On Safari: Yes, the Greatest

On Safari: Yes, the Greatest

The great landscapes of Africa are incapable of being shown on a photo.  The dots behind Mort and Jared are some of the half million animals then on the veld.
The great landscapes of Africa are incapable of being shown on a photo. The dots behind Mort and Jared are some of the half million animals then on the veld.
Our game viewing was exceptional, as I expect at this time of the year, but what was uniquely special was lingering for so long among the great herds, truly the greatest wildlife spectacle on earth.

Yes, we saw hundreds if not thousands of the world’s largest mammal and hundreds of its largest antelope, the eland, and dozens of its smallest, the dik-dik.

Yes, we saw Africa’s smallest owl, the pearl-spotted owlet; a mating dance of Africa’s largest owls, the Verreaux Eagle Owl; and the rare and funny crepuscular marsh owl hopping among the thick grass.

Yes, we saw nearly 50 lion and several kills, and yes, we watched a male cheetah stalk, run, kill and eat a baby wildebeest.

Thank goodness Peter is so strong!
Thank goodness Peter is so strong!
We saw hundreds of hippos and lots of crocs, 16 black rhino, goshawks and bateleurs hunting, giraffes galore, warthog and jackal (three kinds) and lots and lots of menacing hyena.

We saw a really weird white rupell’s (Nubian) vulture (which I’ve never seen before since the bird is always black) and at least a dozen bat-eared fox, steenbok, reedbok and even oribi. Waterbuck, impala, buffalo, grants gazelle, oodles of ostrich and we were inundated with erupting termite mounds after a heavy rain.

But what I’ll remember is the great migration.

The “great migration” is a much misused term, and I admit to being one of the most egregious users. Many tens of thousands of kinds of animals migrate, and each migration is different.

Some animal migrations like with most birds are precise and predictable, year after year. Many more, as with the great wildebeest migration, are triggered by available food sources and much less precise.

In the case of the great migration through the Serengeti ecosystem, 1½ million white-bearded gnu (wildebeest) constantly move in search of better grasslands. But sometimes I think they just move because that’s how they’re hard-wired.

I’ve often seen tens of thousands of wilde leave a beautiful area of new grass with no earthly reason why or linger among the dust when the horizon is filled with rain.

Each year’s wilde migration is different. Roughly clockwise, roughly beginning in the southern Serengeti with the birth of new wilde, they’re joined by more than a half million zebra in a year’s trek north and back south again, following the better grasslands which bloom with the rains that slowly recede into Lake Victoria.

The entire first half of the year in Tanzania is the bountiful rainy season that draws them to the southern grassland plains of the Serengeti. There the young ones feast on nutrient grasses, growing strong enough for a raced migration north when the rains stop.

But where exactly in this 2000 sq. mile southern plains area the millions of wilde and zebra are at any given moment is impossible to predict.

They could be scattered in groups of twenty thousand in twenty different places. They could be spread out, 100 to the mile, when the grazing is at its optimum.

Or, as with us this year, they could be concentrated. I think the entire two million plus animals are right now concentrated in an area hardly 20 miles long by about ten miles wide in the south eastern Serengeti.

We found them the moment we turned into Olduvai having left the crater, and we were among them as we traveled more than 50 miles up and around and back to Lake Ndutu. Until we reached the main Serengeti road, we were driving off-road completely, seeing the entire day a single other vehicle, but millions of animals.

And we were never not surrounded from horizon to horizon by the animals.

It was a migration to be remembered. It was provided by a good measure of luck and a lot of common sense about when the right time and right place to be is. We played the averages, and this time was bingo.

Having lunch about 2000 feet above the grassland plains we could see about 30 miles in all directions. And there it was, mother earth’s greatest wildlife spectacle on earth.
mistoncrater

On Safari: But in the Wild?

On Safari: But in the Wild?

birdonmaxWhy did the rufous-tailed weaver perch on Max’s head? Why did we see 14 black rhinos together? Why were we pinned in the crater’s only forest by over 100 elephant?

The crater has always been outside the wild. This unbelievable natural structure, the remnants of what was once the world’s highest structure ended by what must have been the most catastrophic volcanic event in the history of the planet, has always defied natural balance.

Here was where the British authorities first placed restrictions on how you could hunt. The animals were just too tame, it seemed in he 1950s. It was just too easy to shoot them.

Several times yesterday I had to contain myself from slapping the behind of a zebra, and that ridiculous opportunity has presented itself every one of the hundred times I’ve been to the crater over the last forty years.

Yet when that same zebra walks over the Senego trail out of the crater onto the Olduvai plains, it won’t let us get anywhere near him.

Wild animal behavior, like the mystical micro-climate that dances around the 1800-foot high 37-mile crater rim, defies logic in the crater. Researchers have stopped studying animals in the crater; they just don’t act normally.

