An African Adventure Part 2
Tracking Animals at Vumbra
By: John T. Braun
The difference between Vumbra and our first camp, King’s Pool was immediately apparent. Whereas King’s pool was full of low trees and shrubs, Vumbra had a lot of open plains. King’s pool was close to a river, but opposite the camp from that river, the landscape was very dry. Vumbra is essentially on a wetland. Animals seemed to keep with their own around King’s Pool, where we saw a lot of mixed herds and areas that had a number of different animals in attendance.
As before, we had a bit of a drive from an airstrip to get to Vumbra. The camp is different in some of the details, but the hospitality and guidelines are the same.
Walkways are elevated, and “tents” are still not really tents. This one has a sunken living room, huge open air shower and some really cool modern/bush decorating.
Some of the game drives were a mix though. We missed the morning drive where a cheetah was seen. A cheetah sighting is rare, so, we spent that evening’s drive, and the next morning’s looking for the same cheetah. No avail. The drive actually got a bit boring after bobbing up and down through tall grass and over sugar-sand roads. We did have a fantastic evening drive on the second day though. Having decided to cut this drive down to about two hours, we were pleasantly surprised by all that we saw…including a couple of elephant herds, a rare sable antelope and two waterbuck sparring.
On the final day, we departed as usual. The plan was to check on the cheetah again, and then a leopard. On our way, O.B., our guide, spotted some lion tracks following the road a bit before turning into the bush. We had already seen a herd of cape horn buffalo, and knew that they had crossed the same road some ways up. So, we continued up the road to the buffalo crossing to see if the lions had crossed with them. They did not, so we turned into the bush, driving through dense scrub, looking for more tracks.
We exited again on yet another road, and found two more sets of lion prints from another direction. Translation…there was two pairs of lions in the brush between the two roads that we had driven on. Further in the bush, we found some zebra tracks. This animal appears to have been running…perhaps from some lions? Further still, some 45 minutes into this track, O.B. knew we were close. How? He could smell the lions! That’s right; O.B. claimed that he could smell the lions. Imagine how my pessimism evaporated when not three minutes later, we spotted the lions. Four of them. And a dead zebra! Amazing.
Just a note here…we’ve learned, in no uncertain terms, that in nature, the circle of life has a brutal finality to it. There is no mercy among the players. Fate is handed down with a fierce certainty. Mourning among some animals actually does occur, but there is no recourse. Indeed, nature’s rules are inflexible and inevitable.
While we were on the game drive, several others were out as well. At any given time, four or five jeeps might be out and about looking for action. The guides driving these jeeps work together to track animals, and share information so that everyone might have a chance to see the animals too. We had the lion kill scene to ourselves for about 30 minutes before another jeep showed up. In that time, we determined that the zebra had been dead for a couple of hours. The lions had buried its guts already in an attempt to delay the scent of death from reaching other predators and scavengers. We also saw one of the lions drag the carcass from under a bush to right behind our jeep! We were literally within four feet of these lions as they moved about and fed. It was incredible.
African Adventure Part III - Tracking Animals at Vumbura
