myself sitting on my hands a lot, wanting to actually get to work, stressing that our work keeps accumulating without any work being accomplished.. It makes me wonder if I'm the right guy for the job...

 

Despite this, I am genuinely enjoying my time here. Some of the people I've met so far have been incredible, and have, as anticipated, unknowingly generated some serious introspection on my end. Like Frances, the high school kid I've befriended here who wants to see what Alaska looks like, wants to get married and leave Kalabo (perhaps to Canada, he's mentioned), wants to see the "Concrete Jungle" more than anything else, wants corruption and nepotism in Zambia to come to an end so that he and his fellow high school graduates can actually find employment, but ultimately realizes that he will become a subsistence farmer just like his father and will likely never leave Kalabo. And in the face of this, Lee smiles.

 

 

Anyway...

There are at least 593 different stories I'd like to share from this past week, but I don't even know how to unwrap all of those experiences and put them into words. It's been a lot of stimuli through which I've had to navigate. Highs and lows. Like Allan said, every day is an adventure. A struggle of sorts, navigating through all of the unanticipated problems du jour. Although I'd like to revise his statement and conclude that every hour is an adventure. Really. If you're looking for a bona fide adventure, come to Western Province in Zambia.

Glad to hear from everyone that responded! I hope all you folks in the Rockies are enjoying that mega-snow load I've seen in a few photos you've sent me! I hope everyone has a happy Thanksgiving and understands that we sure have a lot to be thankful for! Keep up the emails if you get a chance. It's great hearing from you all!

Enjoy your turkeys,

Daven

The sun setting slowly into Angola, with a small herd of wildebeest preparing for another dark night in the plains full of predators...

Sufficiently skeptical of our approach, this wildebeest bull allowed us to approach him within 20 yards or so before he sprinted away in a zig-zag fashion, his genes firing away telling him to juke from side to side to elude our potential predatory chase.

In the wee hours of early morning, these wild dogs take the time to size up a wildebeest bull. After testing him for a few minutes, the dogs ultimately decided that a bull wildebeest wasn't worth their energy, and they moved on to find something more to their liking.

As mentioned above, this pack of wild dogs was snoozing the snooze I had hoped to catch under the midday sun. We'd parked our vehicles and put our feet up, not expecting the dogs to move much in the middle-of-the-day African heat. But hunger can strike at all hours of the day I reckon, and these dogs sprang up like compressed coils and charged after a small herd of approaching wildebeest. They isolated a calf, not more than a month old, chased it down and killed it all within 20 yards of my truck. The chase was so close, I could see the desperation in the calf's eyes... Those eyes embodied the true sense of terror, of desperation, of helplessness. I doubt I will ever forget the look in those eyes for the rest of my days. With wild dogs, the alpha pair and pups eat first. And a wildebeest calf isn't much meat for a pack of 17 hungry animals. As the alpha pair and pups consumed the little calf, the subordinate adult male and the subadult dogs redirected their attention on the mother of the calf, who was standing 30 yards away. She continued to make her alarm call, seemingly calling to the calf in somewhat of a state of shock. The subordinate male and subadults, who hadn't eaten yet, sprinted directly toward her and she didn't budge. When they pounced on her, she gave a tremendous fight, injuring the subordinate male dog with her horns. Yet eventually they wrangled her to the ground, and the pack of dogs finally had enough meat to feed the whole gang. Witnessing this hunt was quite a paradox of feelings. Exciting, yes. The source of happiness, knowing that there are still wild systems at work in our overdeveloped world, yes. But hearing her groans, understanding what it means to be animal, having to take the life of others if you are to sustain your own and your offspring. It all felt tangible, visceral. It was great, but it was awful. Something few people in the world have ever seen that close, and I was happy I was there. Yet it was indeed a horrible scene, complete with the final sounds emitted by a dying animal and the corresponding fleshy noises associated with the tearing apart of a living being. A heavy afternoon to be sure.

The feeling during this hunt was too intense to retrieve my camera and start firing away. I just sat in my truck and watched, amazed and dumbfounded. Humbled. After twenty minutes or so, I finally pulled my camera out and started taking pictures, after the calf had been entirely consumed and the whole pack was on the cow. In retrospect, it would have been interesting to catch the earlier moments of the hunt on camera. But the whole series of events was too powerful to do anything other than sit silently still and watch.

