When you enter the Kruger National Park (Kruger) for the first time, do not be deceived by the well-maintained paved roads, road signs and visitors’ facilities. You are entering primitive Africa. The bushveld looks just like it does in the wildlife programmes on TV: tall, brownish “red-grasses”, bushes with vicious thorns, scrappy looking trees, and magnificent umbrella thorns. This is not an ancient, carefully manicured forest surrounding a Buddhist temple in Japan, nor the proud display of exotic specimens collected by British explorers where Londoners now go to picnic on a sunny summer Sunday.
If you arrive with a pre-constructed wish list of what you want to see, put it away now. Commonly, new visitors want to see “The Big Five”, and many do. Some tour operators even issue “I’ve seen the Big Five” certificates and T-shirts, to commemorate the achievement of that goal. Kruger is about so much more than the hyped-up Big Five. The diversity of life that surround you are too great even to see, far less to absorb or understand.
There are things that are in many ways far more fascinating than watching a sleeping pride of lions hidden far off in the long grass in the shade of an acacia tree. Open your mind rather to “The Little 27”. There are far more than 27 special experiences awaiting you in the bushveld of Kruger. This is just a figure of speech, though, because, to absorb them, you need to develop a pair of bush eyes. Bush eyes, bush ears, bush nose: bush consciousness.
Having ‘bush eyes’ has nothing to do with 20/20+ vision. There is a way of observing and a way of thinking in the African bush. Yes, eyesight is a distinct advantage, but your sense of time has to change. Your sense of smell has to change. What may smell disgusting in New York may smell exotic or enticing in Kruger. Let the slow, uneventful tranquillity of the scenery and the climate descend upon you.
Once you learn to use your senses intuitively and in unison, you’ll have acquired bush eyes with bush consciousness. You’ll see and enjoy things other people aren’t even aware of. At the same time, your chances of seeing the high-profile creatures like lions and leopards will increase because you will be on bush-time rather than home-time. By spending time watching a herd of impala, you’ll develop a disturbing sense that a predator may be heading your way. By hearing the go-away bird (grey lourie) give its raucous call, combined with the impalas’ behaviour, you’ll start checking the grass beyond the antelope for the movement of a predator – the sloping shoulders, the open, panting maw, the intent stare of yellow eyes.
If you’ve never seen African animals in their natural habitat, you don’t really know what to look for. You’ll see only the obvious: the impala herd blocking the road, the glossy starlings and hornbills waiting to steal the crumbs off your plate at the Shingwedzi Camp restaurant, the rhino asleep by the side of the road, the elephant herd at play in the Letaba River.
Its impossible to see everything that Kruger has to offer, no matter how many times you may return. What is possible, however, is to develop a way of noticing things.
Deep in the bush, hidden by a myriad of grasses, shrubs and trees, a slight movement may catch your eye. Scan the scene. Your eyes search for the obvious, but you see nothing. In the shimmering heat, there is one patch of grass that seems to be slightly browner, slightly greyer than the rest. Concentrate on just that spot. Suddenly a tail twitches and a zebra comes clearly into focus. She’s not brown or grey at all, as you well know, but her black and white stripes, which are oh so obvious when she’s in plain sight, render her invisible to the untrained eye. She shimmers uncannily in synch with both the grass and the heat. Her stripes blend fully with the landscape. She is invisible to the untrained eye.
The best way to train your senses to find animals and birds in the bushveld is to watch them whenever the opportunity is there. If your attention is focused simply on photographing what you see, you will see only the superficial image you capture in the photograph. By all means, take the pictures, but then put the camera away, and watch. Relax. Let your mind drift. It will initially drag you home, to your day-to-day interests and worries. Relax some more, and gradually you will notice the way the individual animals in the herd behave.
They are affectionate. They are alert. They have issues. A mare with an overdeveloped sense of independence wanders too far from the herd and is nudged back by the stallion. As the zebras move around, the light catches their colours differently. They’re not just black and white. Look at those shadow stripes in the white – is that what gives them the brownish shimmer at a distance? How can a shadow stripe over-shadow the stark contrast between black and white? Some stand in pairs, head to tail, switching their tails to keep the flies off each other’s noses. What do you think the relationship is like between those two? Do they have a closer friendship than with the others? Do they always stand in the same pairs?