But I think that’s presumptive, frankly. What I see from the crater is the more profound fact that nature is no longer in balance and hasn’t been for a long time.

When the Gibb’s guide Pascali took the kids on a forest walk a few days ago, they asked him about the elephants and school houses. He was discreet. He said yes we love the elephants, but we also have to go to school.

The last of the rare lehai, by Dan Peron.
The last of the rare lehai, by Dan Peron.
When I asked Isabelle what a farmer should do when an ele walks over his fields, and when I asked Peter and Max what a school teacher should do when an elephant destroyed his school room, their first immediate response was to “relocate the elephant.”

It’s pretty easy to explain that won’t work. Then, like the rest of the world’s scientists, politicians and lovers of animals, even these American school kids and lovers of animals throw up their hands and ask me, “So what do you do?”

Hybridization of the golden and black-backed jackal probably began here. The last of the world’s greatest elephant with tusks like they’re supposed to be, stretching from a 12-foot high eye down to the ground, will die with the last of the giant tembo in the crater.

The crater is like a wormhole into the future of wilderness. While many casual visitors see the field scientist’s Elysian Fields, it is in fact one of the most stressful places of any wilderness on earth. It’s a moment by moment documentary of the ending of wilderness.

What should we do? Do we shoo the weaver off Max’s head or give it a piece of breakfast muffin? Do we cull the elephants or let them plow down the very last of the beautiful acacia lehai, a tree like none other doomed to extinction?

Do we separate the golden and black-backed jackal the way the Bronx Zoo separates its unintended bird hybrids in the zoo?

Do we add more ranger cars to protect the “wild” black rhino, that would never have dared to stand next to another rhino except to breed but today clusters in “packs” of more than a dozen?

Do we consider, as grandpa Mort suggested in an email he sent around today, that we get rid of all the zoos?

What is to become of the wild?

I really, really don’t know. But I know in this dynamic, stressful and indescribably beautiful crater, there’s a clue. I just don’t get it, yet.

The last of the big tuskers by Steve Taylor.
The last of the big tuskers by Steve Taylor.

On Safari: Old Men Star!

On Safari: Old Men Star!

giant tuskerOf the many animal attractions in Ngorongoro Crater, to me the most precious are the giant old tuskers who will soon be gone.

We saw several of them yesterday and today during our game drives. These are very old men, likely well into their sixties, who descended into the crater during the horrible years of poaching in the 1970s and 1980s.

They came down for the natural protection that the crater afforded them from the well organized and well mechanized corporate poaching of the times that decimated Tanzania’s elephant population in less than a decade.

At the time they were no different than all the rest of the elephant; depending upon how you see it, they were the cowards or the geniuses.

In those horrible years of poaching large helicopters flew over the veld at night with spotlights and bazooka launchers. I would watch them with binoculars from my lodge balcony.

Isabelle & Max watch lions in the crater.
Isabelle & Max watch lions in the crater.
The spots would fall on the veld and a decision would be made that there were enough big tuskers, or not enough. If not enough, the spot went off and the helicopter moved off. If enough, the bazookas were fired, the nets lowered, and the ivory harvested.

It was so regular and routine that in a short time only elephants with no tusks or small tusks were left in the population. Except for the several dozen that went into the crater.

The crater isn’t a good habitat for elephant: there aren’t enough trees and bushes, it’s mostly grass. But over the years the big tuskers learned to survive on that and well after the years of horrible poaching ended, they remained down in the crater.

When finally the poaching had been controlled, other elephants began to descend into the crater as the elephant population rebounded at the same time that their habitat was diminishing.

But, unfortunately, the old men were no longer interested in the females that came down. Their genes weren’t propagated.

Most of the old men have died off, now. Only a few of the sort we were fortunate enough to see remain.

Of course our game drives in the crater included much more than these old guys. We saw a couple dozen lion and lots of cubs, dozens of hyaena, thousands of wildebeest, zebra and gazelle; plus eland, hartebeest, baboon and many birds. A lot of the European migrants have yet to leave.

The crater never fails!

On Safari: No Pain No Gain!

On Safari: No Pain No Gain!

manyara.675Manyara is one of the most visited parks in Tanzania, but maybe 1% or less of the visitors ever get to where we did yesterday.

Lake Manyara is one of the most beautiful parks on the circuit. Even though it’s very small and very near urban areas, it’s carved out of the cliffs of the Great Rift Valley and as a result has an enormous variety of habitat.

The park begins with the great salt lake, Manyara, usually filled with flamingoes, then runs over small plains with zebra and giraffe and buffalo, into forests that scale the cliffs with a greater variety of trees than are found in temperate zones a thousand times its size.

But because the park is so narrow, there are only two main tracks for visitors (with numerous small circuits that meander out from the main tracks to the lake shore and back).

