Wildlife

I’ve been fortunate enough to have visited two national parks in the last month and had the opportunity to see lots of African wildlife while on the game drives and boat rides. Here are a few miscellaneous items to share from those experiences:

-The cliché that elephants have good memories is not that far off, apparently. The park ranger we hired to guide us around the park at Murchison Falls told us that the elephants in that park are more aggressive towards humans than the elephants in Queen Elizabeth Park because of the greater incidence of poaching and the longer history of conflict in that region.

-I was awakened around 4:00am one morning by the sound of something very large eating grass and breathing heavily outside the banda (a small cottage) I was staying in. The man at reception when we checked in had told us not to go outside after the generator was turned off for the night and the lights went out, because the cape buffalo come through and graze on the grass in the lodge compound. Cape buffalo are considered to be the most dangerous animal on the savannah in terms of the danger they pose to humans. Needless to say, I was very glad when the generator came back on and the lights encouraged those big fellas to git movin’!

-While on the boat ride up the Nile to see Murchison Falls, we got very close to a male elephant that was eating on the shore. The driver turned the engine off and we watched this guy for a while. It is quite amazing to be close enough to hear the sound of his ears flapping. However, when he turned, looked us square in the eye and made a few threatening lunges in our direction, I didn’t feel the need to hang around!

-A lot of the hippos we saw had huge scars and/or open wounds on their skin. Male hippos are very territorial and they fight each other a lot; their large teeth can do a lot of damage, apparently! Also, I learned that a group of hippos is called a “school.”

-We watched a large baboon in the parking lot of the lodge we were staying in, go over to the garbage can, lift the lid and peer inside to see if there was anything interesting inside. Those animals are quite habituated, obviously!

You see and learn a lot in a couple of days while on safari and it is a truly remarkable experience to see these animals in their natural habitat. It’s a great blend of fun tinged with very real danger. That park ranger we hired as a guide? He had his gun with him in our vehicle....just in case!