Botswana’s Okavango Delta
The fascinating inland alluvial fan, with its abundant and thriving animal, bird and plant species, is a glimpse of what much of Africa must have looked like before our ancestors arrived. By Ina Conradie
including jackalberries, knob thorns and African magosteen. Dying trees have a telltale bare ring in the bark.
Fever berry trees are often responsible for the death of surrounding plants because of a substance in their leaves, while the strangle fig literally strangles the tree against which it grows. Rain trees (also called apple leaf trees), marulas, leadwoods, sausage trees (Kigelia africana) and tall baobabs all form part of the forest stretches on the island.
Around the evening fire, we would listen to the sounds of the bush. One night Lister told us he had earlier heard the “ugh-ugh” call of a leopard, sounding like a hand saw. A group of monkeys chattered anxiously when they also heard it. The fire protected us, but it was easy to imagine the vulnerability of creatures hunted by a dangerous cat that can climb trees as well as they can.
The next night we heard baboons, sounding a bit like children squabbling at bedtime. Lister explained there was likely to have been a disagreement, maybe, “Hey, you stepped on my toe!”, and the low “boghom” sound that followed was probably the alpha male, leader of the pack, saying, “I’m here, don’t worry, all is well. Now go to sleep!”
Lister grew up with these sounds, lying with his brothers and sisters in a round mud hut listening to the night before dropping off to sleep. Hippos, lions, every kind of sound, their parents would interpret.
The roar of a lion
That night we all woke a few times to hear the roar of a lion close to our camp and wondered what he was saying. In the morning Lister assured us a hunting lion is mostly quiet and the roar probably meant he was marking his territory – partly vocally and partly by spraying key points. As with other animals, this behaviour tells available females that a happy and safe home awaits them if they join him.
On our morning game walk the next day, we saw lion tracks following buffalo tracks, and an elephant track that had followed the same path. We were shown how to distinguish a female elephant track from a male one, and also how to estimate when it was made.
An eerie blowing sound was heard in the forest as we sat by the fire later. Lister lifted his head and said, “That’s a distress signal, an extreme SOS. It’s a sound made by different buck, to send a warning that there is danger – probably a large cat in the vicinity.”
Was it the lion or the leopard? If a kill was made near our camp, we did not hear it; but we realised this was the real thing – we were not in a car travelling through a wilderness, we were right here, among the animals, in the middle of their experience.
A highlight of the week was the daily sunset cruise to a viewpoint to see many species of animals, and to disembark on to one of the small islands to watch the slowly changing light of an Okavango sunset. The intensity of colours on the water and in the sky left us speechless.
The uniqueness of this experience lies in the fact that the Okavango Delta is one of a kind; that the animals live on their own terms, in their own terrain, and we are the guests; that the guides who took us there are skilled and wise men with a deep understanding of the natural world.
It is not possible to know whether the delta will remain untouched by humanity, but, while it is, it is an opportunity to have a timeless experience on our doorstep.