Almost all visitors go in the main gate, travel down the park a bit, then turn around (usually at the maji moto site) and exit the same way. We, instead, had an adventure to remember!

We went overland through little seen areas at the park’s far southern edge. We had to traverse some beautiful, busy rice paddy villages and sugarcane farms and on roads that were hard to believe were ever used by anything but cows!

nopainnogain.675And many cows and gates were using them!

We had to cross two rivers that were a bit tricky. Fortunately for the first there were boys who we hired to walk in front of the cars to make sure the river bed was solid. But for the second river, too remote inside the park, we had to chance it!

And then there were times that the “road” disappeared. We had to get out of the car and walk as the vehicles navigated farmland.

But as they say, “No Pain, No Gain.” It was a ten-hour, sometimes arduous trip, but the southern and hardly ever visited part of the park is actually its most beautiful section.

We saw fabulous waterfalls, thick forests, thousands of zebra and tens of thousands of flamingoes.

And as always with Manyara, the highlight was the baboon. The density of baboon in Manyara is unbelievable. And a second highlight was the enormous variety of birds. We even got good views of weavers nesting, as this is just the time as the rains start up in earnest.

What a grand time! And by the way, parents, it was the kids who did best, constantly enthusiastic. Ten-year old Peter was cheering us through the river crossings as if he were at a football match routing for his team.

On to the crater!

On Safari: Not Dead in The Track!

On Safari: Not Dead in The Track!

LevinFamilyOnSafariThe Levin Family, all 8 of them; their outstanding guide, me; and the finest of safari vehicles and drivers, mine — were stopped dead in their tracks by a creature that weighs about 3 ounces.

The family arrived Tanzania in high spirits after having successfully navigated the calamitous winter weather of home. We spent the night at Lake Duluti Lodge after a late dinner, and grandfather Mort was certain that everyone would be down at the break of dawn to get going.

He was. And I was down only about a half hour later, and the two of us enjoyed wonderful hours of conversation while the family slept in. But we left on time, on our quick little neat charter from Arusha into the middle of Tarangire National Park, and before they woke up from their plane ride we were among elephants.

The rains have been normal and predictable this year, and the elephant population in the south where we landed isn’t quite as spectacular as it will become in a couple of months, but still the best in Africa. And shortly after lunch at Silale Swamp we came across a lioness and her four cubs, which we were to learn the next day was actually two litters of two cubs each, with one lioness babysitting while the other was out hunting.

Plus many more assorted elephant and lots of impala and then a beautiful Oliver’s Camp with an excellent meal. And great conversation and anticipation of the next day’s grand excursion to the far north of the park where the elephant population is resident and always exceptional.

So after a wonderful night’s sleep with lions roaring and thunder and lightning in the far distance, and for most of the night, birds singing because the moon is so bright, everyone was raring to go.

We raced back to the Silale Swamp picnic site, seeing assorted giraffe, hartebeest, gazelle, jackal and of course lots of elephant, and stopped for a pit stop when the little beast conquered the day.

There is one old gnarled and not very big acacia tree above the parking area to the picnic site, and as everyone was out of the car, a juvenile green mamba (about half size) fell onto the ground.

Great commotion as basically the poor creature skidded all over the sand while everyone was carefully watching it from a distance. But then I shouted to everyone to get into the car as I got worried about too much attention to the thing.

And then…
…it climbed into the undercarriage of the car.

So I screamed to Jared and Peter to get out of the car they’d just got into, and remarkably, Peter had in that short time already taken off his sneakers so he was a tad bit delayed.

Obviously, it was trying to climb back up, but there was the car, instead of the tree. The green mamba is a tree snake, not very large, not deadly but very poisonous.

We tried to tease it out and saw its tail and head, where the certain identification of red eyes confirmed mamba. Eight-year old Max was the first to confirm this, as I gently held him an appropriate distance from the car.

So what to do. Neither I nor either of my great drivers had ever had this experience in 40 years. On the one hand this snake, hardly 2½-feet long and probably two-thirds mature, packs plenty of venom to kill a tree rodent. And its mouth can hardly fit around anything larger than a tiny shrew.

Were it to bite a person, unheard of by any of us, the person would indeed get sick and hurt seriously, but it would not be life threatening. But that isn’t exactly what grandpa had in mine for the family vacation.

So with clients properly distanced, Bariki drove the vehicle back and forth into the grass, but the little devil wouldn’t come out.

After insect spray, stick throwing, water flushing and considerable amounts of cursing in Swahili, we were defeated.

Yes, if you’re wondering, a snake that thin could find numerous ways to sneak into the cabin of the car from the floorboard. And if it did, it would have a single motive: to climb upwards to where it normally lives, and it would not be able to discern too easily between a tree trunk or a human leg.

So the family piled into one Landrover with Tumaini, and Bariki and I drove back to camp where the vehicle was raised, flushed with water and kerosene and cans and cans of DOOM. Snake-free certified for tomorrow!

