Wednesday, September 13, 2023

September 10: not the day we’d planned

 We are staying four nights here, which gave us enough time to go on a specialty excursion to a remote part of the park off the normal tourist routes, with the goal of seeing two elusive antelope species that do not live in the eastern part of the park. We expected the drive to take four hours each way, but our Land Rover is a developed engine issues so it took six hours each way. As a consequence it was the heat of midday when we arrived, so we did not see the new species we’d hoped for. It was still interesting to see a very different landscape, a huge floodplain that until about twenty years ago had been rice farms. The government relocated the farmers when they expanded the park. We saw many examples of “predator reaction” by impala, bushbuck and waterbuck. This is when an antelope herd senses danger, and flees to safety, even if safety ( in this case the wooded areas) are on the other side of the threat. Each individual makes a show of leaping as they run. This is believed to be a technique to show the predator that the individual is too healthy to be a good target. An exception is hippos, who often “stand their ground (water)” especially the larger males. 

Usango is not only a new section of Ruaha National Park, it is very little visited. Most of the drive was on a single unsaved road, and we only encountered two safari vehicles ( from two other camps), two delivery trucks, and one ranger vehicle in the 12 hours of driving. The ranger vehicle was transporting captured poachers to camp headquarters for processing, showing us another aspect of the park. 

On our ( slow) return trip we did see a beautiful sable antelope in a woodland. We had several encounters with road-blocking Guinea hens, giraffe and elephants during the return drive.  As we returned to camp in the dark, a hyena ran right in front of the truck… and another tried to sneak into the dining area during dinner. 

In these blogs we often detail what species we see, but we learn so much more about each species from our guides. Did you know that you can estimate the age of a baby elephant by how tall it is compared to its mother? If it can walk under her hind legs, that’s six months old ; if under the front, that’s a year old. We got a kick out of watching baby elephants mimic their elders in terms of trunk movements, but fail to accomplish the task (like pulling and eating grasses). One of the major issues in Tanzania is the isolation of the national parks. The parks themselves are huge and well managed, but there are few protected “corridors” between parks forcing the animals into smaller total roaming area than they had historically. This isolation results in inbreeding (for example the increasing prevalence of tuskless elephants), as well as more browsing damage to the landscape. 

Pictured: sable antelope




, mom and baby elephants, guard hippo 

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