There’s a kids joke about how do you know if an elephant has been in your fridge? – footprints in the butter – that brings to mind what is happening at Nxai Pan this month. We have actually closed the camp for routine maintenance, but the majority of that routine maintenance has to do with elephants, their rather large feet, and their water consumption.
Take 1 x elephant. Place in smallish puddle of water. Check resulting effect. Now multiply by a few thousand and multiply by five years. Resulting effect = one large Olympic-size mud bath.
When you build a camp, there are always things you can learn. One of them is how to better design a waterhole so that all animals can drink, and not just the big grey water bullies who are only second to humans in their talent at adapting their environment on a grand scale. Five years down the track, and its time for a re-design: a shallower, concrete bowl that will allow all access, and no major mud baths or excavations. Naturally, we can’t shut off the water supply in the driest time of the year, so a temporary waterhole was constructed whilst work continued to rehabilitate the original one. The first few days required a lot of looking over the shoulder until word got around about the temporary drinking spot…. But by the end of the month, there was a lovely, large, flattish pan, allowing access to all, and christened with its first elephant dropping…
With not much wildlife news from Nxai, perhaps Kwando’s Maun office can feature in this month’s sightings report? Not wanting to feel left out, but paling by comparison with their bush counterparts, wildlife sightings from the windows of Maun office this month have included: donkeys, cows, one horse, a large black rooster that parades up and down the foot path looking for love, and a herd of goats. Predators include the local pack of dogs, and the latest addition to the Kwando Safaris payrolled employees: Hunter the Cat. Actually an abandoned three week old kitten that was found in the neighbourhood, he has been tasked – once he grows a bit – with pest control of any mice that may desire to inhabit the warehouse.
Word of the Basarwa tracker’s prowess at bird-trap design on the walks at Tau and Nxai Pan has obviously got back to the Maun staff. A dove was discovered in the warehouse one morning, and no amount of opening of doors and flapping of arms by the operations manager was going to get it out. A couple of hours later, and the ops assistant walks in to the main office, proudly displaying a very comfortable looking dove in his hands – he’d constructed a humane bird-trap, and was able to release it back into the blue sky!