Humbling.

A herd of Burchelli's Zebra grazing in the early morning sun. Although a prey species for many a carnivore, these animals tend to be more spry, flighty, and downright strong for the wild dogs and hyaenas we observed in Liuwa Plain.

Another day, another adventure

November 11, 2010

Bueno,

Well, it certaily appears that I'm around internet and cell phone coverage much more regularly than I assumed I would be... Although I rarely have a ton of time at a computer on any given instance... Anyway, I read an email from my friend Allan this morning who spent a good chunk of time traversing Africa from Kenya to Capetown. He mentioned that it's hard to relate/describe all the stories you collect while traveling in Africa, and I certainly agree. Every single day has been worthy of a lengthy email or conversation at the pub with a nice cool Alaskan Amber. Every day has been an adventure of some sort thus far. So here's another one...

Yesterday, I had to drive back to Mongu from Kalabo to retrieve a coworker who had been in Lusaka. The road between Mongu and Kalabo is no ordinary road, though. It is Johnny Fourwheeler's wet dream. A rough and chaotic network of variously rugged four wheel drive tracks, traversing high grass, deep sand, rutted mud, pools and puddles, streams, and remote Zambian villages. The road is about 40 miles, but it takes 4 hours to drive. It crosses the Zambezi River via pontoon boat, which each crossing is a story in itself... Anyway, our primary field vehicle in Liuwa Plain is kind of a suped up ESPN hunter's vehicle. One of those big, burly, four wheel drive golf carts all decked out in camo with various racks for various things. The thing is, it has no windows or windshields. And just a little tarp for a roof. If you have your rain gear on, it's no big deal. It's actually great. But when you forget your raingear back at camp and have to drive to Mongu and back in a monsoon rain and high winds, the situation suddenly becomes less than a barrell of laughs... Which is exactly what happened. After six or so years working outside, I somehow managed to be foolish enough to leave my rain gear behind. Bad mistake... After the first two hours of driving through the downpour, shivering and daydreaming of things like a warm sleeping bag, a hot cup of coffee, or even just a dry place to stand out of the rain and wind, I arrived at the pontoon on the Zambezi. The pontoon was broken temporarily, as one of the two engine's fan belts had snapped. The fix took the pontoon crew about an hour, so I decided to huddle and shiver behind the four wheeler and take my lick. I only sat huddled for a couple minutes before a local lady living in a reed hut near the river called at me and motioned for me to come to her hut and sit out of the rain. I did, and was very grateful! I ended up sharing the hut with her, her husband, and a large collection of adolescent and infant children. Perhaps 8 or more? None of them spoke English, but I made the appropriate thank you gestures, and smiled and laughed with the little kids who kept staring at me as though I was a recent arrival from Jupiter. Later, a Dutch/Zambian farming couple arrived to the pontoon in their safari vehicle, and saw me and loaned me their jacket. We eventually crossed the Zambezi, made it to Mongu, whereupon I gave the jacket back and the Zambian man told me, "Yep, Africa has a steep learning curve, eh?" and laughed. He took a picture of me to add to his safari scrapbook and continued on his way...

Funny. A boy calling Montana and Alaska home, shivering his britches off in the African summer!

The return drive to Kalabo was exciting as well. No rain, but thousands of sizeable frogs hopping across the road. A few jackals made their appearance as the sun began to set over Angola, and then darkness set in. The drive in the darkness was uneventful except for a few cattlemen coaxing their cows down the road, the chilly breeze, and the hundreds of thousands of moths and other bugs making their way directly into my face as we sped along the dirt track... We got back to the park housing in Kalabo in time for a cup of tea and a National Geographic episode on Wild Yellowstone. Drinking tea, eating pasta, and watching people like Roy Renkin of Yellowstone on tv whilst sitting in far western Zambia. Strange...

Anyway, it's back to the park today (I think; plans change here every couple of hours!), where we can begin our prey surveys. We have to survey 16 transects throughout the park and document how many ungulates we see, what species, what age and sex, by Sunday night. I hope we can get it done! Hope all is well in the snowy/rainy conditions back home!

