Sometimes you are just lucky. We stood watching four lionesses dozing. They weren’t moving. There wasn’t time to look for anything else before the light went. So I just took a few photos for practice, when one got up, shook herself a bit and then did a lazy stretch. She looked like she could do with a cup of coffee. If it is a promise of action that you want, that diagonal is exactly it.
Intrigued, I looked through the photos I took that day in Masai Mara. In that absolutely flat landscape how many diagonals did I manage to include in my photos? A zebra’s haunches not only provide bold diagonals, they are also the biggest contrast in that dusty tan landscape. The occasional Acacia provides the only vertical in the landscape, and the necks of giraffes are another angle. An elephant’s trunk and a lioness’ neck provide more gentle slopes to keep your eye from getting bored. Interesting how much your hand does unconsciously when you train it.
Sunrise in Masai Mara shows the seemingly unending plains, with thousands of blue wildebeest and plains zebras grazing together. I want to be traveling again. A series of place names run through my head as I see these old photos. This image should do nicely for the announcement that I will take a blogging break for a couple of weeks. Things that I postponed for a year need to be done. In the last five days I have not been able to connect to around a third of the blogs that I tried to visit. I hope this glitch is fixed by the time I am back.
The famous opening phrase of L.P. Hartley’s novel, The Go-Between, came to mind when my photos app reminded me of where I was a year ago: Maasai Mara National Reserve in Kenya. The phrase was apparently first used by Hartley’s friend, David Cecil, in a lecture in 1949. We all plagiarize our past, and I am nostalgic enough about having lived in that foreign planet where travel was easy, to post this video today.
Tourism made up approximately 10% of Kenya’s GDP in the past decade, with some year-to-year variation. The shock that COVID-19 has had on travel however will have much wider impact than this number suggests. According to a study commissioned by the World Bank it’ll impact the net earning of the rural poor by almost 15%, of the government by about 10%, and of enterprises by a number more or less midway between these. These huge impacts are similar to what is happening across the world.
On our way out of the Maasai Mara National Reserve we passed through a little airstrip in the bush. The land here was so flat that the two striped windsocks mounted on poles were visible for half an hour as we looked for secretary birds and lilac breasted rollers. When we pulled up to the airstrip I found that it was a busy place, full of planes landing and taking off every few minutes.
It would be a hard fate to go down in the memory of one’s friends as having been tripped up by a wandering zebra. “Tried to take off and hit a zebra!” It lacks even the dignity of crashing into an anthill.
Beryl Markham in West with the Night
I was still reading Beryl Markham’s memoirs of flying in the early days of amateur flights in Kenya, when amateurs like her would sometimes be the only means of bringing dying adventurers from the bush to Nairobi. This strip was nothing like her descriptions of airstrips in the bush. No zebra or wildebeest would find anything to nibble on within a kilometer. I looked at the Landrovers lined up, glanced at the Maasai market in one corner, soaked up the chatter in French, Bengali, English, and Swahili, heard the continuous roar of engines, and realized that a hundred years had changed everything. There are several such airstrips in the reserve, and, if you fly in, then you land on the one closest to your hotel. It saves you a five hour trip if you come in from Nairobi, more from Mombasa.
I took a last few shots of the little hut that served as the control tower, and got into Stephen’s Landrover. There was a long trip ahead of us, and I was looking forward to it. I hadn’t had a good look at the trees in this patch of land on our way in. I was also looking forward to passing through the busy town of Narok again; it had looked charmless, but I love roadside towns.
There is a legend that elephant dispose of their dead in secret burial grounds and that none of them has ever been discovered.
Beryl Markham in West with the Night
A thin layer of clouds crept over the sun, and I cursed my luck. It was just before the golden hour, and the light, instead of turning a brilliant gold, had turned watery and hellish. But then, as the wind turned, and a stench of rotten flesh hit my nose, I looked around and saw this tree full of vultures. What a moody and atmospheric shot this was, I thought, perhaps just right for the cover of a book on the Mongol invasion of the world, or perhaps the Black Death. But what we saw, as Stephen turned the Landrover upwind towards the source of the stench, was something totally unexpected.
The story of Tarzan of the Apes involves an elephant graveyard and its treasure of ivory. We know today that stories of elephant graveyards were just myths. But even the scale of a single dead elephant boggles the mind if you ever come across it. Every species of scavenging bird we’d seen in the Mara triangle seemed to be here in large numbers. As we watched a large white-backed vulture emerged from under the skin of the cadaver. It was clear that we had arrived very late. The mammal scavengers had already come and gone. The stench told us that bacteria had started breaking down the flesh. After the birds, insects would arrive to clear the little that remained. The elephant had almost completed the cycle of nature, returning its flesh to the rest of the ecosystem.
A lot of wildlife watching is a matter of luck. You can try to bias the dice in your favour by various means. Our guide Stephen had kept the radio on, and was listening in on conversations between Landrovers across the Maasai Mara, hoping to pick up pointers on which way to go to see something interesting. As he sped along, I saw a weird line across the horizon.
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You can see how it developed. Sometimes the dice come up sixes for you, and you get to see something you had never even heard of.
The afternoon’s drive seemed to be dedicated to lions. There are less than a hundred lions in the Mara triangle, but we must have seen around ten of them in a few hours. The most interesting one was this lonely adult male which had managed to kill a wildebeest just before we saw it. It was in the bush next to where we’d parked the previous evening to watch wildebeest cross a stream. From its short and very blonde mane, we concluded that it was young and stressed, so we left it to eat in peace and went on.
