When we embarked on our first sub-Saharan African safari trip in 2015, we didn't know what exactly to expect. I mean, sure, we knew we'd see some animals. Elephants, hopefully. Giraffes and lions, maybe. I don't know what else. Buffalo? Leopards? Hippos? We didn't really think too much about what we'd see in specific because at that point we hadn't seen anything ever outside of some sort of zoo. The first elephant we'd see would be the first wild elephant we'd ever seen. Same for giraffes, lions, buffalo, leopards, hippos and everything else on the entire continent of Africa. In essence, we were ready to take what we could get and we'd be perfectly happy with whatever we saw.
That changed with our second safari trip. On our 2018 vacation to Kenya and Tanzania, we had a top ten list of animals we'd never seen in the wild. I'm not sure of the exact order but (and I'm going from memory here), I believe we had leopard, rhino, zebra, painted dog, ostrich, secretary bird, cheetah, gerenuk, hyena and pangolin on the list. We saw seven of the ten and went home extremely happy, missing only the painted dog (extremely rare in Kenya and Tanzania), the gerenuk (not where we went in 2018) and the pangolin (nocturnal). Seven out of ten ain't bad as far as I'm concerned.
So fast forward to 2023 and our trip to Uganda, a trip we had scheduled for October 2020 before the world and viruses had other ideas. And OF COURSE, we had another top ten list. After all, doing it one time in 2018 meant we couldn't back off and not do it this time, right?
Here's how we fared against this year's top ten list. Spoiler alert: we didn't do quite as well as we did in 2018.
1. Mountain Gorillas
OK, OK, so this is a complete softball of sorts. I mean gorillas were the main attraction on this trip. We couldn't NOT see these primates up close and personal, could we? That's like going to see Taylor Swift and having the show end after beabadoobee and Gracie Abrams are done with their sets.
And yes, I had to look at who was opening for Taylor Swift and no, we didn't get tickets.
So of course, we did see gorillas in Uganda from feet away on foot with nothing between us and them and it was amazing. The intimacy was just all around. There was real creature to creature connection here, and by that I mean connection between human creatures and some of the nine gorillas we trekked to see. The trip delivered what it promised to deliver. Nature sometimes throws you a curveball and you don't get to see what you came to see. Fortunately, that wasn't the story on this trip. Number one checked off!
2. Chimpanzees
Yep, also a bit of a softball, here. Our chimpanzee trek in the Kibale National Park was incredible and totally unexpected in its awesomeness. No, it didn't beat seeing the gorillas in the wild from feet away but that day, I wondered how seeing gorillas could possibly be better than seeing chimpanzees.
Before we left home for Uganda, I actually didn't consider seeing chimps in the wild a slam dunk. I did actually think we could strike out (to continue the mixed sports allusions) on this walk and see absolutely nothing whatsoever. I loved this day. The intelligence and human-ness of the chimpanzees we got close to really shone through in a way watching few other species could possibly have done.
I love the picture of the chimpanzee above by the way. I see it as very Planet of the Apes like. The smarts absolutely come through loud and clear.
3. Shoebills
OK, so three for my first three. This one was not a gimme and we only saw one but we did lay eyes on one of these giant birds in person in the Mabamba Swamp. While there was absolutely a very high chance we could venture out on our shoebill day and not see a single one of these creatures, the shoebill was third on my list because we made a specific trip to see this bird. That was sort of a theme on this trip; we took three species-specific safari days, one each for gorillas, chimpanzees and shoebills. These were the top three things we targeted on this trip that we had never seen before. We got lucky and got all three.
Considering we saw maybe about seven or eight gorillas, thirty or so chimpanzees and just one shoebill, I know we had some luck on our side this day. Never feel like you are entitled to a show when nature is involved.
4. Painted Dogs
No picture on this one because quite simply, we didn't see any. No encounter, no picture. That's how this post is going to roll. Yes, this is a repeat (and a miss) from 2018.
When we first visited sub-Saharan Africa, we had no idea there was such a thing as a painted dog (sometimes called African wild dog). We saw one of those yellow, diamond-shaped road signs warning of the presence of painted dogs on our way from the Victoria Falls airport to our hotel on the first day we ever spent in sub-Saharan Africa and we actually mocked it (like...who wants to see a painted dog?). How stupid and ignorant were we back then? But legitimately, we didn't understand what these things were. Never heard of them.
Painted dogs are for sure an apex predator in Africa. They are not the same as hyenas, which sort of fill a role somewhere between hunter and scavenger on the savannah. These things are fast, intelligent, coordinated, aggressive pack hunters who relentlessly pursue their prey until they kill it. They are impressively scary. But they weren't where we went in Uganda. Nowhere close really.
That sign that we saw in Zimbabwe in 2015 was maybe not the closest we got to seeing these animals live. We actually went on two off-road wild goose chases looking for painted dogs on our way to and from Chobe National Park on that trip with neither yielding a sighting for me (although our guide claimed he'd seen some in the headlights on the night off-roading adventure).
5. Gerenuks
No gerenuk picture either on this post. A gerenuk (also on my 2018 top 10 list) is often called a giraffe-gazelle, so named because it's a gazelle with a long neck (duh...). Its neck length allows it to reach medium-hanging leaves that animals like impalas and kudus can't reach because their mouths never get to that height off the ground. If its neck weren't enough of an advantage, the gerenuk can also stand on its hind legs to get even more elevation.
