Elephants

Most people seeking some up close and personal wildlife viewing in the area of the world where Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia come together at a single point are there to see African elephants. After all, the area within and around the Chobe National Park in northeast Botswana serves as the habitat for about 25% of the planet's population of these animals. According to the World Wildlife Fund, the global African elephant population is about 470,000. The Botswana Department of Wildlife and Parks claims 120,000 of them live within the vicinity of the Chobe National Park. In late August of this year, I made my own trip to that part of the planet to see what I could find.

Despite the numbers in our favor, which I knew pretty well ahead of setting out for Africa, I was hoping I'd see at least one elephant. Just one. That's all I needed. It was for sure keeping my expectations low so I thought I wouldn't be disappointed, similar to me hoping to see at least one bison in Yellowstone National Park four years ago and at least one alligator when I visited Florida's Everglades National Park last year. In Yellowstone we saw tons and tons of bison, and alligators were all over the place in the Everglades. I really hoped my low expectations bar would be greatly exceeded this time too.

It was. No surprise there. We saw our first elephant crossing the Zambezi on a sunset cruise on our second day on the continent and we couldn't have been more excited. Now, I know these animals are big, bigger in fact than any other land animal today, but it walked through the river as if the current wasn't even there. I wasn't prepared to see that kind of strength in an act so simple as walking. These things are really really powerful.

Our sightings didn't stop there. The next day we were sitting at our lunch table on the houseboat that we called home for the middle two nights of our trip and happened to look towards the bow and saw what to us seemed like an astonishing number of elephants. They stretched as far as our eyes could see. It was like that scene in Jurassic Park when Alan Grant first sees the dinosaurs that have been recreated by the park's scientists. There were herds upon herds of animals. And this was the start of the really good part of our trip.

From our lunchtime look forward to the last morning game drive we took in the Chobe National Park, we saw lots and lots of elephants everywhere. We saw them in the water, in the bush and on the grassy islands that appear in the middle of the Chobe River during the dry months. We saw them from big boats, small boats, trucks, the front porch of our tent at the Elephant Valley Lodge and our dinner table at that same property. We watched them walk, swim, eat, drink, growl at each other, squabble, give themselves dust baths, flap their ears and protect and nurture each other. We learned more about elephants in our six days in Africa just from watching and listening to them than I could have ever imagined.

I like to think that I've seen a lot of elephants in zoos in my life and that I would know a thing or two about them, but there's nothing like sitting on a 15 or so foot boat with the motor killed floating just off shore near a herd of elephants to make you pay attention to detail like you never have before. It's so quiet on the river and these animals are so accepting of our presence (while also being wary of us) so you can get super close and look and listen.

We spent about 20 minutes on our first day on the Chobe River watching a herd eat. They methodically pulled the grass out of the Earth, gently but firmly shook all the soil from the roots and then ate. And repeated. Over and over again. The next day we spent about the same amount of time watching and listening to an enormous group drink from the river just before sunset. All the elephants large and small did the same thing (although the smallest were admittedly learning), slurping water up their trunks and then opening their mouths and squirting the water from their trunks down their throats. It was amazing to hear all that in the calm of the late afternoon.

We got lucky on the timing with our family of drinking elephants. We pulled up just as they made their way to the riverbank and stayed until they retreated into the bush. My use of the word family is not an accident. These elephants arrived and left as a unit following the matriarch as a herd. In fact, every herd of elephants we saw go anywhere traveled as a group. Sometimes there would be a lone male along the riverside seeming to protect the herd's flank (in fact I think that's exactly what it was doing) but for sure all the elephants we saw traveled in families.

And just like families, the dynamic within the herd was fascinating, especially around the watering hole near our last stop in Botswana at dinner under the illumination of a floodlight attached to a tree. We were there two nights and, judging by the distinctive tusks of a couple of the bulls, saw the same animals both nights. They visited our watering hole to drink the fresh water from the underground water line the Lodge had installed and to eat the seed pods of the nearby camel thorn trees which elephants apparently love.