On Safari: Bottoms Up!

On Safari: Bottoms Up!

beeronsafariYou might not find a lion. You might strike out on the migration. But you’ll never not be able to end the day with finding a good beer!

Good beer is something East Africa has had since colonial days, and for good reason, of course. The colonists were some of the finest brew makers in the world.

In the very early days, of course, the Cape of Good Hope was a “vitualling station” for the long voyages to Asia. Vitualling, or victualling, or however you want to apply a Herman Melville accent to a nonword, was how sailors recouped and if possible, prevented scurvy.

So you ate fruits. And since water was never ever safe to drink, you drank wine and beer!

Beer in East Africa in every epoch has been less expensive per glass than a similar amount of fresh fruit juice.

Today it’s about 80% the cost, but in the olden days it was far higher. Fruit was plentiful, but the individual efforts of squeezing were never mechanized or industrialized as quickly as beer making.

And long before the original Coors or later good microbreweries, East Africa’s brew was the best!

The two champions are Tusker in Kenya and Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. Both are considered very IPA in today’s race for depth and color, and both are moderate in alcohol content.

But what strikes me as so important is that they haven’t changed. In all the 40 years I’ve been living and coming here, they taste as good and exactly as good as they always have.

(Don’t think that new Tusker import stuff does it, either.)

So just remember that no matter how your day goes on safari, it can always end perfectly!

On Safari! The Journey Begins!

On Safari! The Journey Begins!

ele under kili.farrand.432.mar07On Safari! Today I begin seven weeks in Africa! You can follow my exploits, adventures and guiding into sub-Saharan Africa in this space!

It’s not empirical. It’s not academic or logical. It’s mostly subjective, when the best time to do anything or go anywhere is. Moreover even after you determine “the best time,” your situation might preclude you from enjoying it.

You might want to get pregnant or expecting your first grandchild! You might be planning a grand celebration for your 50th wedding anniversary! Your job … that, by all reckoning, is the most influential … your job might just not give you the windows you need.

Over my forty years of working in travel, and actually traveling, I’ve learned that “best time” is a priority rarely achieved. In my case, best time is linked to the wilderness and the animals, but that’s linked to the weather … and as you know, that’s in serious flux.
dancers_ostrich.samburu
And finally, hopefully your home – as is mine, and my favorite places in Africa – have wonderful things about them all year long. Otherwise, why would they be your home or your “favorites?”

This is where the African mentality is so much better than the American. Americans like everything in crisp, little decisions: black and white, yes and no. I think that’s a dangerously poor way to lead your life.

Technically in most African languages, including Swahili, there is no direct translation to the English words, “Yes” or “No.” And that’s the way it should be. Everything in life is relative: “likely” or “unlikely,” “better” or “worse.” But, really, not “best.”

So while I’m heading off on my preplannned “best times” for safaris, it’s much less important as a motivation than it used to be.

I’m starting in East Africa where I’ll be guiding two safaris in my favorite places in northern Tanzania, with the crowning splendor of the Serengeti in both cases.

And then I move to southern Africa to guide a wonderful group of mostly veterans for nearly a week in The Cape followed by Botswana (at a super great time to be there) and finally, Victoria Falls.

Not a bad life, eh?

You can join me, at least vicariously, by following this space!

(Top photo by Stephen Farrand; side photo by Ann Hendrickson … both while on EWT safaris.)

Spring is Here

Spring is Here

novioletbulawayoWith my own novel set in Africa now being published, I was incredibly chagrined to meet (through her writings) Noviolet Bulawayo, certainly Africa’s best writer by far.

In my book, Chasm Gorge, I try to paint a story in the troubled areas of northern Kenya and southern Sudan, but I’m necessarily doing it as an outsider.

Ms. Bulawayo is an insider, and for so long I’ve been waiting for an African writer to step forward and tell “it like it is.”

There’s no holes barred in her tales set in very troubled Zimbabwe. She is reticent about linking these tales to politics which irritates me, but I’m sure folks will find my linkages overbearing and irritating in the reverse way.

It’s been a long time coming. Until now, in my opinion, African writers have been harnessed to their colonial past, extremely reluctant to call a spade a spade, a racist gang of African thugs a racist gang of African thugs.

But that’s what Ms. Bulawayo does.

The market for African literature has been dominated by either landscape artists or patient, wise old men. Africa has been considerably more complex than that for several generations. But except for a few hiphop artists now behind bars in Angola, African artists have shied away from the controversial nature of their uniquely personal trials.

Thirty years and a half continent divide myself from Ms. Bulawayo, yet I’ll be so immodest as to suggest we share a couple things, the most important being a love of African languages.

In creating my novel, Chasm Gorge, there were many who criticized what I felt was the relatively sparse use of Swahili without further explanation in the text.