Gradually restlessness takes hold of the herd: they’re moving off. Why do they do that? They don’t seem nervous, so it must be for water or for different grazing. Where is the nearest water? Might they cross the road? Might you see your first live zebra crossing? Look! There are birds piggy-backing on the zebras – there’s one going right up the guy’s nose! Why does he put up with it?
When you see what appears to be a heap of elephant dung on the road, slow down and check. You may find that it is a guinea fowl searching for undigested seeds in a real heap of dung, or it may be small group of dwarf mongooses getting ready to cross the road. Or, sometimes you may be so deceived by your assumption that a greyish-brown mass on the road is elephant dung (because you are bound to see a lot of elephant dung) that you don’t slow down in time to avoid disturbing a snoozing young hyaena.
Often, by stopping to look at something small, you get to see something really big. Recently on a game walk at Biyamiti Bush Camp, we stopped to look at two golden orb spiders and their huge intricate webs. The main silk strand is a thick, golden yellow anchor line strong enough; it seemed to me, to substitute for the front end of a fly fishing line. Our guide pointed out the little males, waiting to have their way with the huge, ominously beautiful females before being eaten themselves.
In looking at the cobweb, my eye caught a shape on the opposite bank of a small ravine perhaps 40 meters beyond the cobweb. It looked like a big granite boulder. There was something to the shape and the colour of this mass that held my eye. The grey wasn’t quite the same as the other granite rocks in the area. I refocused back on the spiders and in that split-second the boulder moved ever so slightly. “White rhino” I muttered.
We ended up doing a 20 minute detour, following the rhino as he moved and grazed. Others on the hike took what must have been award-winning pictures. There was no need for zoom lenses here! Because it was quite a windy day, and we were downwind from him, with his poor eyesight and impaired-by-the-wind sense of smell, the rhino remained as blissfully unaware of us as we had been of him until we had stopped for the spider. My “bush eyes” were in top form. I wasn’t consciously looking for rhinos; I was simply in the African bush, ready to experience whatever opportunities might present themselves. One of my fellow-hikers whispered “no wonder they are so vulnerable to poachers – in a wind like this, a man with a gun can come within SUCH easy striking distance!”
In our average urbanised lives our noses are assaulted by so many aggressive and offensive industrial smells, some of them stinking like sulphur and diesel, some of them the sticky sweetness of artificial perfumes, that in self-defence, we tune out our sense of smell to a significant degree. My sister, a great yachtswoman in her day, told me that when you’re sailing the Indian Ocean, you can smell the Spice Islands days before you can see them. Similarly, she says, you can smell Africa long before it first appears on the horizon. I understood about the Spice Islands because I have been to Zanzibar, but “what does Africa smell like, then?” I asked. “Dust, heat, sweat, blood, musk.”
With all the conveniences of air-conditioning, CD players, coffee cup holders, 4-wheel drive, sunroofs and so on, it has become possible to visit all parts of Kruger even at the height of summer. It is indeed comforting to settle into an air-conditioned vehicle, with the windows up, driving through the sweltering bushveld, cocooned from the heat and dust. But, the closed windows, the noise of the air conditioner, even the delightful coolness of the vehicle, all serve to isolate you from the true bush experience.
Maybe from 100Kms offshore Africa does smell of dust, heat, sweat, blood and musk. However, when you’re right here, surrounded by the African bush, the smells are far more complex and thrilling. The gentle sweetness of the fine purplish blossoms of the apple leaf tree (Lonchocarpus Capassa) evokes memories of tea under a wisteria trellis with a favourite grandmother. The potato bush will catch you unawares. There will be a strong, very familiar smell that reminds you of food without immediately letting on what it is. You will cast back in your memory and will suddenly remember the fresh raw smell of peeled potatoes, perhaps being cut up as French fries (or what in South Africa is known as “slap chips”). THAT is the smell of the potato bush.