Each night the drama played out the same way. The dominant bull and the babies generally received preferential spots at the water before the male moved on to pinch as many of the seedpods as possible, just picking up one after another and popping them in his mouth. Next up were the female elephants who were allowed to drink under the watchful eye of the bull. Each herd we watched had several younger males and every so often they would receive warning growls from deep in the belly of the bull or if they got really too cheeky they would get a nudge, poke or shove. Some of these seemed like legitimate tests of authority and some challenges were punished. Most of the discipline came not through violence but through what appeared to us to be a self imposed "time out" from the challenger, usually turning his back on the herd and remaining there stationary for a few minutes before turning and re-joining the herd. I could have stayed up all night to watch this sort of show if it weren't for the 5:30 a.m. game drive the next morning.

Finally, since I mentioned zoos earlier in this post, I can't finish my story of Africa without an appeal that surely won't be heeded anytime soon. From the first time we saw a herd of elephants moving deliberately but swiftly over the grassland in Namibia to the moment we watched the final departure of a herd at the watering hole, two things were obvious to me about elephants that will not allow me to ever enjoy seeing these animals in captivity again.

First, it seems to me that it is impossible to capture enough land in a zoo or small park to ever duplicate an elephant's natural environment, let alone a whole herd. Without sitting there and watching, you can't imagine how much territory these animals cover in a short period of time. They need vast tracts of open grassland to move through, not small pens or enclosures of an acre or two or four or slightly more. They need thousands of acres. Like miles and miles and miles of land to walk.

Second, most zoos I have visited have two or maybe three elephants. If you get lucky, perhaps there's a baby. And who doesn't like baby elephants? But a family of elephants this will never be. Elephant herds are complex societies and the individual members each play a role in the herd's dynamic. I can't remember any group of elephants we saw that was smaller than 12 or 15 animals and I can't imagine seeing a couple or three in captivity without feeling sadness for the animals. I wouldn't want to be forcibly removed from my family, why do we continue to do this to these creatures?

I get that zoos have played important roles in allowing people to see different species of animals from all over the world and some have been critically important in protecting species that would otherwise be extinct. But there is absolutely no reason on Earth from what I can see that African elephants need to be confined anywhere in the world. There are thousands of them roaming free in Botswana and that's where they really belong. Only in these open spaces in complex family groups can they really be free. I know it's incredibly selfish for me to write these words since I was lucky enough to travel all the way to Africa to see them in person, but after spending four plus days in and around these creatures I can't imagine them anywhere else. I feel so privileged to have been able to see them and I hope I will again.

Chobe Riverbank Trees

Last month, I took a trip to Africa to see Victoria Falls and the animals I came to love from visiting zoos as a kid in England. OK, so maybe Vic Falls was a detour to someplace that I couldn't miss since I was in the neighborhood; it was mostly about the animals. And I was not disappointed. I got to see a ton of them over the six days we spent in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and Botswana. It changed my perspective on so many things, and not just about the creatures we saw there. I couldn't have been happier with my latest trip of a lifetime.

We saw wildlife last month from hotel room balconies, front porches of tents and decks of houseboats in addition to passing them a few feet away in the streets of Victoria Falls. But the best up close and almost personal game viewing came from either the back of a modified souped up pickup truck (it really was so much more than that…) or a small 12 to 15 foot long boat equipped with an outboard motor and a cooler of water, sodas and plenty of Tafel beer. It was our time in the small boat that was perhaps the most rewarding of the six days we spent on the dark continent. 

We were in a small boat on a river because we spent our third and fourth nights in Africa on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats cruising up and down the Chobe River which defines the border between Namibia and Botswana. One of the perks of staying in the four cabin houseboat is the exclusive use of one of the tender boats tugged behind the big boat which you and your pilot (David, in our case) could take out a couple or three times in a day to get a close up look at elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and whatever else happened to be on the banks of the river. Not hippos though. We kept our distance there.

Our first trips on the tender boat were all about getting to see the largest possible mammals we could find. Get me to some elephants (check), giraffes (check) and hippos (check and run). We had no time or patience for birds (we can see birds at home), baboons (saw them in Victoria Falls) or anything else. Get us to the good stuff. And David did. We spent some incredible time watching families of elephants graze and some nervous seconds fleeing from a chasing adult male hippopotamus. 

