This is what I love about the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park. Even if you come at exactly the same time of year, two years in a row, your experience will be as different as a banana is from a barrel of bugs. Late February/early March 2012 was green-green and festooned with flowers; this year the rains were late and the veld was khaki-coloured and dry, very dry.
The differences smacked us in the face on our first foray along the Auob riverbed, which was decidedly less green than it was this time last year. Given the sparseness and shortness of the grass this year, it was easy to spot meerkat and we had a bonanza of sightings of these Kalahari cuties.
March 2013: Meerkat were easy to spot on the dry veld.
March 2012: Meerkat had to be right on the road's edge to be seen among the lush grass and flowers.
Other wonderful sightings that would probably have gone unnoticed among the lanky grass last year were a hunting caracal, and a Cape fox sitting at the entrance to its burrow, the early morning sun kissing the tips of its ears.
Cape fox
There was a fair number of springbok, including fresh babies whose ears were too big for their heads, their horns not even tiny press-studs yet. Without doing a scientific census, our impression was that there were fewer springbok lambs compared to the glut of them last year. Springbok can give birth at any time of year, but usually there’s a flurry of births after good rains. In the Kgalagadi the 'wet' season is January to April, so there were fears it was going to be a long, hard drought year. (Fortunately, at the very end of March, long after our trip was over, 113mm of rain fell in five days.)
March 2013: Springbok in a very dry riverbed.
March 2012: The riverbed was like a fairway on a golf course.
This year too eland carcasses littered the veld. Sometimes just a head, horns and vertebrae were left; others appeared almost intact but were hollowed out from the stomach, the back skin now dried leathery in the sun. Large herds started migrating out of Botswana into the South African side of the park in June last year; some even trampled the fence in the west and crossed into Namibia. It’s a natural movement but no one knows when it’s going to happen. The last time was 2007.
Jackals can't help sniffing around the dried-out eland carcasses.
With so many eland, the waterholes were under attack, their solar pumps unable to cope with the demand. Camera traps showed the waterholes were full by the end of the day. After eland drank in the evening, however, there would be no water until the next day’s sunlight got the solar pumps cranked up again.
Eland can go for quite a while without water, getting moisture from plants instead. But they will drink when they can. And then they must be easy prey for lazy lions. We counted at least a dozen carcasses between Twee Rivieren and Kij-Kij waterhole, with three apiece littering the veld around the waterholes of Samevloeing and Houmoed. Even lions, vultures, hyenas and jackals can’t completely hoover up this kind of windfall.
Eland can go for quite a while without water, getting moisture from plants instead. But they will drink when they can. And then they must be easy prey for lazy lions. We counted at least a dozen carcasses between Twee Rivieren and Kij-Kij waterhole, with three apiece littering the veld around the waterholes of Samevloeing and Houmoed. Even lions, vultures, hyenas and jackals can’t completely hoover up this kind of windfall.
March 2013: Cheetah with lunch in what looks like a 'desert'.
March 2012: It's hard to believe the Kalahari is a semi-arid area.
Flowers represented another obvious difference from last year. Dubbeltjie flowers (devil’s thorn) were thick on the ground then, as were purple thunderbolts (brandboontjies), mauve cat’s tails and spider-wisps. This year, it was hard to find any flowering plants, though we did see a few patches of bitterkambro with their semi-succulent leaves and pink trumpet-like flowers. As its more common Afrikaans name of pylgif suggests, it’s one of the ingredients of arrow poison.
March 2013: The dunes were sparse and almost flower-free.
March 2012: Lots of grass and yellow dubbeltjies on the dunes.
At a picnic site one morning we met a couple from Durban who were on their 40th visit to the park (we’d been quite proud of our 30 visits till then!). We all agreed that what keeps us coming back year after year, sometimes three times in a single year, is that the Kgalagadi shows a new face every time you visit, whatever the season.
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Copyright © Roxanne Reid - No words or photographs on this site may be used without permission from roxannereid.co.za
Copyright © Roxanne Reid - No words or photographs on this site may be used without permission from roxannereid.co.za
