This morning we flew to our final destination, the Katavi national park near the western edge of Tanzania. Our night was a bit disrupted by hyenas and lions calling quite close to the camp. We had a chance to sit down for a hot breakfast today, where we learned that honey badgers broke into the food storage area overnight and ate (you guessed it) all the honey as well as the shelf-stable butter. This raises a whole set of additional logistics issues that we hadn’t considered!
On our way to the airstrip, we saw Lesser Kudu, a species of antelope we’d been looking for during our whole stay here. They are smaller and have narrower stripes closer together than the Greater Kudu, in fact they somewhat resemble a breakfast pastry with narrow dribbled icing. We also saw a type of spurfowl that isn’t supposed to be in Ruaha at all. A classic send off!
The new camp at Katavi overlooks a (currently dry) floodplain. As we flew in we saw herds of hundreds of cape buffalo. The weather has been unseasonably hot all over southern Uganda and the theory is that the “short rains” will arrive sooner than the usual October. Other guests here told us that it rained heavily in the Serengeti (north of here) yesterday, and we heard thunder on our afternoon game drive. Katavi is close to the borders with Rwanda and Zambia. We have noticed a much more serious presence by park rangers than at our previous locations — more paperwork at the airport and strict controls on daytime-only game drives — so it’s goodbye to “sundowners" although night drives are still permitted by arrangement with the rangers. We would not want to be mistaken for poachers.
The highlight of the game drive was watching 5 lion cubs of varying ages explore near their hiding spot. They are part of a pride of 20 lions. There are massive numbers of marabou stork, hippos and crocodiles, as well as migratory flocks of great white pelicans. As the water level of the river drops, these populations become more and more concentrated; in some places you could imagine crossing dry shod on the backs of hippos, although it is not recommended.
We also continue to see local adaptations of familiar species. In Ruaha, the female bushbucks (a small shy antelope) have gray necks and plain golden brown bodies with white bands on their legs, while here at Katavi (and in Zambia last year) they are spotted and have additional stripes.
Pictured: yellow-throated spurfowl, lion cub, spotted and unspotted bushbucks, lesser kudu 
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