Zimbabwe Wild Dogs

Category: Random | Date: Oct 28 2008 | By: zimbabwewilddogs

Hi guys,

Paula was asking about our life at the camp….so here’s a little intro to our version of living in the African bush! 

Sometimes I feel like I’m living a civilized life, and sometimes I realise we couldn’t be further from it here in the bush in Zimbabwe. One the one hand, we are privileged to live in a house—it has doors that more-or-less close, and sometimes windows that shut.  It has a backyard with a lawn and a fence around it. Sounds quite citified, doesn’t it?

Inside the lounge/office/dining room (note the radio for communications) :-

But we have a family of wild Warthogs that nip under the fence to graze on the lawn most of the day, and Monkeys and Baboons pass through the garden too. At night Grey Duiker and Bushbuck take the Warthogs’ place, and we see their eyes glowing ghostly in the beams of our flashlights….or is that the eye-shine of a Civet? Inside the house there are all sorts of strange noises that have convinced previous inhabitants that it is haunted. I am warming up to the idea myself. Certainly we share the house with a variety of non-humans. Bats are among them, hanging from the rooves of the bedrooms and leaving little piles of dung on the floor. Last night I was enjoying the song of a particularly loud cricket, only to find when I went to the shower that the reason it was so loud was that it had decided to use the bathroom as a resonating chamber. Everyone’s house has spiders, but perhaps not as many ants’ nests as we have—a couple in the kitchen, a major ant metropolis under this desk, lots elsewhere—and though we’ve tried evicting them, they’ve lived here a lot longer than us and always come back quickly.

There are some lovely lizards here too, and I’m still on the lookout for the snakes and scorpions that I hope I won’t ever get to meet.

And as soon as you open the garden gate, there are the elephant tracks from last night, and apparently sometimes leopard footprints too. When I got up this morning I walked around the outside of the garden fence and found tracks from last night of Jackals, Porcupines, Civets, a Wild Cat, Impala, Genets, Kudu…as well as the Elephants and a variety of ground birds. Of course, I could go on…

Last night I was checking my email (itself surreal in the bush) from the ranch’s office which is maybe 60 metres from our house. It was dark. I heard a leopard ‘coughing’ outside. That and the fear of startling an elephant made my flashlight seem much too dim on the rather unnerving walk home. Rosemary reminded me that you simply do not walk outside the house in the dark in the African bush. In fact, you dont really want to walk outside of your mosquito net at night either…last night I was beseiged by a menacing malarial hum all around my bed…

In Africa, the nature still rules the night. It reminds us that humans haven’t always been the King of the Jungle, and that there are places where other animals still rule the roost. But when daylight comes, enduring the fears of the night seems worthwhile when the long, welcome sunbeams pour into a symphony of tropical bird song. And the friendly Warthogs are back on the lawn. What a world to wake up into!

–Roy

Tags: conservation, life in the bush, research, Wild Dogs, zimbabwe