Despite the world economy crisis and an Icelandic ash cloud of late, we have all been quite busy here in our nature paradise!
In my last Newsletter I left you wishing the wild dogs good hunting. Almost three weeks went by before they were seen again, once behind Twin Hills and once near the main road before the big Olduvai crossing.
Mid April our guide Hamisi on a game drive found them and was lucky enough to see them hunting and killing a young wildebeest near Twin Hills….What a treat, I saw the photographs with a kill amidst flowers and very happy guests, so enthusiastic to witness this!
To my knowledge they haven’t been seen again since, but as there is plenty of food around I am sure they are all right at the moment wherever they are roaming…
Birds come foremost to mind when I think of the past period; as I mentioned in my previous letter, we had thousands of European storks in January, February and part of March feeding on the plains and roosting every night in Ndutu Lake.
This was followed by unusual large numbers of white Cattle Egrets gathering every evening on top of the Sueda bushes at the northern end of Lake Masek. Due to the good rainfall this year (early March had one 90 mm overnight rainfall), the lake has filled up again and flooded these bushes and this in turn provides ideal and safe overnight ‘housing’ for these elegant white birds.
Not easy to photograph, they fly home in the last light to their roosting spot with a speed that is quite deceptive…. Numbers vary from a few to 40-50 birds in one go and often low over the water, the soft ‘whooshing’ sound of their wings telling you they are overhead and gone: too late for the photograph!!
In the very early morning one needed to be there on time for their departure. Pending birds of prey or other disturbances, the egrets flew off in several huge clouds, like snow flakes in the sky and were generally all gone by 07.30 hrs. Their destinations were the surrounding plains where wildebeest and zebra helped to disturb and flush the insects they feed on. It was a truly impressive sight, which lasted over a month.
Then at this time of the year there are the many flocks of Wattled Starlings congregating. These busybody birds are suddenly heard everywhere, rather frantically feeding in groups with the males starting to show their yellow gape wattle to impress the ladies!
Closer to home and after a period of almost one year suddenly the hornbill couple has returned to my veranda and now visit daily! I wonder when they will start a family, having last year successfully raised one male chick! So far the male Ludovic is working himself up to a frenzy again and attacking my front window, whilst female Leonie just sits and watches him from the bush opposite the window! They are absolute experts in catching biscuit crumbs, right in front of the gathering Rufous tailed weavers!
It is nice to have them back on the homestead, though the force of Ludovic’s beak against the glass sometimes wakes me from an afternoon nap!
There have been changes in the lion prides around Ndutu, with the Marsh lions moving further south and east. It would appear that they are now in the area between Twin Hills and the Makao track, although the picture is not yet quite “clear”. Meanwhile both our guides Hamisi and Marando are familiarising themselves with sets of lion cards that Ingela from the Serengeti Lion Project has brought out recently. With some instructions we hopefully will be able to keep better track of the Ndutu prides. The Masek pride is no longer a coherent unit. There are three Masek females seen regularly near the lake along leopard korongo and one of these has three young cubs.
New males apparently are also roaming around and maybe soon “the” lions will settle down to some sort of recognizable units again!
As the vegetation is high at the moment, the cheetah sightings have been a bit sparse. We were very lucky a few days ago when we went out with some drinks late afternoon with friends to find four cheetahs walking from Hugo’s korongo towards the Ndutu lake edge. First they settled near the corner, and then all walked the length of the shoreline towards the causeway. The pale evening light just touched these beautiful creatures, and after watching them for half an hour we left them to disappear in the approaching darkness whilst we quickly still managed our sun-downer!
The Caracal living at the causeway was seen quite a few times and I came upon one right near the Ndutu Ranger Post one late afternoon. These medium-sized cats are not seen very often and you are so lucky if you have a chance to observe them.
The beautiful brown-red skin colour and contrasting white belly, the thick short tail and those magnificent long ear tufts take your breath away!
Solitary and a bit secretive, there is not much known about their behaviour in the wild, although studies have been done or are in progress, I think. Here over the years I have mostly seen caracal with guinea fowl as prey, but they will also catch birds up to the size of storks. I would not put it past them to have feasted on some of these while the going was plentiful at the lake by the left-over feathers on the shore here and there of late! Caracals catch rodents and have been seen to take prey up to the size of small fawns too. It’s built is sturdier than the serval, which is by nature more shy and takes smaller-sized prey.
Hardly an elephant has visited the Lodge during the past two months, but two small groups have been seen not too far away, between here and Twin Hills and at the Big marsh; food is plentiful at the moment and I expect we will see more of them later in the year!
In this part of Tanzania we were woken up in the middle of the night on April 8th with beds shaking and houses creaking, as an earthquake shook the land, 4.9 in the Richter scale. Epicentre was near Mbulu and sadly there was loss of life and damage to houses too. Here at the Lodge, more accumulated and all too familiar cement cracks reappeared!!
We have had some extraordinary clear night skies after the rains, and the coming period is my favourite time of the night, with Orion slowly sinking in the west, the Southern Cross rising higher and higher all the time, and beautiful Scorpion visible early evening in the east. Venus is very bright in the western evening sky, disappearing often between the Acacias a few hours after sunset. Sitting around our campfire early evening, the number of satellites one can see circumventing earth in various directions are so many. The ISS (International Space Station) regularly zooms past and over and it is still difficult to imagine there are six human beings travelling at such breathtaking speed and watching sunrises and sunsets across all our continents!
It has been a most wonderful year for rain, and not only did this fill up our drink water tanks, but both lakes and consequently more vegetation everywhere.
Just imagine we have had three heavy rainstorms up till nearly mid-May, which
Late April and May is the time of golden waving grasses, with flowers everywhere. The strikingly purple and yellow Hibiscus and several species of the yellow variant, red and white are all in full bloom; the tall, red Leanotis grows all around the Lodge these days and together with the flowering Aloes attracts many sunbirds right now.
The Serengeti is so beautiful at this time of the year, especially the scenery!
The flowers bring the bees and each year again there are bee swarms passing by, sometimes settling for a day or so hanging like a large dark brown sack on the branches of a tree. The other day I could hardly return to my house as right next to the front door a bee swarm had decided to settle! Samson, our staff bee expert told me not to worry: “they are just resting” and “will leave when the hot afternoon sun gets to be too much”, and sure enough I could calmly walk past and the swarm did fly off later in the day!
The large wildebeest herds have left the short grass plains, and due to these late good rainstorms, are moving back and forth – I am told – between just north of Seronera, the Moru area and Simba Kopjes.
There are large zebra groups around at the moment, and plenty of eland especially along the Makao plains, groups up to 80 – 100 animals are regularly seen!
Elegant dikdik nibble away at most of what I have planted near the rooms and in the woodlands you will find steinbuck, families of bat-eared foxes, jackals, an occasional striped hyena, ….plenty of animals to enjoy right now. Together with the resident six species of East African cats, one cannot complain at all!
Lastly, ending this newsletter on a different note, as I drove into Ndutu a few days ago, I was greeted by this lost wildebeest calf standing near the entrance of the Lodge…contrary to usual ‘orphan’ gnu behaviour, it valiantly looked at the car, ran off to the side and once I had quietly passed by, moved back to the track. Let’s hope it’s courage and stamina will see it through to adulthood, in the past I have seen that happen and I keep my fingers crossed it eventually caught up with some of the last herds leaving the Ndutu woodlands for those greener pastures north!
Aadje,
late May 2010
