and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space
It’s time to wind up the account of my trip to Botswana and Zimbabwe, say thanks to Pete Oxford and Renee Bish, the organisers and leaders, and say farewell and thanks to my traveling companions. It was indeed a pleasure to meet you all. I hope to travel with you all again one day.
On the day that God made the Warthog there was a shortage of skin. As a result the body of the Warthog is a very tight fit. When it runs through the grass it closes its eyes to keep the seeds out. So tight is its skin that just closing its eyes is enough to make its tail stand up.
There are other tales to explain why it feeds on its knees and why its hair is so patchy. It seems to be a popular figure in African folklore.
Could you imagine being on the other end of that stare?
A national government has the responsibility for making the most of a country’s resources and sharing the benefits among its peoples. In Zimbabwe during the Mugarbage era the national wealth went down whilst the personal wealth of Mugabe and his cronies went up. A kleptocracy working just the way its rulers wanted. Across the border in Botswana things seem to have gone very much better. Botswana is considered the least corrupt country in Africa, the economy is growing healthily and per capita purchasing power is above the world average.
Botswana is essentially a dry country but with a water supply from beyond its borders. The Kalahari Desert is in the centre and south west, The Okavango Delta is in the northwest. The country is about the same size as France.
The population is about 2.7 million people, population density being 5 people per Km2. They are not evenly spread, about 69% live in a town, the largest being Gaborone, the capital in the southeast of the country, with a population of a little over 208,000. The population of Botswana is slowly increasing.
Diamond mining is the mainstay of Botswana’s economy, about half of government revenue comes from diamonds. A lot of pretty eggs, one basket. Tourism, number two in importance, accounts for a little over 10% of GDP. A large proportion of the rural population depend on subsistence cropping and cattle farming.
The tourists go mainly to the Delta because it’s beautiful, wildlife is abundant and the facilities are first class. Flying in adds to the sense of space and wilderness as does the absence of power lines and fences. The set up depends on concessions. The Government holds on to the dirt. Business leases the opportunity to build and run lodges. Do a good job, upgrade facilities and you may be granted the opportunity to renew when the lease runs out.
A World Bank Technical Report, An introduction to tourism concessioning: 14 characteristics of successful programs cites as an example …
“Okavango Wilderness Safaris has a concession for Mombo Camp in Moremi Game Reserve, in the heart of the Okavango Delta World Heritage Site.
The lodge is highly profitable, achieving an average occupancy of 70% between 2009 and 2013, with a rack rate of US$2,413 per person, per night in the high season. During this period, the lease fees and taxes paid generated US$6 million to government, and over US$3.7 million was spent on staff costs (of whom 75% are local Batswana).”
Kudos to the government. So why is this post entitled Balancing Act? In part because of the fences that you didn’t see. Cattle was culturally and economically numero uno prior to diamonds and tourists and it still is to the rural population. The market for beef is the EU. To satisfy the EU on health grounds Botswana has to keep the cattle and the wildlife apart especially the buffalo. That means Veterinary Fences. Over 10,000km of veterinary fences. Namibia next door to the west also has its share of veterinary fences. The fences cut migration routes that have existed for millennia. Water floods into the Delta in the dry season. Animals migrate to the periphery in search of pasture. As the land dries out they move back into the heart of the Delta. Unless they died against the fences.
Over all wildlife numbers have declined since the first fence was erected in 1958. On the other side of the coin, if the fences come down will the cattle move in, elephants and buffalo move out, conflict with farmers increase?
What about the water? The rain falls in Angola. They have first dibs. If it leaves there it has to cross the Caprivi Strip of Namibia, a colonial oddity that enabled the German overlords access to the Zambese. If it is diverted there to the extent that there is too little to flood the Delta then the Kalahari increases in size and the Delta dies.
And power! Botswana purchases electricity from South Africa and presently all they have to sell is rolling blackouts. That is an issue that the government of Botswana has already begun to address.
Botswana has done a great job. They need to keep it up. There’s a tricky road ahead.
I have heard it argued that the best camera is the one you have with you. Your phone is always handy. The photograph you take is always superior to the one you didn’t take. I have a friend who has an excellent eye for composition who has embraced this absolutely and doesn’t own a real camera. His instagram page has some very nice photographs of fungi. And, not only fungi … but well … mainly fungi.
If you use your photos on social media the image quality is good enough most of the time and getting better. I use my phone sometimes (more often to take photos than to make phone calls in fact) and I have published some of them on this blog. It’s a Samsung. It does an OK job of macro (flowers, corals, dinosaur footprints. Not insects) and a pretty good daytime landscape. It fills in the short end when I’m wandering far and wide with a bloody great telephoto. It wouldn’t meet my requirements for night photography or for birds.