Later in the evening, we swung by to the same spot. The lion had had its fill, and it sat by the Mara and gazed contentedly at the scene in front of it. Do we exist only because we think? Animals teach us that this Cartesian notion is false. Without romanticizing, I believe, from all the accounts that I have read from hunters, that animals have a sense of self and absolutely definitely strive to live. Lions will hunt to eat when they feel hungry, growl when they feel threatened, walk away when they are disturbed. After they have eaten their fill, why would they not sit down in content and look out at their surroundings with a quiet sense of satisfaction? This one glanced around to see the noisy things which had crept up behind it, and then went back to gazing ahead. I took a photo of its face as it turned. It was stained dark with the blood of its kill. A lion has a sense of its own life, but not of the life of its food.
After we’d left the lion to its kill and driven ahead, we came on a pair of lionesses sitting in a little hollow in some rocks, near a trickle of water. They also looked content. There was a minor gathering of Landrovers, full of people taking photos. We joined them, and watching the lionesses lying at ease I realized that tourists have changed their behaviour. These wild creatures now accept smelly and noisy Landrovers as something harmless. If the game wardens were to disappear one day, how many lions would be killed before they became wary again?
Finally, just as the horizon came level with the sun, we came back to the group which had been defeated by Cape buffaloes earlier in the day. The lions seemed asleep, but the lionesses were just beginning to wake. As we watched, they opened their eyes. One by one they got up and stretched, and then walked into the grass. The three buffaloes had been grazing here all afternoon, and, by their looks, were ready to settle down for the night. But as the lionesses walked past them, one of them got up and chased after the trio (you can just about see the tawny lionesses behind the tall grass in front of the buffalo, and to its left). As the three lionesses ran away, the buffalo still stood, making sure they were going. This was the last sight we saw as darkness fell. An African day was over.
In India I’ve grown used to seeing a couple of lapwings, and it was great to be in a new continent where I doubled my count. I first saw the African wattled lapwing (Vanellus senegallus, featured photo) near a small waterhole. Lapwings are waders, as you can tell by their long legs, but it is not uncommon to find them walking in fields. I got this photo as it walked along the track that a Landrover had taken.
It took me quite some work to identify the white-faced whistling duck (Dendrocygna viduata) that you see in the photo above. You say you don’t see them? That is because you haven’t yet read the small print in the field guide which says “the face may be stained due to contact with muddy water.” They are the ones with the tall black necks, looking entirely unlike most photos you find on the web. The other ducks there are Hottentot teals (Spatula hottentota). I don’t know why these two species are so closely associated here. Is that normal? I wouldn’t know unless I see them more often, or talk to a local expert. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do either.
The red-necked spurfowl (Pternistis afer) is supposed to be common, but we saw a group of them only once. I later realized that I did a good thing in taking many shots, because a look at its red feet was needed to clinch the identification. The grey-breasted francolin looks pretty similar. Although its habitat is a little more southwards, it is always possible to have a vagrant bird or two.
I saw this bush pipit (Anthus caffer) in a, yes, bush right next to the trail. Stephen hit the brakes instantly when I said I wanted a photo. Luckily I took many as it looked around, and hopped about in the bush. I find pipits and larks hard to identify; they have strongly patterned feathers, and you have to notice little details to tell the species without making mistakes. In a new continent without a bird guide, the only way out was to take lots of photos, and hope one had enough details to sit down with later.
I’d seen a yellow-billed stork (Mycteria ibis) just as the wildebeest started crossing the Mara river, and not managed to take a good photo. So I was very happy to see one again as we left the Mara triangle on our way back to Nairobi. This time the light was good, and the photo came out sharp.
What can one say about the cheetah that is not already very well known? Once widespread across Asia and Africa, the sleek animal has held the land speed record for about a million years. The superbly graceful animal, which gets its common name from a Hindi dialect word for painted, is now extinct across Asia, except for a small holdout population in Iran. IUCN classes them as vulnerable, but with about 6,500 adults alive, and a 95% infant and juvenile mortality, could this be a hope and a prayer rather than a cool-headed estimate of the chances for its future?
Stephen listened carefully to the radio chatter, asked a couple of questions, and, after a few false turns, brought us to a tree below which two cheetahs rested. Cheetahs hunt during the day, but this was just around noon, the hottest part of the day. The two took turns to keep watch. as we took a bunch of photos. Given their rarity, I count it an immense bit of luck to have seen them at all. It would have been great to see them walking, and an absolute joy to have seen a chase. But I agreed with The Family when she said “This is wonderful.”
We were hurrying back to the lodge for breakfast when Stephen pointed to the right and brought the Land Rover to a halt. A black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas) stood surveying its surroundings. This was the second time I’d seen this tiny predator. Before I could switch on my camera (it takes geological ages to boot) it had started down-slope. I was not unhappy with the photo I got. I followed it as it walked on, and then sat down in the grass to scratch itself, just like any dog that you might have seen. The bliss on its face as it scratched was amazing. I wondered how closely related are the African black-backed jackals and domestic dogs.
By now the answer is pretty clear. They are in the same family: one that includes old-world dogs, wolves, and jackals. But within this family they are as different as they could be. According to a genetic study, the black-backed jackal is the basal form of this group of animals, meaning that it lies genetically closest to the parent species. Usually this means that its hunting grounds are closest to those of the parent group. The genetically more distant descendants usually diverge from the parent stock as they range further into geographically new territory. If this is true of jackals, wolves, and dogs, then the original canids inhabited East Africa. Coincidentally, this area was also inhabited by the parent group from which we humans come.
Sure enough, fossils show that black-backed jackals have been essentially unchanged for about 2.7 million years. That means that the tool-using Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis, and their successors, Homo erectus, would have seen essentially the same animal that I saw. Could they have taken the first steps to domesticate them? Just as we inherited tool-use, and possibly language, from our progenitor species, could we also have inherited the earliest forms of dogs?
Don't hold your breath 