Sand Rivers Page 4
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support for the Selous; the enforced reduction of game wardens, engineers, and mechanics, with the inevitable deterioration of efficiency that followed, had meant - among many other problems - discouragement and increased resignations among the dwindling number of competent people on the staff, loss of all but 10 per cent of the Reserve's vehicles due to mechanical breakdown, and the virtual cessation of patrolling, with the result that the poaching activities brought under control ten years before were on the increase once again. Five months later, in the absence of any meaningful response, and realizing that he "was beating his head against a wall", Brian Nicholson resigned his post and returned to Kenya.
In Nairobi, Nicholson found a job as a charter pilot, and soon acquired all the advanced licenses for commercial airplanes. Brian enjoyed flying, and he was good at it, bringing t(^ it the same intensity and dedication that served the Selous so well for twenty-three years. According to his wife, he did not take a single day off in Nairobi, perhaps because there was nothing there to interest him. At one point Brian was offered a job as manager of a new company that was organizing safaris into the Selous, but with the closing of the Kenya-Tanzania border in 1977 this last chance to work in the Seloij^ evaporated. Except for a few brief flying visits he had not returned here since he left the Game Department six years before, and to judge from his sardonic attitude, he was bracing himself for disappointment in what he was going to find.
Maria and I were happy to be back in an old-style green "Manyara" tent, with its rain fly that shaded the metal safari table and canvas wash basin and Maria's grass mat, which was our verandah; the tent gave us a sense of homegoing. The night before, as if to signal our return to the African bush, hyena and lion howled and roared, though not with laughter, and toward midnight hippopotami resounded from their pools deep in the Kingupira Forest. The wistful bird calls of the African night died one by one; soon the ring-necked and the red-eyed doves began to call, and then the tiny emerald-spotted wood dove with its sad, descending coos, and the dawn scream of a fish eagle, the tinny notes of the trumpeter hornbill, the nasal, jeering squawk of hadada ibis—as the canvas filled with light, 1 lay on my camp cot in the crisp green tent in the greatest happiness.
At daylight came the sound of a fierce whackmg from the direction of the mess tent, where one of the Africans, setting table, had stepped upon a black-throated spitting cobra that had taken shelter beneath the ground flap at the door. The pretty, sand-colored creature had shot its head out, and young Kazungu sprang backward and ran off to fetch a panga (a machete) to dispatch it. After transporting the dead cobra nearly a quarter of a mile from camp, Kazungu donned knee boots, green rubber Wellingtons, which he told us he intended to wear for the remainder of the safari.
With Nicholson 1 went on a "reconnaissance" ("We don't say 'game
24
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run' here in the Selous; that's tourist talk"), crossing a savanna of coarse grass set about with isolated leadwood trees; the leadwood is a species of combretum named for its durability - a dead tree may stand for many years. Soon we turned west into low terminalia woodland, arriving eventually at Kilunda Pool, a small pan where big green monitor lizards shot off low limbs of baobab into the water. These unexpected pans are usually accompanied by termite hills, and Alan Rodgers has suggested that the red mounds, which are partly subterranean, and also the root systems of the large trees such as tamarind and ebony that grow on them, penetrate the hardpan formed by the clay soils to the abundant ground water beneath. Leaching upward through the fissures, the water attracts animals, which paw in the resulting puddles, making them deeper. They are deepened still further when the hippo and buffalo that come there to roll and wallow carry away a thick coat of mud, and eventually a small pan is created. However, the pan's size is limited; if it gets too big, then erosion of the surrounding land during the rains will silt it up again.