I miss you all!

Cheerio,
Daven

Bigger does not necessarily mean better on the Mongu Road. These guys were buried before we were and hadn't made a whole lot of progress by the time we'd winched and dug ourselves out. Who knows how long they hung around in the mud..

The crossing at the Zambezi River. I huddled in a reed hut similar to the one in this photo for an hour or so during a torrential downpour. If I hadn't been approaching hypothermia, I would have thought it to be one of the most surreal experiences of my life. But since I was too cold and wet to think about anything other than ways to warm up, I thankfully sat and shivered until the fan belt on the pontoon was repaired and we could carry on through the rain once again.

A typical scene on any rural road in Zambia. We gave all the people in the foreground (plus another five or six passengers to be picked up later) a ride to Mongu.

Our fleet in Liuwa Plain National Park. The goofy looking rig on the left is the machine I rallied with through the downpour. We had this thing stuck a few times, but when it was running and not blowing head gaskets, it did fairly well in the sand, mud, and swamp.

Yet as mentioned above, we found ways to bury this thing in the sand and mud on occasion. This situation was a dandy to dig out, as we were all sloppy and soaking wet from head to toe. Matt elected to try to woo Pyatt's Crackers and attract some sort of big time donation by giving them a bit of free advertising out in the Zambian bush...

More birds from the floodplains

A few more birds from the Zambezi River floodplain...

Look familiar? The African fish eagle holds a certain reverence in Zambia, similar to the bald eagle in the United States. It is the national bird of both Zambia and Zimbabwe, and looks and behaves quite a bit like it's bald cousin in the Western hemisphere.

The tawny eagle, looking a bit like a certain golden bird of prey in North America, also looks and behaves like its Western counterpart. Tawny eagles feed a fair amount on carrion, or the carcasses of large mammals, much like the golden eagles I've seen browsing the roadkill on Highway 89 in Montana...

The fairly common spur-winged goose in flight.

One can only guess as to what the little bee eater's diet consists of... This one swooped down in front of us to pose atop a termite mound.

I couldn't quite get close enough for a good snapshot of this southern red, or scarlet bishop. A good lookin' bird indeed.

Big Birds of Liuwa Plain

November 9, 2011

"But the most impressive thing so far has been the copious amounts of large birds. Storks, cranes, vultures, eagles, and more. Hundreds of them. Everywhere. This place is a birder's paradise!"

Picking tasty insects from the mud, a group of blacksmith plovers and little stints keep a trio of crowned cranes company at the beginning of the wet season.

The wattled crane stands in at just over five and a half feet tall, the second largest crane in the world. It's estimated that roughly half of the world's wattled cranes are found in Zambia, including these two picking their way through the grasslands on an early Liuwa morning.

A revered bird in Africa, the secretary bird repositioning itself to better hunting grounds. Secretary birds are birds of prey, and they primarily hunt by foot (contrary to most birds of prey who hunt from the air). The birds are revered in Africa for their ability to kill snakes, of which there are plenty in Zambia! The feathers behind the eagles head protrude out the back much like a pencil behind a secretary's ear when sitting at their typewriter, hence the name.

Hunters and scavengers at the dinner table. This pack of wild dogs killed a wildebeest calf and its mother at the edge of a rich, wet pan in the heat of mid afternoon. The scavengers, including lappet-faced vultures, white-headed vultures, and a single marabou stork join the dinner party. Marabou storks are often called "the undertaker," as their presence generally indicates the freshly deceased, not to mention their spooky, 19th century undertaker appearance... The undertaker is another enormous bird, as it can reach heights of five feet with a wingspan over ten (the largest wingspan of any bird in the world, a title shared with the Andean condor).

The undertaker out for an evening stroll in northern Liuwa Plain. The night this photograph was taken, Jassiel and I got trapped by the high waters of the Matemanene River. November is the beginning of the wet season, and when the rains come, they come like you've never seen. After a big rain, the flood plain floods and the rivers swell, making navigation less than an easy task (especially at night). We were roughly 30 minutes from camp when hanging out with this undertaker, but because of the flooding and lack of daylight, it took us over two hours to find a way back into camp without sending our vehicle deep into the drink...