Every once in a while, everyone who spends time in the Africa bush witnesses something that absolutely astonishes them. When you get there for the first time, everything does that as you just cannot believe how amazing all the animals and their interactions with their habitat are. Gazing up at an elephant that is dwarfing your vehicle and the surrounding trees is something that really needs to be experienced first-hand. The sense of perspective an encounter like this offers cannot be topped by anything I know, except of course if you are approaching said elephant on foot on a walking safari, that’s a few other stories! But seeing all the animals, breathing in the smells of the bush, the freshness of the grass, the earthiness of the mud, hearing the exotic sounds of the birds that somehow sparks some recognition deep down in your psyche making you feel more at home, more alive than you ever have before. I would say that I speak for myself but time and again I have guided people and shared these experiences and they have had the exact same feelings as me, a deep connection to nature and a longing to see more.
So then people spend more time in the bush and are privileged to see things that are actually very rare to see. On every safari I’ve guided, we have witnessed at least one thing that I have never seen before, every day is different, every drive or walk or boat trip is different. Each of these encounters, and all of the ones I’ve been lucky enough to see before, I cherish and they all fuse together to make an unforgettable experience. Occasionally, there is one sighting that takes everyone’s breath away. It might be because of the drama of it, the rarity of the species involved or how the entire story plays out. Sometimes it is all three of these.
I started my safari guiding career in an area of South Africa called Zululand, on the north-east coast. This is an area rich in biodiversity and was a fantastic place to start guiding. Having already spent a lot of time in the bush in various different areas of Botswana and South Africa, I thought I knew quite a lot. But spending all day every day in the bush opened my eye to all the different interactions that happen. And staying in the same reserve for a while allowed me to get to know individual animals and form bonds with them. I started seeing more and more as I became a better tracker and more in tune with the bush and the animals’ habits and personalities. There was one male wildebeest that held a territory on the northern section of the reserve, you knew you could find him with 100% certainty because he guarded his little section of the bush with his life, waiting and hoping that one day some female wildebeest would wonder through to his patch and he would finally be able to pass on his genes. Unfortunately for him, his ‘patch’ was probably the least desirable square of scrub with little vegetation in the whole reserve. He is probably still a bachelor now!
Once I had got to know a lot of the bigger, easier to find animals, is was the smaller and medium sized rarer ones that became the proverbial pot-of-gold at the end of the rainbow / search. And of these, the smaller cats were a favourite of mine. There are two species of medium sized cats in the wild in southern Africa, the serval and the caracal. Servals prefer grassland where they can hunt small rodents, reptiles and flush out birds. Caracal tend to live up to their Zulu name (Indabushe – pronounced In the Bush, Hey!) and stick to thickets, bushes and all round difficult places to find them / great places for them to set up an ambush for slightly larger prey of birds and small mammals up to (usually) the size of small antelope. Seeing either of these species is a special occurrence and even now I get overly excited whenever we find one of these beautiful and elusive cats.
A quick side note to this story, if you are a photographer or interested in photographing your safari, or anything you are doing in nature, never ever ever leave your lodge / base without your camera. Even if it’s an overcast day and the light doesn’t look right because you never know, you might just find something that is so special it doesn’t matter if it’s not in perfect light. Trust me, always take it.
This particularly astonishing morning started very un-astonishingly, with overcast grey skies reminiscent of my native United Kingdom making it feel a far cry from the sub-tropical African bush that I was actually in. It was waking up to this early morning greyness that made me think the flat light wouldn’t make any photo opportunity worth trying for this morning and so I made the erroneous decision to leave my camera behind as I got the vehicle ready. Picking up my guests we headed out into the reserve to see what we could find. Having been kept awake by lions the previous night I hoped that we could find them so they could redeem themselves for causing me a sleepless night. During my hours lying awake, I had at least been able to get a direction on their calls and their movements, it sounded like they were headed upstream along the dry riverbed. So it was down towards this riverbed that we headed, breezing past various colourful birds that all seemed to have been painted a couple of shades duller due to the lack of morning sun.
As we neared the river, we came across a heard of beautiful impala, an antelope species about the size of a big deer and weighing around 50-70 kgs when fully grown. They often get overlooked on a safari as they are quite common (because they are really successful) throughout Africa but I feel they deserve more respect than they get. We stopped to watch this herd as another benefit of spending time with a prey species is that they can alert you to the presence of any predators, but only if they have seen them. Within a few minutes of stopping to watch this graceful heard of female impala, they exploded. Taking off in all directions; something had caused absolute pandemonium and I had no idea what it was. The only impala left standing in the place where there had been a herd of more than twenty had its neck angled towards the ground and a funny ginger smudge on it. After a split second of processing what we were seeing I realised that a caracal had pounced on this impala and now had its significantly bigger adversary by the neck. In what must have been less than a minute, the caracal had subdued the impala by crushing its windpipe and hanging on for dear life while the impala was kicking and writhing trying to get rid of it. Once dead, the caracal took some time to get its breath back, assess the situation to see if the noises made had attracted any of the bigger predators that would scare it away and look for an exit strategy with its meal of a lifetime.
This ambush had played out only 20 metres away from the road which ran along the dry riverbed and very close to a dense thicket that I suspect the caracal had used as its cover for the attempt at breakfast. I cannot tell you how astonishing it was to witness this medium sized but powerful ginger cat catch and take down a full-grown female impala, but what happened next really made me think this whole thing was a dream. Just as me and my guests had settled down from seeing the action to biding our time for the caracals next move, I caught a glimpse of something moving along the road towards us in my rear-view mirror. Coming towards us was the reason for my tiredness that had long since disappeared to be replaced by the adrenalin from watching the caracal kill. Three big male lions, each of them around 12-15 times the size of the plucky caracal where headed straight for us, and it! Lions like to walk on roads as it is an easy path through the bush with no thorns to prick their feet and no bushes to have to plough through or go around. So along the road they came towards us. I moved just off the road so we were out of their way but could still see what happened when they got to our ginger friend. I felt so sorry for the caracal, it had probably never caught anything as big as the impala in its life and possibly wouldn’t again! I could only see this going one way, the lions would see either the cat or the dead impala, thank the caracal for handing them a light breakfast on a plate without having to do anything for it and that would be that, the caracal would have to run and the lions would get their share.
This caracal had not read the script. As soon as it saw the lions, it astonished me again. It went and sat right on top of its prize, making it more visible if anything and refused point blank, to move. You could see the stubbornness in its eyes. As if to say ‘I’ve been plotting this kill my whole life, there is no way I am going to lose out to a bunch of lazy lions just because they are bigger than me’. And there it sat, like a statue, as the lions slowly sauntered within 30 metres, then 25 metres of it until they passed so close we were all sure one of the three lions would see or smell something. We sat there with bated breath, and the lions continued on their quest. They never even suspected a thing and went on patrolling their territory and trying to find an easy bite to eat, unawares they had missed the easiest opportunity they were likely to find. Once they were out of earshot, our brave caracal decided maybe it was time to live up to its Zulu name and take cover. It hopped off its prize, repositioned it and dragged it with incredible strength into the nearby dense thicket. We almost cheered with joy knowing that it was about to get the meal it deserved. Any caracal that can take on a full-grown Impala and stare down three male lions is definitely NOT a scaredy-cat.