In a dead tree perched a motley selection of large birds: a fish eagle and a black-headed heron, two juvenile saddle-billed storks, and a huge gymnogene or "harrier hawk", with a bare, vulturine lemon-yellow face, that went off in strange weary flight through the bony trees. Beside the pool lay a full-grown lion with full belly and no manc; he got up slowly and moved away, displaying no haste until 1 jumped out of the Land Rover to get a look at the departing gymnogene. Apparently these maneless lions are rather common in this part of the Selous, and Brian recounted other anomalies of the region. The roan antelope, ostrich, and dik-dik, which are typical species throughout northern Tanzania, are entirely absent from the Selous. The silver-backed jackal has only been recorded three or four times, always near this eastern border, although it is common enough around the settlements outside the boundaries; yet in the Serengeti it is abundant even in areas well away from human settlements. Besides the giraffe found north of the Rufiji, and the puku, a swamp antelope confined to the lower Kilombero, the cheetah is also scarce and localized even on this hardpan plain of the eastern Selous; because of the scarcity of the open country that its usual hunting technique requires, the cheetah has apparently adapted to the prevalence of heavy cover by learning to stalk baboons as leopards do.
The behavior of a widespread species may vary greatly from place to place - for example, crocodiles are much more dangerous in some places than in others (probably according to the availability of fish), and the chimpanzees of Kibale Forest, in Uganda, have not been seen to attack and kill other creatures, as they do at Gombe Stream here in Tanzania, and also in West Africa. Nicholson was always suspicious of scientists at the Serengeti Research Institute who tended to "write up animal behavior on the basis of the Serengeti only, when areas like the Selous were far more typical. All those boffins with their great pulsating brains.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
selecting facts to fit their precious theories! Years ago, some S.R.I, people wanted to come down to the Selous. I said, fine, on three conditions. First, they must work on projects helpful to the Selous - for example, we needed more information on sable and kudu, and we still do; we don't need to know how high a vulture can fly. Next, that they go out on their research safaris in the rains as well as in fair weather, because animal behavior in the rains is a necessary part of the whole picture. Fmally, they were not to go to Dar more than once every three months. I never heard from any of them again." This sort of resentment against the field biologists who come into an area and instruct the old-time wardens about their wildlife is heard rather commonly in East African wildlife circles, but Brian Nicholson is better qualified to speak out this way than most: twenty-five years ago, he published a pioneering paper on wild elephant behavior which led the way for the formal studies that came later and is still highly regarded by students of Loxodonta afhcana} Because of the early end to his education, and because it pleases him to appear rough-hewn, Brian camouflages his ideas behind phrases such as "so to speak", "as you might put it", and "if that's the word", but in fact he is very articulate indeed.
On the track ahead, a Gabon nightjar fluttered up like a large chestnut-and-gold moth, only to alight just yards away and vanish in the dry season's brown leaves. A pygmy mongoose, quick and rufous, scampered like a huge shrew across the track, then some striped ground squirrels, long thin tails carried upright and waving slightly to one side, and a troop of yellow baboon, less burly than their olive cousins in the north. Where a new flush of green had arisen from the burnt-out black was a herd of Nyasa wildebeest, larger, paler, and more handsome than the race on the north side of the Rufiji, with roan flanks and haunches where that animal is gray, and a remarkable white blaze across the forehead. Further
west, in the miomho, a fine big civet cat, started from a clump of tawny grass by the tires of the Land Rover, moved away a little distance before stopping to turn and have a look at us. The civet was black-faced, lustrous in the sere pale grass, averting its head just a little, the better to listen, and going on again when it heard no more than the soft vibration of the motor. The civet is not a cat at all but a large omnivorous weasel, a relative of the mongoose and the honey badger. It eats fruit and carrion as well as small animals and birds, and helps to propagate the fruit trees which it frequents by depositing their seeds in the defecation place that it returns to again and again, sometimes for years; there the seeds thrive, not only because of the powerful fertilizer but because the small rodents that normally eat up the fallen seeds avoid the civet smell and leave the tree nurseries alone.^
A group of buffalo went rocking away through the small trees; a lone hyena sat up like a sphinx. On the savanna as well as in the open woods there were impala, which seem to occupy the ecological niches filled
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further north by the gazelles; in the Selous, the impala is the major prey of the wild dog and the scarce cheetah. In the long grass of the miombo, these elegant antelope have the kongoni habit of climbing on to ruined termite mounds in order to see better.
