More facts from Africa - 6 Sept 2008
Each day we continue to be blessed with lovely sightings... this is really turning into one of my best holidays ever. Totally memorable. Our driver, Jason, is so passionate about wildlife and so enthusiastic about the sightings too, it's just lovely to see that he never takes any of them for granted. Roy's tracking skills are amazing. These guys can read paw prints in so many ways. They can even tell you if the lion paw print is from a male or female, if it was going West or East and how long ago the lions had walked that path. I had to ask HOW can they know if the print is fresh but they said you look at the edges, if they are very defined then it's very fresh, if not, it means it has been swept away by the wind and so the lions may be long gone. They do not tag any of the animals, you have to look for them. On our own Nathalie & I would have never seen a thing. These guys train for over 2 years to understand how the animals live. It's really fascinating and they can answer pretty much any question you may have about them, which truly enriched our experience too.
We once spotted some dwarf mangoose (plural is 'mangooses', not 'mangeese') and Jason said that these little guys really look out for each other. Once he saw one being taken by an eagle and its mates just ran to the rescue and all clung onto him to add more weight so that the eagle could not lift him off the ground after that. It sounded so sweet, 'all for one and one for all'... a true case of 'united we stand, divided we fall'... it's pretty much the rules here. Most predators will try and isolate animals and look for the ones that are not part of a gang.
Sometimes Roy would get off the jeep and walk on his own for a while to try and track leopards or lions and we had to ask 'hang on, if the leopard finds Roy, will he be vulnerable with no weapon? What are the odds of him becoming the leopard's next meal?'. Strangely it seems that the big cats do not see us as food but as predators too. If one of them did eat a man and developed a taste for them, it'd become problematic and they may need to kill it before the knowledge is passed onto to fellow big cats, but so far it's not been a problem. Also, a leopard will do everything to avoid confrontation. Unlike the lionnesses that hunt together and have a wonderful support system (with one lactative female baby-sitting the cubs while the other 4 or 5 go hunting) the leopards are solitary animals and so cannot rely on anyone else to fend for them or bail them out. If they get injured, no one will get them a meal. So, they desperately try to avoid getting injured and would rather run away from confrontation than risk injury.
Hyenas have got it quite tough in a different way. They are born with very strong jaws so that they can start killing their siblings when they are born. Only the strongest pup will survive, but if for some reason 2 pups survive, the better 'bully' will have his way. Jason said it is really heart-breaking to witness a mother hyena totally ignoring the weakest pup's plea for milk, wailing endlessly, while the stronger pup bullies him into keeping away from her. She will not intervene, she will not stand up for the weak pup. She will let the strong one have its way. We saw 2 pups born from the same litter and the strong one was much much bigger than the other. Simply because he had much more milk from day 1. This constant bullying resulted in the weaker pup just feeling scared and timid and not taking many chances. He usually would only feed when the stronger pup is asleep. Then the mother will let him suckle, but only then. It's often the case in the jungle that the 'strongest & fittest' will win the day. There is NO room for weakness in their harsh world.
Even cheetah mothers will have to abondon their cubs if they cannot get them a meal regularly. If the cubs need her milk and in suckling her drain her of her energy then she won't be able to hunt as effectively. If she keeps failing to secure a meal for all of them then she will have to make a choice and will always save her life by leaving them.
And yet the bush will also give its rewards... they claim that if you put elephant dung on a stick, you can use it as a candle to light up your hut and it will last 24 hours. Better still, it will also double up as a mosquitoe repellent and if you inhale the smoke, it will cure headaches. The branches of another tree do that... I've forgotten the name of the said tree but Jason said that one day he took a lady on a game drive who then developed a nasty migraine. They didn't have tablets handy so they just followed their training and snapped branches from a particular tree they had read about that supposedly had medicinal properties. They put a mix of leaves and branches under her hat and within minutes she said her migraine was gone! Wow. Just like if you need to cut yourself to clean a wound, say, the juice of the nob farm tree is a powerful anaesthetic. But you first need to put some on your skin and rub it vigourously. As your skin heats up only then, does it numb the skin so that you can cut it and feel no pain. I didn't ask how deep the wound could be but I'm sure it's better than nothing !
They also have a 'magic warry' tree whose leaves take a lot longer than any others to burn. Branches off this tree are usually cut off whenever there is a fire in the bush and it's easier to keep it under control then (you can beat the fire with it to extinguish it). You can also wrap some chicken in its leaves and you can smoke it and cook it fine. This is a life-saving bush that anyone in the bush can recognise a mile off for its many useful properties. Strangely enough, they didn't have many acacia trees here. Well, not the classic umbrella trees that are so prominent in East Africa. They have other types of acacia trees, but none as photogenic.