But, the most awesome smell is that of a bull elephant in musth. If you’re driving along with the windows open, the air-conditioning and the CD player silent, idly watching the landscape drift by, and then gradually a feeling of dread and thrill, revulsion and desire wells up within you, it will have been brought on by this smell. Slow down and look out carefully for a large elephant. And, when you find him, notice the streams of fluid running down the sides of his face. They start at his temples, sort of midway between his eye and his ear canal. THAT is the source of the smell.
Imagine, if you can smell it long before seeing him, and if it causes such feelings of arousal and revulsion and restlessness in you, a member of a totally different species, what effect that smell must have on other elephants. From the simple act of driving with your windows open, you may see an elephant you may otherwise not have noticed, and you are lead into pondering the lives of elephants as you drive on, rather than dwelling on the normal worries of your civilised world.
Even if you visit Kruger in the winter months, you may find your car’s air conditioner a welcome relief in the middle of the day. The argument for opening up to the smells and sounds of Kruger is not an argument for punishment through heat exhaustion. By all means enjoy the mod cons of your car if you’re travelling in the heat of the day, but allow yourself the luxury of the smells and sounds in the early mornings and late afternoons. In this way, you will hear the excitable chatter of the arrowmarked babblers long before you see them clustering in a tree by the side of the road.
Or, if you visit during their mating season, you may hear the very strange clack-clack-clack-peep-peep-peep of the redcrested korhaan. And, once you hear it, stop the car and look around quickly, not at the ground, but in the air above where the sound came from. Chances are that you will see a male korhaan shoot straight up in the air, and then suddenly drop, as though shot. He tumbles to the ground as you watch, aghast, and then you thrill as he opens up his wings at the last possible moment, and stops the free-fall. What woman can resist a courting ritual like that?
Upon your return to camp, someone will likely ask you whether you’ve “seen anything”. They probably mean lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos. You say “yes, a redcrested korhaan and some arrowmarked babblers and a chameleon crossing the road. (And, what you think was a 2000-year old ironwood tree (Combretum Imberbe), with its organ-pipe branches pointing up into the sky, evocative of a Bach fugue playing full blast in a glorious European cathedral.” They say “Oh. Bad luck: we saw LIONS.”
If you arrive with a pre-constructed wish list of what you want to see, put it away now. Commonly, new visitors want to see “The Big Five”, and many do. Some tour operators even issue “I’ve seen the Big Five” certificates and T-shirts, to commemorate the achievement of that goal. Kruger is about so much more than the hyped-up Big Five. The diversity of life that surround you are too great even to see, far less to absorb or understand.
There are things that are in many ways far more fascinating than watching a sleeping pride of lions hidden far off in the long grass in the shade of an acacia tree. Open your mind rather to “The Little 27”. There are far more than 27 special experiences awaiting you in the bushveld of Kruger. This is just a figure of speech, though, because, to absorb them, you need to develop a pair of bush eyes. Bush eyes, bush ears, bush nose: bush consciousness.
Having ‘bush eyes’ has nothing to do with 20/20+ vision. There is a way of observing and a way of thinking in the African bush. Yes, eyesight is a distinct advantage, but your sense of time has to change. Your sense of smell has to change. What may smell disgusting in New York may smell exotic or enticing in Kruger. Let the slow, uneventful tranquillity of the scenery and the climate descend upon you.
Once you learn to use your senses intuitively and in unison, you’ll have acquired bush eyes with bush consciousness. You’ll see and enjoy things other people aren’t even aware of. At the same time, your chances of seeing the high-profile creatures like lions and leopards will increase because you will be on bush-time rather than home-time. By spending time watching a herd of impala, you’ll develop a disturbing sense that a predator may be heading your way. By hearing the go-away bird (grey lourie) give its raucous call, combined with the impalas’ behaviour, you’ll start checking the grass beyond the antelope for the movement of a predator – the sloping shoulders, the open, panting maw, the intent stare of yellow eyes.
