Botswana: Moremi Game Reserve / Okavango Delta

DAY TWO

🦁 Morning Game Drive — Into Moremi Proper

We had a very full and busy day of game drives lined up. The morning session would take us inside the Moremi Game Reserve itself, and it was here that we really got to grips with what makes this place so exceptional.

Moremi was the first reserve in Africa to be established by indigenous residents themselves, rather than by a colonial government or a conservation organisation imposed from outside, which makes it rather remarkable. The story goes back to the early 1960s, when the Batawana people of Ngamiland — the region that encompasses what is now Botswana’s North-West District — were watching with growing alarm as wildlife populations in their ancestral lands collapsed. The culprits were twofold: uncontrolled hunting, which included both subsistence poaching and commercial hunting operations, and the steady encroachment of cattle from surrounding farming communities. The Okavango, for all its extraordinary wildness, was under genuine threat. It was at this moment that a remarkable woman stepped forward. The widow of the late Chief Moremi III — known simply as Mrs Moremi, or Regina Moremi — took the bold and historically unprecedented initiative of persuading the Batawana people to formally proclaim Moremi a protected game reserve in 1963. She worked alongside the Fauna Preservation Society and Botswana’s newly independent government (independence came in 1966, so this predated it) to bring the reserve into being. Chief’s Island, the great raised landmass at the heart of the delta, was added to the reserve in the 1970s, incorporating the royal hunting grounds that had historically been the preserve of Batawana chiefs. Moremi remains to this day the only officially protected area within the entire Okavango Delta ecosystem, covering approximately 3,900 square kilometres where the permanent delta meets drier woodland. It is, by any measure, one of the great conservation success stories of the African continent.

Moremi Game Reserve occupies the central and eastern areas of the Okavango Delta, encompassing both the Moremi Tongue — the long peninsula of land that juts northward into the delta — and Chief’s Island, which at roughly 70 kilometres long is one of the largest inland islands in the world. The ecosystem here is one of the most biodiverse on the continent: all naturally occurring herbivore and carnivore species of the region are present, the birdlife runs to well over 400 recorded species (with some sources citing more than 500), and the plant life encompasses more than a thousand species. Both the black rhinoceros and white rhinoceros have been re-introduced to the reserve in recent years, following their historical extirpation, which means Moremi can now legitimately claim Big Five status — lion, elephant, leopard, buffalo and rhino all resident within its boundaries. The landscape itself is a mosaic of seasonal and perennial floodplains, permanent waterways, lagoons, reed-fringed channels, grassland pans and dense mopane woodland, all of which makes for extraordinarily varied and rewarding game viewing.

🌊 The Waters of the Okavango

From the Khwai Guest House we had to cross over the same ramshackle bridge we’d been over the day before, which had lost absolutely none of its character overnight. Our driver and guide took us into a section of the reserve we hadn’t passed through during our accidental transit the previous day. Most of that terrain had been dry, flat and fairly arid mopane scrub, which is beautiful in its own way but doesn’t exactly teem with wildlife. The section we entered now was a completely different world. Here the waters of the Okavango Delta had pushed out into ponds, channels and slow-moving rivers, creating a wetland environment that attracted wildlife from kilometres around. The Okavango River itself rises in the Angolan highlands — the Bié Plateau — and flows some 1,700 kilometres south-east into the Kalahari basin, where it fans out into the famous inland delta rather than reaching any sea. This happens because the delta sits in a geological depression called a graben, formed by tectonic activity along the East African Rift system, and there’s nowhere for the water to go except to spread out, soak in and evaporate. The result is one of the largest inland deltas on Earth, covering roughly 15,000 square kilometres in the wet season, and it is this extraordinary annual flood — arriving between June and August, paradoxically at the height of the dry season — that drives the entire ecosystem. The water we were looking at, pooled in pans and channels across the reserve, was the tail end of that flood, and it was proving a very great attraction indeed.

🦅 Raptors on the Roadside

The first things we spotted of real interest were a large tawny eagle sitting on the side of the road as if it owned the place — which, in fairness, it rather did — and close by, perched magnificently above the waterline, an African fish eagle. The tawny eagle (Aquila rapax) is one of Africa’s most widespread large raptors, found across the continent from Mauritania to South Africa, and it is a bird that has adapted remarkably well to a variety of habitats including the semi-arid savannah and the wetland margins of the delta. It is, it should be said, not above a spot of kleptoparasitism — nicking the kills of other birds — which is perhaps the avian equivalent of nipping in and taking someone else’s taxi. The African fish eagle (Haliaeetus vocifer), by contrast, has a rather more distinguished reputation. Its call — that extraordinary, wild, carrying cry — is arguably the most evocative sound in all of Africa and has been used as the national symbol of Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Sudan. It is a sound that, once heard echoing across an African waterway at dawn, you absolutely never forget. We sat and watched both birds for longer than was strictly necessary, which is precisely what one should do in these circumstances.