Back to elephants: if they are less than a month they will fit under their mother's belly, if over, they won't. There have been some sightings recently of up to 20 lions attacking an elephant ; they didn't use to, but it seems that they are evolving into taking more chances, but realise they can only bring an elephant down (who can weigh up to 6 tons I believe, 3.5 for females) if they double their numbers. Hence they usually go for an elephant calf, as they 'only' weigh 120 kgs at birth. They had 13,000 elephants in 2000 in Kruger, but 7,500-8,000 would be the better number to sustain them all properly and to minimise damage. The park is talking with WWF and other elephants foundations to see how they can move some of them across to other parks. Or look at sterelisation or contraception. In worse case scenario they'll need to cull them as there are too many. Elephants spend 18 hours a day eating, so.... that's a LOT of trees damaged (they will push them over to eat the roots giving them no chances to grow back).
I also was wondering why lions don't pur when most of the big cats do but Jason said it's because their vocal box is different, it's geared for deeper sounds so that it can warn other lions that they are approaching their territories. Only 35% of lion cubs survive their first year (as they are inquisitive they can equally be killed by puff aders, not just rival males). In the bush the old adage 'curiosity killed the cat' has never rung truer, sadly. If they make it, their chances will double to 70% for their 2nd year.
In November-December it's the season that impalas breed and there are babies all over Kruger... they have to learn to clean up the blood real fast after they give birth as they know a hyena can smell blood up to 4kms away.
One evening we spotted a bush-baby up a tree. They are a cross between possoms and koalas almost. They can visit up to 1,500 trees per night (they are exclusively nocturnal) and have so many cone receptors in their eyes that they cannot move their eye balls ! So, to make up for it nature gave them a head that rotates 270 degrees. Very much like owls (whose eye sight is 9 times better than ours).
I did wonder where the term 'big 5' came from and why these five (elephants / rhino / buffalo / lion and leopard - not hippo as I wrongly mentioned earlier). It's because these were the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt on foot basically.
Even the names of animals may sound very English to us by now but the vast majority actually come from other languages. Cheetah is hindu and means 'spotted one', giraffe is arabic and means 'walks swiftly', zebra is portuguese and elephant is greek. Who would have thought! And 'safari' is shawili for 'journey'...,.
Each day we continue to be blessed with lovely sightings... this is really turning into one of my best holidays ever. Totally memorable. Our driver, Jason, is so passionate about wildlife and so enthusiastic about the sightings too, it's just lovely to see that he never takes any of them for granted. Roy's tracking skills are amazing. These guys can read paw prints in so many ways. They can even tell you if the lion paw print is from a male or female, if it was going West or East and how long ago the lions had walked that path. I had to ask HOW can they know if the print is fresh but they said you look at the edges, if they are very defined then it's very fresh, if not, it means it has been swept away by the wind and so the lions may be long gone. They do not tag any of the animals, you have to look for them. On our own Nathalie & I would have never seen a thing. These guys train for over 2 years to understand how the animals live. It's really fascinating and they can answer pretty much any question you may have about them, which truly enriched our experience too.
We once spotted some dwarf mangoose (plural is 'mangooses', not 'mangeese') and Jason said that these little guys really look out for each other. Once he saw one being taken by an eagle and its mates just ran to the rescue and all clung onto him to add more weight so that the eagle could not lift him off the ground after that. It sounded so sweet, 'all for one and one for all'... a true case of 'united we stand, divided we fall'... it's pretty much the rules here. Most predators will try and isolate animals and look for the ones that are not part of a gang.
Sometimes Roy would get off the jeep and walk on his own for a while to try and track leopards or lions and we had to ask 'hang on, if the leopard finds Roy, will he be vulnerable with no weapon? What are the odds of him becoming the leopard's next meal?'. Strangely it seems that the big cats do not see us as food but as predators too. If one of them did eat a man and developed a taste for them, it'd become problematic and they may need to kill it before the knowledge is passed onto to fellow big cats, but so far it's not been a problem. Also, a leopard will do everything to avoid confrontation. Unlike the lionnesses that hunt together and have a wonderful support system (with one lactative female baby-sitting the cubs while the other 4 or 5 go hunting) the leopards are solitary animals and so cannot rely on anyone else to fend for them or bail them out. If they get injured, no one will get them a meal. So, they desperately try to avoid getting injured and would rather run away from confrontation than risk injury.