If you’ve never seen African animals in their natural habitat, you don’t really know what to look for. You’ll see only the obvious: the impala herd blocking the road, the glossy starlings and hornbills waiting to steal the crumbs off your plate at the Shingwedzi Camp restaurant, the rhino asleep by the side of the road, the elephant herd at play in the Letaba River.
Its impossible to see everything that Kruger has to offer, no matter how many times you may return. What is possible, however, is to develop a way of noticing things.
Deep in the bush, hidden by a myriad of grasses, shrubs and trees, a slight movement may catch your eye. Scan the scene. Your eyes search for the obvious, but you see nothing. In the shimmering heat, there is one patch of grass that seems to be slightly browner, slightly greyer than the rest. Concentrate on just that spot. Suddenly a tail twitches and a zebra comes clearly into focus. She’s not brown or grey at all, as you well know, but her black and white stripes, which are oh so obvious when she’s in plain sight, render her invisible to the untrained eye. She shimmers uncannily in synch with both the grass and the heat. Her stripes blend fully with the landscape. She is invisible to the untrained eye.
The best way to train your senses to find animals and birds in the bushveld is to watch them whenever the opportunity is there. If your attention is focused simply on photographing what you see, you will see only the superficial image you capture in the photograph. By all means, take the pictures, but then put the camera away, and watch. Relax. Let your mind drift. It will initially drag you home, to your day-to-day interests and worries. Relax some more, and gradually you will notice the way the individual animals in the herd behave.
They are affectionate. They are alert. They have issues. A mare with an overdeveloped sense of independence wanders too far from the herd and is nudged back by the stallion. As the zebras move around, the light catches their colours differently. They’re not just black and white. Look at those shadow stripes in the white – is that what gives them the brownish shimmer at a distance? How can a shadow stripe over-shadow the stark contrast between black and white? Some stand in pairs, head to tail, switching their tails to keep the flies off each other’s noses. What do you think the relationship is like between those two? Do they have a closer friendship than with the others? Do they always stand in the same pairs?
Gradually restlessness takes hold of the herd: they’re moving off. Why do they do that? They don’t seem nervous, so it must be for water or for different grazing. Where is the nearest water? Might they cross the road? Might you see your first live zebra crossing? Look! There are birds piggy-backing on the zebras – there’s one going right up the guy’s nose! Why does he put up with it?
When you see what appears to be a heap of elephant dung on the road, slow down and check. You may find that it is a guinea fowl searching for undigested seeds in a real heap of dung, or it may be small group of dwarf mongooses getting ready to cross the road. Or, sometimes you may be so deceived by your assumption that a greyish-brown mass on the road is elephant dung (because you are bound to see a lot of elephant dung) that you don’t slow down in time to avoid disturbing a snoozing young hyaena.
Often, by stopping to look at something small, you get to see something really big. Recently on a game walk at Biyamiti Bush Camp, we stopped to look at two golden orb spiders and their huge intricate webs. The main silk strand is a thick, golden yellow anchor line strong enough; it seemed to me, to substitute for the front end of a fly fishing line. Our guide pointed out the little males, waiting to have their way with the huge, ominously beautiful females before being eaten themselves.
In looking at the cobweb, my eye caught a shape on the opposite bank of a small ravine perhaps 40 meters beyond the cobweb. It looked like a big granite boulder. There was something to the shape and the colour of this mass that held my eye. The grey wasn’t quite the same as the other granite rocks in the area. I refocused back on the spiders and in that split-second the boulder moved ever so slightly. “White rhino” I muttered.
We ended up doing a 20 minute detour, following the rhino as he moved and grazed. Others on the hike took what must have been award-winning pictures. There was no need for zoom lenses here! Because it was quite a windy day, and we were downwind from him, with his poor eyesight and impaired-by-the-wind sense of smell, the rhino remained as blissfully unaware of us as we had been of him until we had stopped for the spider. My “bush eyes” were in top form. I wasn’t consciously looking for rhinos; I was simply in the African bush, ready to experience whatever opportunities might present themselves. One of my fellow-hikers whispered “no wonder they are so vulnerable to poachers – in a wind like this, a man with a gun can come within SUCH easy striking distance!”