As one of my characters points out in the book, “There’s no poetry in the language” of the west. But Africa is filled with it. You don’t have to study iambic pentameter to be a poet. You just have to say hello and goodbye.

Ms. Bulawayo was criticized when returning to southern Africa from her studies in America for “not having an American accent,” something that is an increasingly stylish component of an African educated abroad.

Fessing up to the personal struggle of leaving her home to become educated in order to better understand her home, Ms. Bulawayo told This Day, “I have to look backward at home with a new set of eyes that have made me embrace my language as a true identity.”

At the ripe age of 33, she has won more awards – in both Africa and the west – than most writers could hope for in a life time.

Her newest book, We Need New Names, is available on Amazon.

It’s hardly over. The promising future of her writing, that is. It is definitely over, the winter of no real African writing.

Good Godwana!

Good Godwana!

pafight“And in Ring 3 the battle of the century!” Oh, sorry, of “the millennia!” Nope. “Of the Milli-Millennia!”

When scientists duke it out in public it’s either for prestige or money, and the two are usually inextricably tied together. This is particularly true of paleoanthropology which has little contemporary use; it’s not going to lead to a new food or power source.

It’s pure science in the finest form.

So getting funds for the often expensive work that today includes super computers and treasured super MRIs is extremely competitive.

The battle today is between ardipithecus ramidus (Tim White, U.S.) and kenyanthropus platyops (Meave Leakey, Kenya).

Frankly, I find it maudlin how similar this public war appears to the one duked out between Meave Leakey’s husband, Richard, and Tim White’s former boss, Donald Johanson, thirty-five years ago.

It’s made maudlin mostly by maudlin Tim White, who as he has grown in experience has shrunk in stature becoming nearly reclusive and guarding his science like buried treasure.

But Meave Leakey is not without the streak of vengeance that makes this such a soap opera.

Here’s the crux of the issue (which in my mind has long since been resolved in Meave’s favor):

Does the paleontological evidence we have today (the old bones of early man) point to a more linear or more branching form of evolution?

This makes me so weary. It’s sort of like asking, Is there really global warming?

Back in the 1980s the argument was more crisply viewed, I admit. And back then, with much less money available, it was as much a battle for survival as publicity.

Back then, Donald Johanson using mostly his great find, Lucy, pronounced that humankind evolved on a step-by-step, clear timeline, from one old type of man to another, to ourselves, and that every bone ever found was one of our ancestors. Line.

Richard Leakey in a characteristic chortling and antagonistic reply, necessarily using several of his finds said Johanson was crazy, that multiple kinds of early men lived simultaneously and that they were so different they couldn’t interbreed:

I.E., all the bones of early man represented multiple, maybe dozens, maybe hundreds of different creatures all “trying” to evolve into humankind and the vast majority dying out. Branch.

Today the argument doesn’t have quite the religious implications that existed in the 1980s when there was so much less fossil evidence.

White is not arguing that branching didn’t occur. But he is claiming to have drawn the line through existing fossil evidence from the earliest ancestor to us, and the key link is of course one of his finds, Ardi.

Meave Leakey, on the other hand, says that’s balderdash, that the existing fossil evidence is just by common sense such a scant portion of what actually existed, that it would be simply mathematically absurd to presume we have already found the links from the oldest to us.

Moreover, in a paper published last month in Nature, she claimed that a find she made nearly more than a decade ago is an old man that lived simultaneously with White’s Ardi but was so different it couldn’t interbreed even though it appears more “human” than White’s!

White immediately claimed Leakey’s analysis was flawed because it’s in such bad condition, and that her old man was actually the same species as his.

This is why Vanity Fair first published the definitive background to the early paleontologists rather than Science Today.

White is wrong, but Leakey’s current attempt to show him so is way too presumptive.

It’s a shame, because these are two remarkable scientists. This year Leakey became the first woman and first Kenyan to be voted into the National Academy of Sciences. White (also a member of the Academy) has a detail of field work that is mind-boggling: perhaps that’s why he never married or had a family.

But there’s neither enough fossil evidence or grant money for the two to share. And I’ll bet you three million years from now when their skulls are found, not even our future super wizards are going to be able to tell them apart.

Be Good to A Samaritan!

Be Good to A Samaritan!

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, say some. Others? Perfect example of cooptive liberation. Confused? Read on.

There are good and bad everything, although readers of this space know that I think most charities are bad. I argue that most charities afford a way that their supporters can believe they’re doing good, when they aren’t really, or when the amount of good that the supporters’ resources could have done is squandered.

And so believing that they are saving the world, the supporters of the charity lose interest in their own governments’ foreign aid programs. Worse, they start to believe they can do everything well that really it takes a huge government to do.

Ergo, charter schools, pay-as-you highways, subcontracted prisons and the list goes on and on.

I’ve said it so much, but here goes again:

The world is too big and too complex to be run by a school committee.