Could you take a phone as your safari camera? Professor Mo (Honeybadger) Donelly did and was kind enough to share. These are some of her photos (all rights reserved) …
These are nice photos, certainly good enough when they pop up in her Facebook feed next year to bring back a flood of good memories. They were shot on an iPhone 13 pro.
A palindromic acronym that I just made up. Perhaps unlikely to attract many hits but who knows … curiosity. So WTF does it stand for (I tried not to do that but I couldn’t resist). What about black and white? My first experience of photography was watching the magic of black and white appear in a dish. My Uncle Ron was a professional photographer back in the day. I went on to have my own wet dark room for some years. Film, enlarger, paper. Oh the nostalgia. I’m still a sucker for B&W.
I’m into photography. If I had to say what sort I would say wildlife and landscape. I had better insert the word amateur somewhere although I did once swap some of my photos for some art work. Since I live in a part of the world that is almost devoid of large, day active mammals the wildlife I shoot is mostly birds. I photograph birds almost every day. Landscapes, too, are determined by what’s available, mountains and snow are absent from my neighbourhood but I have seascapes facing both east and west and dark night skies. These are the regular subjects for my landscape shots.
It’s in your day to day photography that you learn your way around your camera and how to solve the problems of lack of light, harsh light, black eyes in black faces, finding focus in the grass or foliage and, above all, composition. Practise, practise, practise. Photography on safari is very much like photography at home. You will make the same mistakes, your photography on safari will be just as bad as your photography at home.
But some of your photographs on safari will also be much better than your photographs at home. Ansel Adams is often credited with saying that the art of landscape photography is “knowing where to stand”, to which you could add “and when to stand there”. It’s just as true for wildlife. Go stand in front of a lion, a hyena or a leopard, carefully, of course. You will come home with some gems.
Rule number one – take lots of photos, only ever show the best ones.
What will be different on safari? You will only be there for a short while. You will want to get the most out of it even when the sun is overhead.
You will fly there. There will be weight restrictions. If it involves light aircraft the restrictions will be severe. My camera kit is a challenge for hand luggage regulations at the best of times.
You will be shooting from a vehicle. So, often a higher view point than you’d like and limited as to choice of position.
There will be dust. Changing lenses in the field should be avoided. A woman’s head scarf in your lap is a good way to keep the dust off the outside of your camera while traveling.
You will be a long way from the camera store. Whatever you didn’t take will not be found by magic in the pocket of your camera bag.
So what should be in your bag? A camera that you know and love is essential. A second body that will accept the same lenses is desirable – I have twice had cameras die while traveling. (If traveling with a companion three bodies between two should be enough.)
Which lenses? Doing research for this piece I came across a glowing endorsement of a 400mm f/1.8 prime as the ideal safari lens. Makes your mouth water. Imagine shooting wide open in the predawn light, creamy bokeh, low ISO therefore low noise, subject razor sharp. The affiliate link was, of course, at the bottom of the page. The sun comes up and most of the advantage the lens had is gone but it still weighs the same and it will be a 400mm lens all day.
Your driver/guide will do their best to put you and the other occupants of the vehicle in a good position. This will vary from perfect with the sun just where you’d like it to bloody awful. You won’t be able to fine tune it by stepping forward, back or a little off to the side. A zoom lens will give you some control over your composition. If 400 mm is what you want Sony shooters will find that in the 200 to 600 along with a lot more flexibility.
You will face similar restrictions with regard to landscapes. You will not be walking about in search of a low viewpoint framing a nice foreground subject leading through an interesting mid ground to a fascinating baobab. Even in camp at night you will be limited in your freedom to wander. So a very wide angle lens is not likely to get much use (But they do weigh a lot less than a 400mm prime). You might be comfortable filling in the short end with your phone. A small herd in its habitat or the classic silhouette in the sunset can be achieved with a 70 to 200.
What about going really long? On a full frame camera an 800+ mm lens traditionally meant ridiculous size and weight, image softness due to camera movement and noisy images in low light. This is the suite of problems that every bird photographer has had to confront, so home turf for me. My solution is the OM Systems OM1 mark ii and the Zuiko 150 to 400mm zoom with built in 1.25X teleconverter. It is a micro four thirdscamera with a small sensor and a mere 20 megapixels. In full frame terms it has the equivalent reach of a 300 to 1000 mm lens at a fraction of the weight (and also cost). Image stabilisation and autofocus are excellent. If 400mm is the sweet spot this lens does it comfortably and then you can turn around and zoom in on a bird.
So that was my long lens. Plus I had the 70 to 200 mm mounted on a Sony full frame camera and switched that for a 14mm wide angle prime for night shots. My companion also had an OM1 with a couple of zoom lenses giving her coverage from about 25mm to 300mm in full frame terms.