In our average urbanised lives our noses are assaulted by so many aggressive and offensive industrial smells, some of them stinking like sulphur and diesel, some of them the sticky sweetness of artificial perfumes, that in self-defence, we tune out our sense of smell to a significant degree. My sister, a great yachtswoman in her day, told me that when you’re sailing the Indian Ocean, you can smell the Spice Islands days before you can see them. Similarly, she says, you can smell Africa long before it first appears on the horizon. I understood about the Spice Islands because I have been to Zanzibar, but “what does Africa smell like, then?” I asked. “Dust, heat, sweat, blood, musk.”
With all the conveniences of air-conditioning, CD players, coffee cup holders, 4-wheel drive, sunroofs and so on, it has become possible to visit all parts of Kruger even at the height of summer. It is indeed comforting to settle into an air-conditioned vehicle, with the windows up, driving through the sweltering bushveld, cocooned from the heat and dust. But, the closed windows, the noise of the air conditioner, even the delightful coolness of the vehicle, all serve to isolate you from the true bush experience.
Maybe from 100Kms offshore Africa does smell of dust, heat, sweat, blood and musk. However, when you’re right here, surrounded by the African bush, the smells are far more complex and thrilling. The gentle sweetness of the fine purplish blossoms of the apple leaf tree (Lonchocarpus Capassa) evokes memories of tea under a wisteria trellis with a favourite grandmother. The potato bush will catch you unawares. There will be a strong, very familiar smell that reminds you of food without immediately letting on what it is. You will cast back in your memory and will suddenly remember the fresh raw smell of peeled potatoes, perhaps being cut up as French fries (or what in South Africa is known as “slap chips”). THAT is the smell of the potato bush.
But, the most awesome smell is that of a bull elephant in musth. If you’re driving along with the windows open, the air-conditioning and the CD player silent, idly watching the landscape drift by, and then gradually a feeling of dread and thrill, revulsion and desire wells up within you, it will have been brought on by this smell. Slow down and look out carefully for a large elephant. And, when you find him, notice the streams of fluid running down the sides of his face. They start at his temples, sort of midway between his eye and his ear canal. THAT is the source of the smell.
Imagine, if you can smell it long before seeing him, and if it causes such feelings of arousal and revulsion and restlessness in you, a member of a totally different species, what effect that smell must have on other elephants. From the simple act of driving with your windows open, you may see an elephant you may otherwise not have noticed, and you are lead into pondering the lives of elephants as you drive on, rather than dwelling on the normal worries of your civilised world.
Even if you visit Kruger in the winter months, you may find your car’s air conditioner a welcome relief in the middle of the day. The argument for opening up to the smells and sounds of Kruger is not an argument for punishment through heat exhaustion. By all means enjoy the mod cons of your car if you’re travelling in the heat of the day, but allow yourself the luxury of the smells and sounds in the early mornings and late afternoons. In this way, you will hear the excitable chatter of the arrowmarked babblers long before you see them clustering in a tree by the side of the road.
Or, if you visit during their mating season, you may hear the very strange clack-clack-clack-peep-peep-peep of the redcrested korhaan. And, once you hear it, stop the car and look around quickly, not at the ground, but in the air above where the sound came from. Chances are that you will see a male korhaan shoot straight up in the air, and then suddenly drop, as though shot. He tumbles to the ground as you watch, aghast, and then you thrill as he opens up his wings at the last possible moment, and stops the free-fall. What woman can resist a courting ritual like that?
Upon your return to camp, someone will likely ask you whether you’ve “seen anything”. They probably mean lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos. You say “yes, a redcrested korhaan and some arrowmarked babblers and a chameleon crossing the road. (And, what you think was a 2000-year old ironwood tree (Combretum Imberbe), with its organ-pipe branches pointing up into the sky, evocative of a Bach fugue playing full blast in a glorious European cathedral.” They say “Oh. Bad luck: we saw LIONS.”
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