The time we spent on the small boat was so precious and such a luxury. And thankfully we got a lot of it. After our first two hours on day one, we spent over six hours on three separate excursions the next day in addition to a quick journey the day we left the houseboat behind. We were lucky to spend so much time right on the surface of the water and close to the riverbank that we started to appreciate more than just the large mammals and reptiles that we traveled for longer than a day to reach.

By the third tender boat trip on day two, we wanted to find kingfishers in the reeds near the water's edge and African jacanas (or Jesus birds) walking on the lily pads that floated near the shore. We also sought out monitor lizards and vervet monkeys and kudu and puku and spoonbills and vultures. And in that time, I started to look at other living things on the riverbanks like the trees. And I realized that the trees there are absolutely incredible.

A family of kudu and a couple of baboons by the edge of the Chobe River.

We visited southern Africa in the fourth month of five straight without rain. The water we traveled on was therefore really low; so low in fact that a lot of the land we cruised by and watched wildlife standing on would be covered by water during the height of the rainy season. And not just by a bit. the water level in the Chobe River was a good six feet lower when we were there than it would be a few months later.

The banks of the Chobe are made up of a thin layer of soil covering a base layer of hard basalt rock and the trees that grow there use the soil and the water in the soil to grow large. When fully grown, the trees there are 50 feet or more high and provide shelter and habitat for the animals that live on and drink by the shore of the river. But each time the river rises, it washes away some of the soil that covers the layer of rock that is invisible beneath the bank of the river and it takes away what is sustaining these ancient trees on the edge of the river. 

Eventually, the trees nearest the bank of the river are stripped of what gave them their existence, their roots are fully exposed and they are left clinging to the basalt underlayment for dear life. When you cruise by the trees on the shore you can see their desperate struggle to stay upright. They are literally grasping at everything they can hold onto. Eventually, the beautiful scene of these decades old majestic trees is going to come to a tragic end. They collapse and end up providing a new habitat for monkeys and reptiles at the river's edge. Ultimately nothing in Africa is wasted. I found these trees just fantastic to look at. I hope someone reading this post will also and maybe appreciate them on a trip of their own in the future.

This tree eventually lost its battle to survive...

and provided a sunning spot for a Nile crocodile.

Beware The Hippos!

One week ago today, I traveled out of Zimbabwe, through Botswana for about 30 minutes and into Namibia, where I would be spending the next two nights on one of the Ichobezi Safariboats on the Chobe River in southern Africa. After a few hours cruising upriver on the big houseboat and a couple of hours in a three-person tender boat (each cabin on the boat got exclusive use of a smaller or tender boat for wildlife viewing) getting a closer look at some of the animals I had come to the dark continent to see, it was time to relax a bit before dinner. And right at that time, I could think of no better place to sit, watch and listen than on the Chobe, which separates Namibia to the north from Botswana to the south.

Our boat and hotel in one was anchored to a small sand and grass island in the middle of the river, technically on Namibian soil, and we were feeling very much alone in the middle of nowhere, probably because that's exactly what we were. The four crew members who were taking care of us were conspicuously out of sight preparing dinner for us and the other three cabins on the boat were empty for the first night of our stay. It was just what I could have wished for on this vacation. Utter isolation. It wouldn't feel quite like this any other night of our trip.

At about 7:15 p.m., just 45 minutes or so after sunset, there was no trace whatsoever of sunlight which added to the feeling of remoteness. It was an amazing scene. There were more stars visible that night than I can recall seeing in a long time, highlighted by the Southern Cross, which is a sight I had never witnessed in my life. Despite the darkness, the brightly lit half moon allowed us to see shapes and masses in the night. Or at least I think it did. The darkness played tricks on our eyes but we believe we could make out dark things moving and bobbing in the river. And the dark things we think we saw were very large.

