WITH MY OWN EYES
CENTRAL KALAHARI GAME RESERVE, BOTSWANA
A fter my wife Marguerite and I read an article about Botswana in your magazine, we decided to follow the writer Willem van der Berg’s recommendation and go on a solo mission to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. In May 2019, we spent two amazing days at Kubu Island on the Makgadikgadi Pans and then travelled to the reserve where we planned to explore for six days. We camped at Piper Pan on our last two nights in the CKGR. Early one morning we heard lions roaring nearby. We dropped everything and drove around looking for them.
There was water in the pan and we’d seen something in the shallows close to the shore the previous evening. Initially we thought it was a tree trunk, but when we looked closer with binoculars and the camera’s telephoto lens, we saw it was a vulture stuck in the mud. Now, arriving at the spot again, we saw that the bird was still in the same position and not moving. We thought it had died.
After a while, two lions came to drink. One slowly moved around the water’s edge 1 towards the vulture. It walked up to the bird 2 , carefully sniffed it, grabbed it by the neck 3 and pulled it from the pan 45 , . The lion was clearly not impressed with his “catch” 6 and put the bird down and walked away. After the second lion had drunk its fill, it too went over to the vulture 7 , sniffed around and departed.
When we returned later in the afternoon to check on the vulture, it was gone – probably looking for the friends who had left it there for dead!
Marguerite & Grové Koch, Riversdal
“We’d travelled through Botswana before on our way to the Zambezi Region in Namibia, but this was our first visit specifically to the country. The vast plains of the Central Kalahari were exceptional, even though the drought was severe. At night, we stared at the stars and listened to lions only metres from our tent – they roared from 2.30 am until 5 am… “The roaring started as a long bass note, repeated a few times, and ended with shorter guttural sounds. First on one side of the tent, then an answer from the other side. We listened in silence, frightened, but in awe.”