🐃 The Buffalo Herd — With Free Passengers

Not far beyond the two raptors, we came across our first proper large-mammal sighting of the day: a breeding herd of Cape buffalo (Syncerus caffer caffer) grazing along the road margin and into the adjacent scrub. During our time travelling in Africa on this trip and on previous journeys, we had developed what one might charitably call a healthy respect for Cape buffalo. They are among the most dangerous animals on the continent — considerably more so than lions in terms of the number of people they kill annually, which sits somewhere between two and four hundred deaths per year across Africa — and they have a deeply unpleasant habit of circling back to ambush a hunter or perceived threat rather than simply running away. However, a relaxed breeding herd in open terrain, accustomed to game drive vehicles, is an entirely different proposition, and these animals were perfectly calm. The herd was right next to the road, so we moved carefully past them and they showed absolutely no sign of being bothered by our presence. Enjoying the ride on the backs of several buffalo were oxpeckers — both the red-billed and yellow-billed species are common in the delta — and a scatter of cattle egrets, all of them engaged in the mutually beneficial business of removing ticks, flies and other parasites from the buffalo’s thick, mud-caked hide. The buffalo get a free pest-control service; the birds get a meal. Nobody’s complaining.

🦛 Wetland Life — Lechwe, Waterbuck and Extraordinary Birds

Even though there had been no meaningful rainfall for many months — we were well into the dry season by late September — the waterways and channels retained generous volumes of water from the Okavango flood, and the whole place hummed with life. The antelope, zebras and waterfowl seemed very much at home. There was a particularly pleasing abundance of lechwe, an antelope we hadn’t seen all that frequently elsewhere on this trip but which are almost perfectly designed for the Okavango environment. The red lechwe (Kobus leche leche) is found almost exclusively in and around the Okavango and Chobe systems in Botswana, as well as in parts of Zambia, and it is one of the most perfectly adapted semi-aquatic antelope in the world. Its hooves are splayed to give purchase on muddy ground, its hindquarters are higher than its shoulders to allow efficient movement through shallow water, and it spends much of its day standing knee-deep in floodplain channels, feeding on aquatic grasses. Botswana holds the largest population in the world, estimated at around 80,000 individuals. And there was, of course, the ubiquitous waterbuck (Kobus ellipsiprymnus), that large, shaggy antelope with the distinctive white ring on its rump that looks as though it sat down on a freshly painted toilet seat — a joke that never gets old, trust us. The birdlife around the water was quite simply the finest collection we encountered anywhere on the entire African leg of our travels. We saw saddle-billed storks, those extraordinary, multi-coloured giants that stand nearly a metre and a half tall; wattled cranes (Bugeranus carunculatus), which are the largest crane species in Africa at up to 1.75 metres in height and are classified as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List with fewer than 8,000 individuals remaining worldwide; open-billed storks; yellow-billed storks; marabou storks in their slightly sinister, undertaker-esque way; great white pelicans; and a variety of whistling ducks. By the water’s edge we also picked out several species of bee-eater, the most spectacular of which was the carmine bee-eater (Merops nubicinus), arguably the most beautiful bird in southern Africa, with its deep crimson body, turquoise head and long, trailing central tail feathers. We sat watching them dart and wheel for rather a long time.

🐘 Elephants Take Charge

Our peaceful enjoyment of the waterbirds was rather emphatically interrupted by the arrival of a large herd of African bush elephants (Loxodonta africana) from deep in the mopane woodland. There were many females and a good number of calves of various ages, which is the classic structure of an elephant family unit — matriarchal groups of related females with their offspring, led by the oldest and most experienced female. The bull elephants mostly live separate, solitary lives or in small bachelor groups, coming together with the breeding herds only during musth. These animals utterly own the Okavango, and it is impossible to overstate how completely they dominate the landscape. Botswana has the largest elephant population of any country in the world — estimates suggest somewhere between 130,000 and 150,000 individuals, roughly a third of the entire African elephant population — and the Okavango-Chobe ecosystem is the beating heart of that population. When a herd of this size decides it wants to cross the road you happen to be parked on, there is precisely one appropriate response, which is to sit quietly and wait for them to do so. We could do nothing but wait for them to pass by us, which we did with enormous pleasure. Of course we were delighted to sit there and watch them. You’d have to be made of particularly stern stuff not to be.

☕ Elevenses in the Bush (and an Unexpected Antelope)

It had been a good few hours since we’d left the guest house, so it was break time. This being a guided safari rather than us blundering about on our own, our guide had rather more say in the matter of where we stopped than we did, and he found us a suitably shaded spot with good bush cover all around, which served the dual purpose of providing shade and offering those who needed it somewhere to answer the call of nature in relative privacy. Despite being firmly in the Botswana bush, it did feel reasonably safe with ten of us gathered in a group — safari guides will tell you that the risk from predators when you’re stationary and making noise is considerably lower than people imagine. That said, the prospect of wandering off alone behind a mopane tree for a wee was another question entirely, and one we approached with a degree of caution and a nervous look over the shoulder. Our guide produced a flask of hot water for tea and coffee, and a box of rather good snacks, and we sat about in the shade in the thoroughly English tradition of stopping for elevenses regardless of what continent you happen to be on.

While we were enjoying our break, one of our group spotted a different antelope a short distance off — another species I hadn’t seen before this trip, the common tsessebe (Damaliscus lunatus lunatus). The tsessebe has a somewhat comical appearance, looking rather like a hartebeest that has been assembled slightly carelessly, with a long, oddly angled face and a hump over the shoulders that gives it a permanently puzzled look. What it lacks in conventional good looks it more than compensates for in pure athletic ability: the tsessebe is the fastest antelope in Africa and one of the fastest land animals on the continent, capable of reaching speeds of up to 90 kilometres per hour in short bursts. When pursued by a predator, it can maintain 70 km/h for extended periods, which is the reason lion hunts targeting tsessebe are generally unsuccessful affairs. We watched it trot about for a while, feeling vaguely unfit by comparison, before our guide called time on elevenses and we headed back to the Khwai Guest House for lunch.