The problem is that often the governments, as is the case in the U.S. today, are shrinking and able to do less and less. So what the old aid agencies used to do be able to do with their own staff, they can’t, because they don’t have enough staff.

So they hire a contractor … an “NGO” – nongovernmental organization. They are, in effect, hiring a charity.

At this point things often get squandered just as hopelessly as they do with a individual church or Rotary project.

“Samaritans” is a fabulous new TV comedy series that takes my feelings to the sarcastic extreme. It’s hilarious.

It explains so perfectly Herbert Marcuse’s “cooptive liberation” concept while keeping you laughing at each moment. The creator told AfricaIsACountry recently that he was inspired when he learned of a charity in the U.S. that held an auction to raise money to save the rhino.

The auction was of a rhino hunt in Namibia.

The other story, of course, is how professional Kenya’s entertainment industry has become. Conceived, written, produced, directed and using Kenyan actors. Incredible accomplishment and as good or better than most stuff we see here at home.

Ever since Buzzfeed carried the story last month the show has gone viral.

You can rent the first two episodes for as little as $5! Click here.

Take a look! Then, please, take a think.

Crocs vs. Crazies

Crocs vs. Crazies

creationistsFor literally hundreds of years we thought there was only one kind of crocodile in Africa, the great Nile beast. Anyone care there are really seven kinds?

Univ. of Florida researcher Matthew Shirley recently announced the fourth new species of crocodile to be found in Africa in the last five years.

As explained to the common man by Scientific America, it was “discovered in plain sight.”

What the magazine means is that the slender snouted Guinean crocodile was not stealthily uncovered in a long forgotten grotto. It had been known for centuries. It was just wrongly classified as the same beast regularly seen as far as a half continent away.

Using the increasing DNA technology that is developing a lot faster than improvements in the Dreamliner, more and more animals thought to be the same thing are being shown as diverged species.

But who cares? Does it really matter?

Very much. It adds each day to the already overwhelming evidence of evolution and some day the threshold must be reached where naysayers are simply laughed at and fade away.

It is been a continual embarrassment to me traveling often abroad to discuss one of my most favorite topics, evolution, because I’m an American. Of the most recent survey of the world’s most developed countries, the U.S. and Turkey were the least to believe in evolution.

Dig deeper and you’ll find in more comprehensive studies that in Muslim countries there is little support for evolution. In other words, our evangelicals and Iran’s jihadists are bedfellows.

The simple-minded and stubborn, clinging to a dying past, embrace a fantasy that their own personal creation was divine. That way, they don’t have to think about it. And unfortunately for America it’s a very stubborn situation.

Why, I’m being newly asked, is American coming round to support same sex marriage but not evolution?

Because evolution doesn’t vote. It has no lobbying group in Congress. Most simply, it’s not alive.

It’s not possible to see and contrast evolution in the moment. So the less educated person is let off the hook. Evidence is not instantly observational. It’s more subtle and in fact, profound.

So thank you Matthew Shirley for continuing to expand the bulging libraries of evidence for evolution.

Some day it will become big enough for even the smallest of minds to grasp.
creationgraph

Let the Safari Begin!

Let the Safari Begin!


The safari calendar in East Africa resets each year at the end of November, and the news that has poured in from our safaris just keeps getting better and better. 2014 may be an exceptionally outstanding year for safaris!

The latest bit came from safari traveler Loren Smith traveling on a safari EWT arranged for the Cleveland Zoological Society. You can see Loren’s fabulous video above.

The first is the only disturbing one: there continue to be too many elephants, but let me get that single negative out quickly. I’ve been warning of a growing elephant conflict for more than a decade in East Africa. My blogs are replete with the problems and endless attempts at solutions.

The “elephant problem” has become a political problem in East Africa. Candidates for political office in both Kenya and Tanzania now often have planks in their platform regarding what to do about elephants.

My concern is that there will be overreach. And as I’ve often written, the exaggeration and bad analysis of the elephant poaching problem in the west isn’t helping.

But I can assure you that on safari the effect is nothing less than exhilarating as you can tell from Loren’s video. I show minute:second time points below in the video corresponding to my remarks:

0:10
Loren traveled in the last half of February, which over the last forty years of good climate statistics suggests should be much drier than shown in his first shots in Arusha National Park.

Typically the entire first half of the year is a wet season in northern Tanzania, but in February the precipitation abates at times almost completely. If you were planning your trip strictly by statistics, Loren’s video would have had little green in it.

Global warming has been changing this steadily for almost a decade, and as you can see by the green bushes, it’s not dry.

It’s hard for animals to be affected negatively by too much rain. But it definitely affects people, and that’s been one of the continuing stories in the equatorial regions of the planet as global warming progresses.

