The Savuti river used to flow strongly here, but a few years ago there was a major earthquake here, and the river stopped flowing, its waters redirected elsewhere in the delta.  Now it is dry and the occasional waterhole supports a dwindling population of various ungulates, and predators.  This young male Roan Antelope (Hippotragus equinus) seems to be commenting on how tasty the water really is.  He must be less than 2.5 years old as he is still running with the herd.  After this age these males get driven out of their natal herd by the single dominant male.



Their primary predator is the Lion (Panthera leo), and this large male was the only lion we saw all 3 weeks.  He was just under a mile from our campsite when we spotted him, and headed right for it.  Later we heard grunts and low vocalisation all through the early evening.  He certainly wasn't alone.  In the morning we found lion spoor crossing the edge of our campsite not 200 yards from the vehicles.  Needless to say none of us moved from the tents on the top of the vehicles all night.



During the hot hours from 12 noon to 3 pm it is pretty much advisable to stay in the campsite, as most sensible wildlife uses that time to siesta too.  However, if you are like me, it is very hard to sleep when there are other things to photograph, so the small mammals around the campsite get their moment of glory, and are immortalised on film (well at least digitally).  These two Egyptian Mongooses (Herpestes ichneumon) were exceedingly shy, but after I had been sitting watching them for 2 hours, they began to get trusting and let me take a few shot of their foraging (for beetles and grubs mostly).



While I was photographing the smaller mammals, I joined my fellow explorers in the comfortable camp chairs as they were meditating (or something like that with strange ZZZZ zzzzz sounds) and managed to get a very carefully composed self portrait, complete with appropriate backdrop.



Just then a troupe of baboons (Papio ursinus) strolled past our campsite, following the precise route the lions did during the night.  This little fellow was obviously exhausted by the heat of the day, and was seriously comfortable on Mom's (or maybe Aunty's) back.



Then to round off the game visiting our campsite, rather than us having to go looking for them, this elephant bull decided to visit.  Ross and Casey spotted him slowly approaching, but he didn't come closer than the 40 yards he was at in this photo.  The elephant regularly wander through the campsites, and one camper nearby complained that he had been woken up by the noise of the air moving up and down an elephant's trunk outside their tent.



Since the river had dried up, the elephants have been getting rather obnoxious about knocking down the ablution block to get at the piped water, and even knocked down the big gravity holding tank several times to get at the water.  Recently the Botswana government funded rebuilding these facilities, and now, as can be seen below, the ablution facilities and water tank are surrounded by a 3 meter concrete wall shored up by tons of earth, with just a person sized entrance between the concrete fortifications.  So far they have not been able to breech this.



Once again we come to end of an eventful day, this time with the campsite being more exciting than the rest of the surrounding game reserve by far.



Maybe we are starting to get into the real wilderness.  Tomorrow we head on to the Chobe river and Ihaha, which was to become my favourite part of Africa. (and those of you who know me, know that I've seen and lived in quite a few).

[Complete Safari and wildlife photo index]
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Permalink | Posted by: Ian at Thursday, September 16th, 2004 22:00:00 | Location: Savuti, Botswana | Category:  Botswana Safari 

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