The alluvial hardpan of this eastern boundary region (the hardpan is formed by river clays mixed with old sand washed down out of the eroded soils of the miombo] is characterized by terminalia thorn bush; lacking the ground water that is found in most of the Selous, the land depends for its water on the rivers and also the clay-bottomed pans that sometimes hold water throughout the dry season. With Hugo van Lawick, I spent a day at a large pan called Namakambari, or the Catfish Pool, an harmonious place set about with terminalia, albizzia, and combretum, and also small black cassia trees in yellow blossom. Here a hundred-odd hippo were in residence, but as the dry season^progressed and the pool shrank they would retire to the rivers and the last deep holes in the Kingupira Forest. The water lettuce at Namakambari had been stomped to a green mat by the hippos (which eat very little aquatic vegetation), and the place was a natural illustration of why most borehole wells created artificially for animals, both wild and domestic, turn out to be such ecological disasters: the grass and grot5nd cover were obliterated by the pressure of all the animals using the pool, and the packed earth, baked hard as brown concrete, extended as far back into the bush as I could walk without losing my grasp of the myriad game trails and becoming lost. In the green rim of trampled lettuce, a small company of waders picked silently along the margin: common and wood sandpiper, ruff, little stint and the three-banded plover with its coral bill - the only one of this far-flung group that makes its nest in Africa. There was just one individual of each species, and probably these birds were not early autumn migrants from Eurasia but a makeshift community of those left behind by the northward migrations of the spring before.
In the early morning, the blue sky with its high cumulus was crossed by big dark birds - griffons and hawk eagles, bateleurs and vultures, as well as the gaunt water birds scared up from Namakambari. A flock of thirty-two open-billed storks soon returned with heavy flapping to settle in a sepulchral arrangement on the bare limbs of a dead tree; the open-bills are so named on account of the odd space between long bent black mandibles through which one may see the sky. As the sun rose, the dark birds crossing the sky returned to earth and the hippos, which had settled somewhat at our approach, lowered themselves deeper still into the thick gray-brown broth of their own making. A gray heron poised in the water was evidence that fish and frogs could still find sufficient oxygen to exist in this copiously fertilized water, and that the water itself could scarcely be deep enough to immerse a standing hippo, far less a swimming one; the enormous animals were resting on their knees.
PETER MATTHIESSEN
I sat very still in the thin shade of a tree that grew from an ancient termite hill close to the shore. A hrrt brrt of wings preceded the arrival of chin-spot flycatchers, and soon other birds came to the bare limbs and dead snags nearby: doves and rollers, a white-headed black chat, the lesser blue-eared starling, sparrow weavers, and a brown-headed parrot that could not make up its mind whether I was something it should mvestigate or merely flee. On one dead limb over the pool, two hammerkops peeped sadly as they mated; a pygmy kingfisher, turquoise and fire, zipped into a burrow hidden in the mound behind me. Striped skinks emerged beside my book, and the parrot followed me all around the little hill, clambering along on the limbs over my head with electric shrieks of indignation as I stalked a very small deliberate slow bird, modest olive-gray above with pretty gray bars on a white breast, called the barred warbler. Searching for mites, the warbler worked from the base of a small bush up to the top, flew down and started again, always moving upward from the bottom until it had circled the mound to my place once more, where it proceeded to glean the leaves near my right hand.