0:45
Tarangire is bit drier, which is always the case. Arusha is the wilderness around Africa’s 5th highest mountain and when it’s wet, it’s always wetter there. Tarangire is actually an ecosystem more similar to southern Africa than East Africa and is the only northern Tanzanian wilderness defined by a sand river ecology.

1:04
This lady has just eaten and washed herself off, which is why she is so close to the water in Silale Swamp. We can speculate about the three new lacerations on her hide. Two are just above her left hip and if you watch closely you’ll actually see a larger one on the far backside, middle of her left hip.

Lions gorge themselves when eating. Their very inferior molars are almost useless. They don’t chew much. They tear and swallow huge hunks of meat. A 400-pound male lion can easily chow down 70 pounds in a sitting. That extends the belly and makes it droop and is often confused in females as being pregnant.

So what caused the problem? We can only speculate but I think she was in a tussle with hyaenas, and the lacerations are the hyaena nips. In this area of the Silale Swamp there are four very grand males and for some reason they aren’t very welcoming of females. It could also have been a fight with the males.

Tarangire is actually where I think the best elephant experiences should be had, but Loren obviously had a fabulous one at nearby Lake Manyara National Park!

1:33
Notice the small tusks on this elephant, the legacy of the horrible years of elephant poaching in the 1970s and 1980s. As the video progresses we’ll see some better and longer tusks, because the elephant population is definitely on the increase and growing healthier.

Manyara was where the very first substantial elephant research was carried out in the 1950s by the famous Ian Douglas Hamilton. In those days there was no place on earth with as many and as healthy elephants as Manyara.

3:18
Junior here has a short branch in the back of his mouth. Elephant get a new set of molars about every ten years and like all good kids, he’s got to massage those tender gums!

4:36
What we see in Loren’s video is a large mass of transitory elephants: they’re moving through Manyara. They don’t live here as Hamilton’s elephants did in the last century. You can tell this by the way many multiple families are grouped together.

In a totally calm and balanced system, elephant families tend not to group. But when they’re on the move they do.

Tarangire provides a massive corridor to elephants south into central Tanzania’s great wildernesses of Ruaha and Rukwa. They move northwest from Tarangire into Manyara, and from Manyara they moved in very narrow corridors into Ngorongoro where they can then spread out widely into the Serengeti and Mara.

It isn’t that elephant are breeding so rapidly that their numbers are bulging. Poaching has been on the increase and the growth rate of the population is not high. But human encroachment is on a rapid increase, so their habitat is shrinking.

And more than ever, they have to move. Loren’s video is a magnificent documentary of this.

6:12
Until recently Ngorongoro Crater had the highest density of lion in Africa, but we need new studies since the rapid decline in lion was documented a few years ago. Even so, it is probably still one of the best places on earth to see lion.

These are two juvenile males, and despite their bravado they’re having a hard time. Look at their bellies and then look at their muddy feet. Lion like cats all over hate water.

Something was in the marsh that seemed like easy pickings, but they even missed that.

In a balanced population in the wild there are many fewer males than female lions. This is because so many young juveniles like these die of starvation. Unlike the sisters in their litter, they aren’t taught to hunt by the mothers.

But also unlike their sisters who usually remain with the mothers, the males are kicked out before they’re fully mature. A fully mature male is 50% bigger than a female, and nature’s way among lions to avoid inbreeding is to kick out the teenage males before they get as big as mom.

They have to teach themselves to hunt. Obviously enough learn, but these kids don’t seem to be doing so well. You might think what a pretty mane the one has. What I notice is their ribs and boney haunches. When the one starts to call, I think that’s a real hunger pain or possibly a pointless message to Mom for help.

7:50
The video ends in the central Serengeti and notice how wet the track is. Good for the critters to be sure. Not so good for the farmers.

Thanks Loren for an outstanding quick story of Tanzania’s wilderness in 2014!

Sunset over the Serengeti

Sunset over the Serengeti

SErengetiSunsetOld people often bemoan the dwindling frontiers of their youth: barefoot in the unregulated playground, the unhelmeted motorcycle ride, 3/2 beer, the willing mortgage banker, silent partners … and me?

The diminishing wild.

It’s been very difficult the last decade in particular watching the stress on the frontiers of the wild, especially in East Africa. So far they’ve held their own, but the ramparts are trembling.

And you can see what’s coming, what will replace the truly unmanaged wild.

Private reserves. Some of them are quite good.

Most are in South Africa, but East Africa has a very famous one that has been around for nearly 30 years, Lewa Downs.

Private reserves have existed in South Africa for actually more than a century, but you can really argue that Lewa was the dawn of a new era when private reserves were not mostly for hunting, but for protecting game.

Lewa began with 5,000 acres in Kenya’s beautiful northern frontier just north of Mt. Kenya, where the few remaining wild black rhino still roamed. The owners and investors of the ranch rounded up as many rhino as they could, and they’ve protected and farmed them ever since.