If our eyes weren't much good to us that night, our ears took in way more. Over an inconsistent background noise of a few unknown bird calls every now and then, there were other sounds in the night that had our imaginations running wild. Most frequent among these noises were minor to fairly serious splashes and the sound of breathing out so heavy that it kicked up water from the surface of the river, not unlike a whale surfacing and exhaling before diving again. But the more sinister sounds were what had our minds racing: low growls reminiscent of a bear and loud grunts that can only be described as a tenor pig (heavy on the bass) with an ape's intonation (ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh). The noises were coming from hippos in the water, which happened to be the same very large dark things we think we could make out in the night.

Of all the animals I hoped I would see in the wild in Africa, I was most looking forward to getting a closer look at some hippos. I'm fascinated by the large African mammals in general but the hippopotamus, which is so ungainly looking on land and so deceptively fast in the water, is my favorite. After dinner that first night on the boat, we retreated again to the rear deck of the houseboat to continue staring almost uselessly into the dark while listening to these beasts, hoping they might come ashore so we could see them better in the light emanating from our anchored ship. At about 9 p.m. we believe one did get out of the water and onto our island followed by a second but it appeared to us that the first chased the second right back into the river and things got quieter from there on. We went to bed, hoping that in the morning we'd get up and see four or five hippos grazing before us in the early morning light. We were disappointed. But not for long.

Hippo heads on the Zambezi River.

I came to Africa knowing that the most dangerous animal on the continent for humans is the hippo. These things kill more people each year than any other creature. More than lions, leopards, cheetahs and some of the other predators that you find on the continent by far. Some of this is based on human ignorance. Big cats are quick; have big teeth and claws; and are scary; hippos look happy, fat and slow; eat grass; and can be rationalized as decidedly unscary. But the hippopotamus in the water is a very dangerous animal and it's here where they do their damage. They are very territorial and will chase and attack boats, sometimes biting with their tusk like canines and sometimes capsizing the vessels. And if you don't expect that, I imagine it would be very easy to get killed by one of these things.

With that knowledge, the idea of cruising about a river in a tiny tiny boat with some hippos at large was a bit unnerving. My imaginings had us and a pilot swerving about on a very narrow waterway avoiding the piles and piles of hippos that were popping up all around our extremely fragile vessel. My only solace was that people do this all the time and you don't hear a lot of stories about hippos killing tourists. Maybe our guides would know what they were doing. The river, as it turned out, was a lot bigger than I expected. That helped a lot.

Maybe I scared myself to death before even getting on the water, but my first couple of encounters with hippos in the wild were very different than my preconceived notion that these things were menaces. On our last night in Zimbabwe, we had seen our first pods of hippos from the deck of a 35 foot long, 12 section hull boat on the Zambezi River. While we were told at the beginning of our cruise that the hull design would allow us to survive a hippo attack without sinking, it almost seemed like that warning was a joke. All the hippos we saw that evening stayed far from the boat and didn't show the slightest interest in having anything to do with us.

Our second hippo encounter was similarly uneventful. We had spotted a lone animal grazing on the north bank of the Chobe from our houseboat while motoring upriver and made a beeline for the thing when we launched on our first tender boat ride. Instead of seeming threatening, the hippo simply slid gently into the water, submerged and was gone before we could get close enough for a good picture. No aggression. No attack. No nothing. Maybe these things weren't that frightening and fierce after all.

Hippos near the shore of the Chobe River; the big one looking at you is NOT a good sign.

But by the end of that first tender boat ride the night we were alone on deck, I could very firmly believe that I would never want to get super close to an adult male hippo on the water in a very small boat. Because I had. And it didn't feel good.

First, they made our pilot visibly nervous. Don't get me wrong here, I believe we were never in real danger with David driving our boat, but he didn't like hippos at all. Our boat rides with David allowed us to get super close to elephants, Cape buffalo, crocodiles and all sorts of other creatures and to maximize the experience with these animals we cut the engine when near the shore I guess to allow us to hear the creatures and make them feel more secure. We were checking out a crocodile from about three feet away that first day when we heard a grunt from the water behind us. Before I could turn around and ask David "was that a hippo?" he had already started the engine and was backing up to move on. We never cut the engine around hippos. Never.

