November 26, 2021

 

Letaba, 0930

 

Friday morning. Morning after Thanksgiving Day in the US.

 

After two nights in Punda Maria, in the far north of the Park, I’ve moved back to Letaba and later today move to Olifants for two days as I work my way back out of the Park. Then, I move to Orpen for a night, which is the staging point for leaving the Park. I’ll do a final pack there, fuel, change tire pressures, etc. and then drive to Eastgate Airport in Hoedspruit, take a flight to OR Tambo, get a PCR test (though it seems like requirements have changed and I’ll have to investigate that), wait 10 hours, take a 16-hour flight to Atlanta, get luggage, go back through security and then take a flight to Tucson and then the hour-and-a-half drive home. It’s one foot in front of the other. And it’s possible I’ll just die of exhaustion.

 

I’m ready to go home. I miss Gina and Tunzi.

 

Punda Maria is a pretty, small camp set in rolling, wooded hills. It’s remote but is considered to have some of the best birding in Africa and I’m guessing that I was the only person in the camp who wasn’t there specifically for birdwatching. I chatted with a couple of birders from Johannesburg on the first evening and they told me that they’d been there to see the pennant-winged nightjar. You should look it up. The males particularly are strikingly marked and during breeding season, and only during breeding season, they grow these long feather pennants on the end of each wing, trailing twice the body length of the bird. The feathers help in securing a mate, as females seem to prefer males with costly and unnecessary adornments. The pennants stay in place for only a short time, a few weeks. 

 

As the birders described seeing this bird, it sounded almost like a religious experience. They had traveled to this camp specifically to see them and the only reliable way to see them was to go on the organized sunset drive to a secret location not accessible to the public. And there, if you’re lucky, you’ll have a few mystical moments.

 

So, I called an audible for the next day.  After weeks of relentlessly driving and looking for something to shoot, I stayed in. Sat and did nothing for the day. But I signed up for the sunset drive. 

 

And so, at 1645, we met at the appointed place - 5 English ladies who’d traveled together here for the birding, 2 birders from South Africa and a couple who never spoke and so kept their identities secret. And in the gathering dusk, off we went, over rough terrain, arriving at the secret spot as it grew increasingly dark. After the ranger checked the area on foot for animals that would kill us, we all alighted and stood quietly in the roadway as it got darker. Fifteen minutes passed and then the ranger, who was a very excitable guy, said, “Shh! Listen!” and we heard the soft call of the male and then saw a flash and another indistinct flash. And then another and another and then finally you could start to make the birds out. There were two males in conflict over territory and they floated and veered over our heads. I’ve never seen anything like it. They didn’t appear real. They floated over us like wraiths, or like some decorative kite.  And after about 10 minutes, it stopped. We waited in the road for a while and then the ranger confirmed that the birds had moved on and invited us to get back on the vehicle to finish the drive.

 

Every one of the birders on the vehicle was satisfied. All had come on this drive (and maybe to Africa) for the sole purpose of seeing this bird, so the rest of the drive was completely anti-climactic and without interest for them. 

 

So, birders…. I love birds. I love how the awareness of birds and their calls and their movement keep me alert and in the present when I’m outside. Every call I hear goes through an automatic algorithm - I know that call and it’s ‘x’, I know that call but can’t identify the bird or, I don’t know that call - what the hell is it? All day, a segment of my brain is devoted to paying attention to birds (even though they’re jerks).  But “birding” …. I don’t have the self-discipline to keep a life list and I’m just not that competitive. These English ladies traveled together as a team and the next day they were headed to Pafuri Camp to participate in a competition where teams count the number of species they can identify in a certain period. Seriously, such a thing happens. I don’t think their general bush knowledge was very strong and I don’t think they were that interested in the connections between nature’s elements (and how termites are at the center of it all). Once they’d checked off “pennant-winged nightjar”, they were focused on going to Pafuri to get the “racket-tail nightjar”.

 

But I don’t mean to sound overly critical, and I’ll tell you that I admire the passion of those ladies and the courage it takes to travel across two continents, in the middle of a global pandemic, to a spot in the middle of the bush in South Africa to clamber onto a game drive vehicle and endure bombardments of termites. They may not look badass, but they are badasses in my book.

 

Next morning was another gloomy, cold, gray day. I left camp at 0600 to begin the long trek south to Letaba. I took a back road that runs east of the main paved (or “tar” here) road, running parallel to the Lebombo Mountains, marking the border with Mozambique. I’d taken this road maybe 12 years ago, and I remember that it was beautiful, and, in this one instance, my memory was right. It’s a beautiful drive and, because it’s a long drive, isolated from the main road, I encountered no other vehicle for hours. After about 8 hours on the road, I rolled into Letaba. Letaba has greened up a lot, and the bush has become even more dense, in the week I’ve been gone. And it’s still packed with elephants.

 

I had a bit of time before gate closure, so I decided to take a short drive on the beautiful S47. But I quickly encountered a massive herd of elephants of all sizes in the dense bush and reversed for a long distance to keep them from filtering in behind me. When I finally got to a place with enough visibility to allow me to stop and think, I decided to go back. It was getting dark, and I really did not want to end up in that dense bush, in the dark, surrounded by breeding herds of elephants. 

 

I did a U-turn, and instead took a short drive down a road south of Letaba that has never produced much for me, except one time when it gave me one of the best leopard sightings I’ve ever had. I felt like the bush owed me one more leopard, but it doesn’t work that way and I came back early and mostly empty handed.

 

This morning, another drive south along the river. Birds continue to be jerks. I found a large troop of baboons, but they were on a mission and they’re kind of jerks too.

 

After breakfast, I head toward Olifants along some route yet to be determined. I’d like to try the S47 again. There’s a leopard somewhere. The thing about making these decisions is, a) you have no information, and b) you can never know if the decision you’ve made is a good one or a bad one. If you end up with an amazing sighting, it’s not because you made a good call. It’s because chance, or some leopard, decided to smile upon you.

 

So, off we go.