Today Lewa is 40,000 acres, mostly a not-for-profit conservation organization and proudly boasts of 62 free-ranging black rhinos. The reserve contains all Kenya’s big wild game, all within a massive, fenced wilderness that in many respects would not differ from the wild outside its borders, except that there is less poaching.

Lewa is adjacent the natural home of the very rare and critically endangered Grevy’s zebra, and so Lewa is now the Grevy’s principal hope for survival.

With several tourist camps built within the reserve, field science facilities and a growing endowment Lewa is now the premiere private reserve in East Africa, and a model for all of Africa.

But … it isn’t the wild I remember.
lionpanoclipped
In South Africa private non-hunting reserves proliferate and are much more commercial and (financially) successful than in East Africa.

I am amazed, for example, with the speed with which the “Garden Route” has turned into a private wilderness.

Well nicknamed, the Garden Route is the coastal stretch between The Cape and Port Elizabeth. In times past it was known for its laid-back resortiness, spectacular coast and world-famous cliff walks (like the Otter Trail). Not unlike the coast from San Francisco to Mendocino.

The area did not have big game wilderness. In fact by the 1930s an official South African game count put the total big game remaining in an area the size of Maryland at 11 elephant. But as with much of undeveloped coastal California, as soon as you leave the coastal strip, there is wild land.

So in 1931 the South African government created a new wilderness out of nothing just off the coast, with the idea of repopulating it with big game. Today Addo Elephant Park has 450 elephant, as many for its size (630 sq. miles) as Kenya’s still totally wild Amboseli National Park.

But it’s not the wild, as not only is the exterior fenced, but there are sections within the fenced park that are fenced again, to protect certain species.

But the park has been so successful that a few years ago some of these internal fences were removed and even more exciting, cats have finally been introduced. Until just a few years ago the park was cat-free, managed to protect endangered species.

The “reintroduction” of predation into this man-made ecosystem will trigger the management of the park to more or less “lay off” the until now strict culling that had been employed. In a sense, the South Africans are trying with some critical success to wild-up a previously unwild area.

And all around Addo have developed many private non-hunting reserves, each usually dedicated to protecting one set of species or another. The Lalibela Game Reserve, for example, is specific to the protect of smaller cats like serval and sand.

I hope Addo’s patient, slow rewilding works. And I commend enormously Lewa and enjoy even the tinier places like Lalibela.

But every time I step onto my secret hills in the Serengeti, looking over miles and miles of undeveloped, roadless wilderness, I bemoan its coming to an end. I’m just an old man nostalgic for the dwindling frontiers of my youth.

We’re All Guilty

We’re All Guilty

pistoriusWhether Oscar Pistorius intentionally murdered his girlfriend or not, better than anyone he embodies the deep racism in many South African whites.

That’s hard for me to say, for two reasons in particular. First, I don’t think anyone anywhere is completely free of racism. Second, I personally know several white South Africans who eclipse Rev. Al Sharpton politically and socially.

And there are many, many more – perhaps a majority in some places like The Cape – who are far less racist than a random community in Texas.

But what the world is seeing in Oscar Pistorius’ life trial is a perfect reflection of racism.

If he is the premeditated murderer the prosecution contends, the anger that fueled such action followed by an attempt to disguise it as a reflexive response to a presumed home invader, is about two millimeters if that apart from Florida’s stand-your-ground laws.

And that, my friends, is racism through and through.

Yes, he’s also a murderer then as well, but my point is to show how deep and pervasive racism among some whites still is.

If on the other hand his self-defense defense isn’t a gimmick, but for real, that also reveals a trigger-happy mentality to shoot anything black in the dark.

I really have no sense whether Pistorius is guilty or not. My friends in South Africa are split, as I expect many friends and acquaintances of the growing number of self-defense accused in Florida are.

And South Africa, I believe, is trying to deal with racism a lot better than Florida is.

The South African Human Rights Commission is one of the best and most efficient mediators of racism on earth, a stand-out in a country built on such stellar principles, that is today in other respects breaking up miserably.

The commission reports of 10,000 cases it investigates annually, 80% are of racism.

Bad actions driven by racism are terribly tragic. They often reveal the schizoid nature of an individual who is racist, pitting a loving soul against a hating one, in the same body.

We like to think the loving soul will be the stronger, but it often isn’t.

Racism doesn’t begin willfully. Ending it requires great will, but the point at which someone’s behavior is governed by racism is not a conscious choice.

Their family, their community, their schools all contribute to creating a mind-set that makes judgments reflexively. Moments of life-and-death push racism to its extreme, because in such instants it’s hard to reflect carefully.

So whatever the Pistorius outcome is, it will likely be as incomplete and unsatisfying as the outcome of the George Zimmerman case. And guilt will never surely be known except for one thing:

The actions and the outcomes were determined no more by facts than racism.