Second, we got charged by one as we were heading back to the big boat that night which made the sounds we would hear later so much more threatening. Most of the hippo groups we encountered behaved exactly the same way. During the day, they generally stick close to the shore in a family group: one adult male, a couple of females and maybe a younger calf or two. The male keeps the territory safe and the females keep the babies safe. So if you are cruising by in a boat, you get watched by a very concerned male hippo.

While he's watching you, he may grunt, snort and show you how big he is by raising his body and head out of the water. If that's not enough to scare you away, (and let's face it, we were there to see these things, not run from them) they will charge. And when they charge, they dive so you can't see them for a couple of seconds and they are fast. Like really fast. If you ever want to experience the full force of nature, sit in a small boat with a 3,000 pound plus male hippo rushing at you. I guarantee you won't want to stick around and see what happens. These things are powerful and scary and we fled. Later that week, I'd sit in an open vehicle about ten feet from a lion in the wild and wouldn't be as concerned as seeing a hippo chasing after our boat. Not even close. And that's still super weird to me.

Despite that harrowing experience, we were out the next morning in the small boat again and again we couldn't keep our distance from these things. So that meant more chasing, one similar to the night before where a single male shooed us away with a threat of violence and another where the group of five hippos spread out across the river and kept coming even as we tried to run and stop to look at other animals. I don't think it's paranoia when I suggest that those hippos were determined to chase us until we got far enough away to be tolerable to them. Eventually we did and we got a look at some other things.

A crash of hippos abandoning the shore for the safer waters.

As if all that hippos charging wasn't enough to make me never want to get in a small boat around these things ever again, our last tender boat ride sealed the deal for me in what I now refer to as the first of three "scare the tourists" moments that we had in Africa. Although in reality all of these occurrences were absolutely real and could have been really really scary.

It was early morning after our last night on the houseboat and we were determined to get another small boat ride in to get one last look at things from the river. Our focus that morning was on the shore, looking for leopards (that we never saw) and other creatures that were out just after sunrise. Things were especially slow that morning so not finding anything upriver we decided to pass by the houseboat and check out what was out early in the morning downriver. We had just passed the boat when we stopped dead in the water.

After five trips with David, we generally understood this type of abrupt stop to mean there was something close by worth looking at. But this stop was in the middle of the river where there was never anything interesting to see. We looked back and watched as David struggled to re-start the engine, fiddling with the levers (yes, that's a technical term) and tapping the gas can in a way that it looked like he was trying to coax fuel to magically appear and take us onward. And then we heard the hippo grunt. And while it was not visible to us, it sounded awfully close.

The next 15 seconds or however long it was seemed like a pretty long time as we watched David trying to get our engine re-started and we imagined a hippo in full on rush destroying our boat and then coming after us. And while that seems farfetched, it's really not. If we had been in its protected territory and it would have been close enough, there would have been a distinct possibility of that happening.

Eventually (and I'm sure it was not more than 15 seconds), the engine kicked in and we got moving again. But rather than heading upriver back to the boat and a hot breakfast, we moved downriver. And saw a hippo head in the middle of the river. So we moved to go around it. And found another one ahead of the boat's new path. And then another when we re-directed again. There were five or so of these creatures arrayed across the river watching us and cutting off any angle we took. So we decided caution was the better part of valor and slalomed between a couple of the heads and fled back home. This was way too close and I'm sure our speed saved us. But God forbid if that engine stopped. I never want to do that again really. Seriously.

I went to Africa to see the animals I looked at in zoos as a kid in their natural environments and learn and appreciate everything I could about them. And I did. I learned more about elephants, marabou storks, lions, hippos and a number of other species by watching and especially listening to them in unfenced and wide open nature in a few hours in Africa than I ever did in my whole life. I guess hippos are still my favorites, but I know for sure if I'm never in a small boat with these things in the water nearby, I'll be a happy man. It was totally scary. And totally worth it. I'll never forget the Chobe hippos. But I'll beware of them forever.

Hippo heads in the African sunset.