Hyenas have got it quite tough in a different way. They are born with very strong jaws so that they can start killing their siblings when they are born. Only the strongest pup will survive, but if for some reason 2 pups survive, the better 'bully' will have his way. Jason said it is really heart-breaking to witness a mother hyena totally ignoring the weakest pup's plea for milk, wailing endlessly, while the stronger pup bullies him into keeping away from her. She will not intervene, she will not stand up for the weak pup. She will let the strong one have its way. We saw 2 pups born from the same litter and the strong one was much much bigger than the other. Simply because he had much more milk from day 1. This constant bullying resulted in the weaker pup just feeling scared and timid and not taking many chances. He usually would only feed when the stronger pup is asleep. Then the mother will let him suckle, but only then. It's often the case in the jungle that the 'strongest & fittest' will win the day. There is NO room for weakness in their harsh world.
Even cheetah mothers will have to abondon their cubs if they cannot get them a meal regularly. If the cubs need her milk and in suckling her drain her of her energy then she won't be able to hunt as effectively. If she keeps failing to secure a meal for all of them then she will have to make a choice and will always save her life by leaving them.
And yet the bush will also give its rewards... they claim that if you put elephant dung on a stick, you can use it as a candle to light up your hut and it will last 24 hours. Better still, it will also double up as a mosquitoe repellent and if you inhale the smoke, it will cure headaches. The branches of another tree do that... I've forgotten the name of the said tree but Jason said that one day he took a lady on a game drive who then developed a nasty migraine. They didn't have tablets handy so they just followed their training and snapped branches from a particular tree they had read about that supposedly had medicinal properties. They put a mix of leaves and branches under her hat and within minutes she said her migraine was gone! Wow. Just like if you need to cut yourself to clean a wound, say, the juice of the nob farm tree is a powerful anaesthetic. But you first need to put some on your skin and rub it vigourously. As your skin heats up only then, does it numb the skin so that you can cut it and feel no pain. I didn't ask how deep the wound could be but I'm sure it's better than nothing !
They also have a 'magic warry' tree whose leaves take a lot longer than any others to burn. Branches off this tree are usually cut off whenever there is a fire in the bush and it's easier to keep it under control then (you can beat the fire with it to extinguish it). You can also wrap some chicken in its leaves and you can smoke it and cook it fine. This is a life-saving bush that anyone in the bush can recognise a mile off for its many useful properties. Strangely enough, they didn't have many acacia trees here. Well, not the classic umbrella trees that are so prominent in East Africa. They have other types of acacia trees, but none as photogenic.
Back to elephants: if they are less than a month they will fit under their mother's belly, if over, they won't. There have been some sightings recently of up to 20 lions attacking an elephant ; they didn't use to, but it seems that they are evolving into taking more chances, but realise they can only bring an elephant down (who can weigh up to 6 tons I believe, 3.5 for females) if they double their numbers. Hence they usually go for an elephant calf, as they 'only' weigh 120 kgs at birth. They had 13,000 elephants in 2000 in Kruger, but 7,500-8,000 would be the better number to sustain them all properly and to minimise damage. The park is talking with WWF and other elephants foundations to see how they can move some of them across to other parks. Or look at sterelisation or contraception. In worse case scenario they'll need to cull them as there are too many. Elephants spend 18 hours a day eating, so.... that's a LOT of trees damaged (they will push them over to eat the roots giving them no chances to grow back).
I also was wondering why lions don't pur when most of the big cats do but Jason said it's because their vocal box is different, it's geared for deeper sounds so that it can warn other lions that they are approaching their territories. Only 35% of lion cubs survive their first year (as they are inquisitive they can equally be killed by puff aders, not just rival males). In the bush the old adage 'curiosity killed the cat' has never rung truer, sadly. If they make it, their chances will double to 70% for their 2nd year.
In November-December it's the season that impalas breed and there are babies all over Kruger... they have to learn to clean up the blood real fast after they give birth as they know a hyena can smell blood up to 4kms away.
One evening we spotted a bush-baby up a tree. They are a cross between possoms and koalas almost. They can visit up to 1,500 trees per night (they are exclusively nocturnal) and have so many cone receptors in their eyes that they cannot move their eye balls ! So, to make up for it nature gave them a head that rotates 270 degrees. Very much like owls (whose eye sight is 9 times better than ours).
I did wonder where the term 'big 5' came from and why these five (elephants / rhino / buffalo / lion and leopard - not hippo as I wrongly mentioned earlier). It's because these were the 5 most dangerous animals to hunt on foot basically.
Even the names of animals may sound very English to us by now but the vast majority actually come from other languages. Cheetah is hindu and means 'spotted one', giraffe is arabic and means 'walks swiftly', zebra is portuguese and elephant is greek. Who would have thought! And 'safari' is shawili for 'journey'...,.
posted by Sylvie at 12:16 PM
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