Because these lists of species that I make are often emotional, I didn't check out if all the animals that made the list actually live in the places we were traveling. There are no gerenuks in Uganda. Their range is further east in eastern Kenya, eastern Ethiopia, Somalia and northeastern Tanzania. I'm definitely not putting them on any future list (if there ever is one) unless I'm in one of those spots in the future.
FYI, Somalia is not on any sort of travel list for me at all.
6. Great Blue Turacos
So from what I just wrote about gerenuks not being anywhere close to where we were headed, I may have given the impression that I pulled together this list without any research whatsoever. Not exactly true. Some of my wish list was emotional and impulsive (hence, the gerenuk and yes, rare for me, I know) but I did do a little homework ahead of time, although much of that didn't extend beyond studying the East African Birds pamphlet shown in the cover picture of this post. But that is how I found the great blue turaco.
There are not a ton of super-colorful medium to large birds in Africa, so when I saw the great blue turaco in our wildlife guides and the noticed they live in forests where we'd be heading for the first time in Africa ever, I thought there might be a chance. The great blue turaco is a bit more than two feet from head to tail when fully grown so we are not talking about a small bird here. It's brightly colored from the tip of its beak to the tip of its tail so this seemed like a bird worth looking out for.
We didn't really have to do much looking out. While we were wrapping up lunch after our chimpanzee trek, we saw five or six or these birds fly into a tree right next to the gazebo where we were eating. The lighting wasn't great. It was about high noon and the sun being almost directly overhead didn't allow me to take any pictures that weren't significantly backlit. Still...great blue turaco sighting in the books.
We did actually see a few more of these birds right after lunch when we took a stroll around the Bigodi Swamp but the lighting on that spotting was even worse than at lunch.
7. Kingfishers
I've been a little kingfisher fixated lately. We saw three different species down in Costa Rica last October and it whetted my appetite for some more sightings on this trip to Africa. I put kingfishers on the list here because I knew we'd be taking two boat rides on this vacation that might get us a look or two. It worked. We found these birds on both of those boat rides and on safari in the middle of Queen Elizabeth National Park. No shortage of kingfisher sightings on this trip. We even saw one at our hotel on Zanzibar one afternoon.
We managed to lay eyes on three different types of kingfisher in Uganda. On our trip to find shoebills in the Mabamba Swamp, we came across the black and white pied kingfishers both in the Swamp and over Lake Victoria along with the multi-colored malachite kingfishers when we arrived at the Swamp. The bird above is a woodland kingfisher that we found in the middle of Queen Elizabeth National Park nowhere near water. These birds eat fish to survive. No idea what it was doing in the middle of landscape populated almost exclusively by candelabra cacti.
According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, there are about 90 species of kingfishers distributed throughout the world. I have a lot of work to do. That also means there's a lot of places where I can find these things in the future.
8. Bee-Eaters
The place where I really fell in love with small birds, and which made me into an avid birdwatcher wherever we've been since, was Lake Manyara National Park in Tanzania. Among the many birds we saw in that Park was a carmine bee-eater. I managed to capture one sitting on a thorny branch of a tree and it's one of my favorite photographs from that trip. I thought since we saw one in Tanzania, maybe we'd be able to see some in Uganda also. We did.
Bee-eaters are little, brightly colored birds with curved beaks and a stripe that extends from their beaks to the back of their heads. They are quick and acrobatic flyers which eat (perhaps quite obviously here) bees, wasps and hornets. We only saw bee-eaters on one day on our trip but we did see two different species. The one above is (I believe) a blue-cheeked bee-eater which is generally found in northern Africa and the Middle East but which sometimes winters further south between the tropics.
Appropriately, the bee-eater above is sitting in a thorny tree. Always with the thorny trees these birds in Africa.
9. Pangolins / 10. Aardvarks
Pangolins (like painted dogs and gerenuks) were on my 2018 list so I had to carry it forward, right? I knew there was basically no chance of seeing this nocturnal anteater so I thought I'd double down and add another nocturnal anteater, the aardvark, to round out the list in the number 10 spot. Yeah...didn't see either. I mean not even close.
So...10 species. Six seen, including multiple species of kingfishers and bee-eaters. I don't think that's too bad considering this was our third safari and we've pretty much seen every animal and bird that's an obvious and well-known African species. Sure we are missing some from the list above and there are some species of some animals (notably hyenas and zebras) that we haven't yet seen, but we've covered all the big and famous stuff by now.
I see a few more safaris in our future. I'd say at least two more on mainland Africa. Maybe more. Who knows. At least something that touches South Africa in some way and maybe a trip through the Namib Desert. Those would be my top two.
When and if either of those two (or a different one) happens, I'm not sure I'm going with a top ten list of species we want to see. I think going forward I'd prefer to take a trip to find a specific species that is missing off our list and we'll take whatever else we can see while we are on that trip. So I think the next one of these we take has to target the painted dog in a serious way. That's the one species we long to see more than any other. Sure there are some experiences we'd like to see like lions finishing a hunt or a leopard carrying a dead impala or something like that up a tree but we can't guarantee those things happening even if we see those animals. Next safari trip to Africa: painted dog has to the be target.
But that's the future. For 2023...six of ten on our list seen. I'll take that.
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| Malachite kingfisher, Kazinga Channel, Uganda. |
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