Murchison Falls wildlife

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Murchison Falls wildlife
Monday, July 31 2017

location: Paraa Safari Lodge, Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda

We had to get up at 6:00am so we could eat an early breakfast and then head out into the park for a game drive. The critters are more active in the morning, so that's when you want to do it. Our vans had special detachable tops that could be raised or otherwise gotten out of the way, allowing occupants to stand up in the back and look out with an unobstructed view. Gretchen and I rode in the van with the bigger detachable roof along with both the kids and their mother (who never wants to be far away; you never know when they might try to flee). [REDACTED] Our drive started from a gate into the wilderness near the lodge, and form there we more or less went north of and parallel to the river, though far enough away from it that all we saw was veldt and savanna. There had been baboons at the gate, but the first wild animals of the drive were water bucks, then the long-faced Jackson's Hartebeast and a variety of antellope such as the gentle-seeming Kobb Antelope or the small oribi antelope with a black dot next to its ear, a dot that nobody asked about or felt the need to explain. Within twenty minutes, we'd seen our first elephants and giraffes, which were off in the distance, but which we were soon able to approach because of the way the road system worked. We managed to snap some good pictures of giraffes (I got as many as six within a single frame), though the elephants were more elusive. There was one elephant right there on the road, but she was very old and had a front right foot that was grossly swollen with disease. She walked on it without bending any of its joints as she did her usual elephant things, which always involved eating greenery in its many forms and flapping her hears. She grown thin, probably from inability to eat as much as she normally would do to the uncomfortable foot. But as a wild animal, all she could do was soldier on.

Further west, we passed across shallow vales in the savanna so densely peopled with antelope that they looked almost like paintings by Hieronymus Bosch. Occasionally there would be groups of cape buffalo or even the odd hyena. There was also a long stretch of road dominated by vervet monkeys. But it was antelope that made up the bulk of the visible animalia. So many things depend on grass (as opposed to other vegetation) that it made sense for the landscape to be a grassland, even though it was likely to revert to a dense jungle were the giraffes and elephants to go extinct. They're the main consumers of non-grass vegetation.

At some point someone saw a lion. It probably wasn't one of our drivers, but they may have been told where to look by the driver of another van. As vans pass one another, their drivers have quick conversations in the Luganda language, and I had a feeling they were mostly about what animals to look for. So there we were, stopped on the road, scanning the bush to the south for something tawny against the greens, yellows, and rusty reds of the landscape. Eventually I saw the lion, though it was so far away I could really only tell it was a lion by the way it moved. Still, I managed to get a good photograph with the 42x zoom of my Nikon camera. (I almost didn't bring it on this trip!) At some point all the gathered vans (and there were four or five that had stopped to see the lion) suddenly went off-road and drove over to where the lions had last been seen. We eventually were parked beside a bush, where our driver insisted one of the lions was hiding. It was hard to see at first, but then I saw her: her huge lion face was visible between the branches. Unfortunately, the battery on my camera was now exhausted. Then all of us sudden we had to drive away from the lion and back to the road. Our being off-road was illegal, and a stern-looking park ranger had just driven up. Evidently there are no actual fines for such transgressions, and so the drivers, hoping for big tips, are perfectly willing to flaunt the rules when there's a lion to be seen.

We sat there on the side of the road near the lion for awhile, partly because one or more in our party needed to urinate in bush. Eventually the lion (and she was actually a very pregnant lioness) came out from wherever she was hiding and walked across the road in front of us only a hundred feet away and then continued north, seeming to stalk various antelope along the way (those who saw her were sure to alert their friends with loud snorts). None of the antelope seemed unaware of the lion, and any who felt the need to escape the area did so with elaborate displays of stotting, as if to say "you can't even catch me in your dreams."

We drove all the way to the the Nile's delta, where it empties into Lake Albert. There we got out and walked down to the water, where we could see a school of hippos about fifty feet out in the water. There were also herons, egrets, and other riparian lifeforms.

The drive back to the lodge was along a different route for parts of it, allowing us to see new things (example: a crowned eagle feeding on a dead baby antelope and a hunting jackal). I was also much more aware this time of all the skeletons littering the savanna. After passing an airstrip, we were once more on the road we'd been on on our way out. (Interestingly, the grass was much longer within the fence surrounding that airstrip.) We passed through "Monkeytown" and got a second look at the lame old elephant; we had to wait while it got out of the road so we could pass. Finally, as we returned to the gate near the lodge, we passed a number of water buck.

Following yet another buffet lunch featuring rice and curry, we went off to our afternoon activity: a boat ride up the Nile to the falls. We climbed aboard a boat at the ferry landing and then headed east (upstream). Roger, the boat operator, was also an effective naturalist with a good eye. It wasn't long before we saw first one school of hippos and then another. And then there was a giraffe standing like a sculpture on a broad lowland adjacent to the river. Roger said it was an old giraffe, as indicated by the darkness of the reticulate pattern on its back. Evidently giraffes standing around doing nothing on lowlands near the Nile is a thing, as we would see several more. We also saw an elephant that had recently been swimming. Unlike hippos, elephants can actually swim (according to Roger).

We passed along a high bank along the river and saw dozens of holes had been drilled into it. There were burrows for pied kingfishers and bee eaters, which were flitting about close by but often too energetic to photograph.

Later on we saw crocodiles in a number of places, including one on rock that seemed to be designed specifically for this one individual. He (or she) was so intimate with the rock that it almost look liked some prankster had tiled a crocodile design onto it. There were also some cape buffalo and several pairs of fish eagles, which look a lot like Bald Eagles (they're both in the same sea eagle genus).

At the falls, Roger gave some money to some park staffers at a trailhead that lay at the bottom of a steep stairway (I don't know what that was about). A few of us also got out onto a rocky island where there wasn't much to do except pose in front of the roaring water to the east.

I mostly napped on the boat ride home, trying to keep to shade as much as possible. I hadn't applied much or any sunscreen and been exposed to a lot of sun, though I must have had a good base tan because I didn't end up getting burned much at all.