I anticipated switching frequently from one camera to the other but in practice I hardly used the 70 to 200. I really could have left it at home. Nor did I find 400mm to be the sweet spot. When the sun gets high in the sky the shadows really mess up the image. Cats tend to find a spot in the shade. With the lens at 400mm half the scene is likely to be in shade and the other half over cooked in the sun. With a bit of extra reach it’s often possible to compose a more intimate scene in even light. I made a lot of use of the 700 to 800 mm range.
Camera settings seem to get a lot of attention. I like to be ready so as not to miss an important moment so make full use of the custom settings. The OM1 has 4 available. I use C1 for birds on a perch or animals at ease at 1/800th of second. C2 for birds in flight at 1/2500th of a second, both are Manual with auto ISO at f/5.6 as a starting aperture. C4 is set for daytime landscape, aperture priority f/11, ISO 200. Which I use on a tripod with a 2 second delay.
An image that is not sharp is useless. Let the ISO go where it must, a noisy image can be cleaned up.
I shoot in raw, edit in Capture 1, use Affinity Photo where I need to combine layers and clean up noisy images with Topaz.
That’s how I went about it. The results are there for you to see. Well some of them are. If you want to look good never forget rule number 1.
Panthera pardus, the Leopard, the most wide ranging and adaptable of the big cats. They are solitary creatures, adults coming together only to mate. Females then spending almost two years as single mums.
Medium sized antelope and the young of large species account for most of their diet but they also take small mammals and even invertebrates. A patient and silent approach to within 5 meters of its prey is likely to be successful. Longer chases are often abandoned. We several times watched Impala telling Leopard that they had been spotted – don’t bother. And they won’t bother if they’re not within 20m.
A kill may be consumed on the spot or carried up a tree. They are powerful enough to climb with more than their own body weight in tow. On the ground dispossession by lions, hyenas or wild dogs is not uncommon.
Other predators are also a threat to the dependent youngsters. There are one to three cubs in a litter that must be left when mum goes hunting. They can climb well from quite an early age. Even so this is a particularly dangerous period in a leopard’s life.
If you read about photography you will occasionally come across the notion that a photograph should tell a story. Sometimes it does …
But sometimes it’s just a pretty picture …
We were very fortunate to spend a lot of time with Leopards, not the first time I’ve seen them or photographed them but on this visit we had stunning views. I took many photographs and you will see some soon. This trio are not among the best. The first one makes the cut only because it does indeed tell a story. The others only make the cut because of the story attached.
The Leopard was initially lying on a low branch, a very flat cat. And that’s the way it stayed for ages. Really flat. There were two vehicles in attendance and for us to get a decent view took a bit of manoeuvring. When it was time to go it became apparent that we were stuck, a wheel had come to rest between two sizable fallen branches and it simply wouldn’t climb out. It was decided that the other vehicle would tow us to safety which meant that someone had to dismount and attach a rope to the back of our vehicle and the front of the other, under the sleepy gaze of a Leopard poised to pounce just a few meters away and above us. The moment our driver did so the flat cat quickly woke up.
Fortunately it didn’t feel the need to leap onto the driver and we were very quickly on our way.
Are they gorgeous or will they rip you to shreds? Yet another animal that is much misunderstood. Male baboons are much the same size as a large dog, have canine teeth that are way more impressive and sharp claws. They could do some damage. But by and large they don’t. If cornered or threatened they may fight their way to safety but they are prey animals not predators. Dogs on the other hand are a different story. Animals24-7.org keeps a log of fatal dog attacks in South Africa. They run at about two per year, about half are children. I haven’t been able to find a single instance of a human killed by a baboon. The dog you bought to keep you safe is a far greater threat to you and your family than a baboon.
Baboons are big monkeys in the genus Papio. Mammals of the World volume 3, Primates lists six species each of which is further divided into subspecies. The boundaries of the species has been blurred by hybridisation to such an extent that there are places where there’s a PhD to be had in working out which species is present. It’s generally accepted that the Chacma Baboon is the one found in Botswana but the mitochondrial DNA differs from those further south. The Kinda Baboon is present in Angola and the Yellow Baboon in Zambia and they all interbreed freely at points of contact.
Life for a Baboon is communal. Groups vary in size but are typically 30 to 40 strong. Females and their young are at the core of the group. Females spend their lives in their natal group, males leave home at about four years of age and may switch groups again subsequently. Status is important to Baboons, the females inherit theirs from their mother. The boys have to work it out for themselves.
The group as a whole has the job of keeping other groups off their turf and keeping individual members out of the jaws of predators.
Conflict with people arises because Baboons raid crops and will enter houses in search for food. The response tends to be tinged with fear and spite.
The answer to the initial question is Baboons are gorgeous. They are never cruel to people.
bobmcgee 