A herd of impala picked its way around the pool to a point just yards from where I sat; their harsh tearing snorts as they suddenly departed would warn me, I thought, of the approach downwind of any lion. Soon wart hogs came in from the far side, progressing forward on their knees, tails whisking and manes shivering as they snouted and rooted in the baked earth. From the pond, in the thick heat of the growing morning, came a pungent duckpen smell to which the Egyptian geese that swam around at the edges of the hippo herd made only a pitiable contribution. The geese never appeared to feed, seemingly content with the sheer overwhelming presence of their huge and indelicate companions, and they stayed close, retreating only when washed backward, attending minutely to each thrash and heave as the herd barged about in its small space, as if there were much for a goose to learn from hippopotami. Periodically the cacophony of groans and blares, snorts, puffs, and sighs subsided with the submergence of raw, agonized heads, leaving only a mute cluster of shining wet boulders on the still surface of the pool. Then, one by one, the heads protruded, froggish pink eyes and round pink ears, followed by the generous nostrils that can close tight under water.
Sometimes hippos remain beneath for minutes at a time, thinking long thoughts or cooling the cumbersome machinery of their brains, or -in deeper water - enjoying a short stroll over the bottom. But in these close quarters the commotion resumes rapidly, a quake and rumbling from beneath the surface, then a roar and wash as the huge bodies surge, and way is made for two pink-eyed gladiators which draw near slowly, splitting each other's ears with heavy bluster. Sometimes one will turn aside, not to flee but to hoist its hind end out of the water long enough to defecate, the fleshy furious short tail whisking muddy manure into the unoffended face of its assailant. (Since subsurface elimination is much
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more relaxing - as easy, indeed, as rolling off a log - Hugo has concluded that this strenuous act, which would surely be taken amiss among human beings, is a gesture of submission among hippos.)
Many of the outbursts were not true fights but the threat display of a female hippo, directed at those which approached her calf too closely; this maternal solicitude invariably incited an uproar, though it soon deflated into disgusted snorts and weary sighs, as if to say, "What can be done with such crude people!" Since the animals were all piled up together, the cow appeared to be drawing a fine line, but no doubt she could perceive a threat not discernible to the casual observer. Despite appearances, hippos are sensitive and easily upset; they were not reconciled, even hours later, to the presence of Hugo's car, which they stared at all day with suspicion and pursued with bluster charges toward the water's edge whenever it was shifted or appeared to be departing, in order to speed it on its way.
I noticed, however, that when real fights occurred between two males, the herd did not join in the uproar but fell silent, as if watching carefully ifor a sign that the hippo hierarchy was about to change. Even the Egyptian geese retired as the gigantic creatures reared up on their hind legs, mouths wide and ivory clacking; theirliuge
heads locked, the titans twisted, crashing back into the water in an attempt to come to grips as a dung-filled wave rolled across the pool, flushing the birds up from the margin and washing the water lettuce with a rich soup of manure. Then a third male came in from the side, in discreet silence, to deliver to one of the straining contestants a terrific bite upon the flank, driving it off. He then turned upon the other and engaged it in a contest of jaws which he soon won. Only when the fight was over did the nervous herd release its tensions with a mighty uproar, as if the opinions of each one had been vindicated, subsiding shortly once again as if nothing had happened. Most of this was ritualized combat, minimizing injuries, as it is among many if not most of the horned and antlered animals, but hippo bulls may be slashed open by the enormous shearing teeth, and often die. At midday one of the vanquished, apparently banished from the pool, came very quietly out of the hot scrub, anxious to get in out of the heat; he stood indecisively on the bank, great head resting humbly on the mud, as if listening for favorable vibrations. If so, he heard none and decided not to risk it, for after a while he turned away and walked back slowly into the bush, revealing a large open gash on his hind quarter.
In the early afternoon I joined Hugo in his blue Land Rover. The car is specially adapted for photography, even to the green net mesh that may be lowered from the roof on the camera side and twined with branches, thereby transforming this no-nonsense machine into a mobile bush. Hugo is a superb observer (it was he who made the famous discovery that the Egyptian vulture is a tool user, having learned to shatter the smooth enigma of the ostrich egg by slinging rocks at it) and he is full of