Inside Mopani Rest Camp in the Kruger National Park grows a most impressive specimen of a Baobab, which has now been selected as a nesting site by a pair of barn owls. During the day they remain well hidden, but during a night-time walkabout we were thrilled to see one of the pair pluck a thick-knee out of the air in mid-flight!
The Kruger National Park has a list just short of 500 bird species recorded there. Many of these are summer migrants, while a few others are rare vagrants to these parts. Even in winter however, the Park abounds with feathered life, and here’s just a few of the 115 species we managed to tick in our recent eight day visit to the Satara and Mopani areas of the Park.
When out and about in the Kruger National Park, even in winter, there’s always a chance of spying some cold-blooded creatures, many of them extremely dangerous to humans!
Our winter visit to the Kruger National Park, suffering through one of the worst droughts to hit it in recorded history, provided several excellent sightings of some of the predators for which the Park is renowned. While many of the herbivores are finding survival difficult now with limited water and grazing, the predators are having a royal time, as the movement of prey revolves predictably around the remaining water sources where they can be easily ambushed.
The Satara area of the Park is well known for excellent predator sightings, and the guided night drive we took part in there delivered lions, hyenas, black-backed and side-striped jackals and two leopard sightings!
Even just walking around the fenceline at Satara could provide close encounters with dangerous predators, though 99.9% of the time seperated by an electrified fence. Spotted hyenas are to be found on most nights, as visitors often feed them scraps from their evening meals. The reason why this is illegal is because the animals become very bold beggars, which often ends in tragedy for the hyenas and sometimes also for the human visitors, as evidenced by a hyena attacking a teenager when it somehow found its way into Crocodile Bridge recently. We therefore expected to find hyenas on our evening walkabouts and weren’t disappointed, but the leopard that unexpectedly appeared in the glare of our spotlight near Satara’s entrance gate, safely on the other side of the fence, caused us great excitement!
With the Kruger National Park in the drought’s firm grip, we weren’t surprised that the majority of our sightings of Plains Zebra during our recent winter visit to the Satara and Mopani areas were near or at some of the artificial water holes maintained by the Park’s staff. The most spectacular congregations were at the Mooiplaas waterhole, where hundreds of zebras (if not more) milled around the water during the midday hours, kicking up dust (often further exacerbated by strong winds) and getting on each other’s nerves.
Probably due to the prevailing drought, we encountered very few buffalo in the five days we spent around Satara during our winter visit to the Kruger National Park. However, that all changed when we moved northwards to Mopani, where better winter grazing seems to have attracted even more of the huge herds of these bulky beasts than we would normally have expected to see in that region.
The Kruger National Park is experiencing one of the worst droughts in recorded history, and the Satara area of the Park seems to be the worst affected of all.
Of course, this has a tremendous impact on the water dependent hippopotamus. While there are still substantial pools of water remaining in man-made dams, stream and the large rivers, the lack of rain has meant that the available grazing around these water sources has been drastically denuded, causing the hippos to have to travel further and further to satisfy their considerable daily food requirement. For the first time I can remember, we encountered hippos spending the heat of the day out in the open veld, miles away from the nearest water.
On the second day of our winter 2016 visit, we noticed a hippo that had succumbed to the drought lying in a pool in the Nwanetsi River, just a few kilometers from Satara along the S100-road. Knowing that the carcass would soon start attracting predators intent on an easy meal, we decided to visit the sighting again that evening. Sure enough, we arrived to find a fairly large crocodile tearing at the bloating body. When the rest of the hippo pod occupying the pool started moving closer, we thought we were going to see them attack the crocodile to try and defend their fallen comrade. Bot nothing. They plodded past, barely giving the unfolding events a passing glance, almost as if resigned to the fact that they too will likely meet their end in this fashion, and leaving the crocodile to go about his gory business…
Harrowing as it was to witness, we had to remind ourselves that drought, and the deaths of the animals too old or weak to cope with the demands made by the difficult circumstances, is a part of the natural cycle in a wilderness like Kruger. We passed the same pool in the Nwanetsi again on our last afternoon at Satara, only to find that another emaciated member of this particular herd of hippos had lost the battle.
Before we get to some of the more dramatic stuff, let’s share a few funny shots taken during our recent winter visit to Satara and Mopani in the Kruger National Park.
We thought we’d start the report back on our recent (winter 2016) visit to Satara and Mopani in the Kruger National Park by sharing a few of photos of some of the cute babies we encountered on our drives.
I think this sad spotted hyena mimicked our own facial expressions as we passed her on the way from Mopani Rest Camp to Phalaborwa Gate this morning.
We’ve returned to Pretoria with thousands of photos from our latest trip to the Kruger National Park, and of course we’ll be selecting the best of those to share with our friends here at de Wets Wild in the coming weeks.
DeWetsWild 