Tuesday, July 19, 2022

Cobra(s) in the Container and a Porcupine on the Porch

 I’m cowering in the kitchen (with “baby goat” and Spike, “the dog that’s not our dog”) as Paul and our friend Tim empty out every item in our container (the trailer of a tractor-trailer truck that we use to store camping equipment and valuables). Tim is kitted out in extra-large Hollywood style dark sunglasses, long pants and a long sleeve shirt and armed with our “gentle giant” (long-handled snake catcher) as he goes into our container for the second time in as many days to try to find (and remove) a Mozambican spitting cobra (hence the glasses as they aim for your eyes when they spit their poison). 

 

This particular saga has been going on for several days when Paul first spotted the thick body of a yellowish snake slithering under some jerry cans for fuel and water transport in the back of the container. Getting near the end of the day and my pleading to “NOT GO BACK IN THERE!” (I’ve still got a little PTSD since I almost lost Paul to a wave in early September which broke his neck in three places), he locks the container for the night vowing to “make a plan” tomorrow. 

 

When tomorrow comes, Tim volunteers to go in and see if he can get him out. At 81 years old, he assures me he has less to lose. I think we should abandon all our property and move! 

 

Consulting our snake books that evening (that’s right we have “snake bookS”), Paul convinces himself that while it looked like a (deadly) Cape Cobra, those aren’t really in our area and the book reassures him that Cape Cobras are often confused with (harmless) mole snakes. I treat all snakes as if they could kill me. It seems like a reasonable approach. 

 

So, on day two of the snake saga, Tim goes in looking to remove a “mole snake” with Paul as his back up assistant (much to his chagrin but on my insistence). I’m not sure exactly when they figured out it WASN’T a mole snake…perhaps when it flared its damn cobra hood or maybe when it started spitting what the snake book calls “copious amounts of venom”. The thing was terrifyingly big, defying the 4-5 foot estimate our trusty book tells us it typically is. Trapped in the gentle giant, dragging the remainder of its body down the sandy driveway, its hooded head spitting in all directions, Paul and Tim relocate it outside the ostrich farm and we hose Tim down when he returns before the “skipping necrosis” of its venom starts to rot his flesh or destroy his eyesight. We naively assume that saga is over. 

 

The next morning (day 3 of the snake saga) we begin packing to head off into the bush for a couple nights of camping so that Paul can to do a star show with his two telescopes for clients. I go in the container to grab my duffel bag to pack. I get tent poles, the bedroll, etc. When Paul goes in to get “Lexie” his 10-inch Meade telescope he’s met eye-to-eye with a snake perched on top of the case. What the what! Did the thing come back? Is there a hole in the container it’s sneaking in through? I burst into tears. Pleading my case again to simply abandon our house and all of its contents. There’s really nothing in there that is THAT important! Paul insists he’s going in to try to get it out. I INSIST he is NOT! It’s one thing to think you’re headed in to remove a (harmless) mole snake and another to go BACK into a container to remove a known deadly cobra! 

 

We call Tim. He’s ready this time with the appropriate snake removing costume. They carefully begin removing items from the container. Bedroll, tent, poles, boxes, Jerry cans, tools, nuts, bolts, suitcases, etc. This goes on for hours. They are both sweating like crazy in their closed toed shoes, long pants, long sleeve shirts…Paul even has on giant work gloves that go up past his elbows used to trim thorny bushes. Our yard looks like the container threw up. Everything is sprawled out across our “yard”.

Paul keeps saying, “it’s always the last place you look” and my thought is, of course it is because when you find the poisonous snake, you stop looking! With just about everything out of the container, they are about to give up. Tim is wondering if Paul’s vision is okay after that head knock in the ocean. Maybe he didn’t see what he thought he did. They’ve looked for holes in the container that perhaps the snake came in and out through and there are none. And at the moment they are about to throw in the towel, so to speak, a slight movement in one of the few remaining boxes catches their eyes and there he is! It hurries to conceal itself more, sneaking under a shelving unit. Rods and wood pieces are used to push it out of its hiding place enough to grab it with the gentle giant. The only good thing about snake removal from the container two days in a row is that I had a second chance to video the removal (see below). And, low and behold, it was NOT the same snake but probably its mate, a much smaller male with the classic black bands under its neck. Despite its attempts to escape the box used for transport it TWICE, they get it secured and Tim agrees to drive him far away from the farm and set him free (you couldn’t pay me to get in a car with a deadly snake in a box!). I breathe a (tentative) sigh of relief and we begin the arduous task of putting everything back into the container. 

 




 

We’ve had a lot of activity on the ostrich farm since I arrived in early June. Ostriches have been mating (it is quite the dance, I’m still trying to get a video). Impala come to drink out of a water bucket near our outdoor shower. Elephants have routinely roamed the farm at night eating seedpods of acacia trees, stripping tasty bark off limbs and leaving spoor (tracks) and shin high piles of poop that deter us from making our normal walk around the farm. We check the freshness of the poop piles before cautiously walking down to see the Boro River which filled overnight in mid-June. 

Ostriches waiting to be fed at the fence
     

Impala drinking from water bucket

Flooding of the Boro River




Spike on our daily walks

Sundown brings a six-pack of bush babies emerging from a hollowed-out pole on our porch. The earliest riser looking as curiously at me as I look at him out the window of our living room. After stretching and scaling the beams to the highest point on the porch, they spring into the mopane trees launching themselves in death defying leaps from one tree to the other like popcorn escaping an unlidded pot on a stove. Five going in one direction and the sixth headed in the opposite way for their nocturnal forging. 

 


Bush baby emerging from pole





Things don’t quiet down in the deepest of night as several mornings we awaken to find the metal ostrich feed boxes dragged across the yard and tipped over to release its content for midnight snacking. For the life of us, we cannot imagine what is strong enough to drag the boxes which weighs in at about 25-30 pounds. A honey badger? So, when I’m awoken at night by Spike’s barking, I get up to see what’s happening out there. And, as I peer out the living room window, what do I see? A GIANT porcupine on the porch trying to claw his way into the box. I don’t know why I thought porcupines were the size of large racoon but boy was I surprised to see this thigh high creature standing there (they can weigh in over 50 pounds). I rush back to the bedroom to get Paul up to have a look. He must hear us because as we look in awe at his size, he rattles all of his quills to full height and does what I’m calling the “porcupine shuffle” that would put the best of speed walkers to shame, speed shuffling across the yard and down the path. 

 

Drag marks from porcupine dragging ostrich food bin

 

White Faced Owl

Of course, the biggest animal excitement we’ve had on the farm is the arrival of “baby goat.” (I’m already too attached and can’t bear to give it a real name.) Returning from our morning walk around ten days ago I hear what sounds like a child crying frantically near one of our neighbor’s homes. Following the wail to the source we find a tiny tiny baby goat so small that it’s practically two-dimensional. It still has its umbilical cord attached. I scoop him up in my arms and carry his featherweight body back to our house. We call the farm manager, Joe, who says it showed up yesterday and he has asked around and no one is claiming him. We’ve got to feed him. Joe brings a bottle and nipple, Paul runs to the Agrifeed to buy powdered goat milk and before you know it, I’m bottle feeding a baby goat that follows me around like a dog. 


 







This is not okay!

Spike took out some of his resentment on his toys (the blue bits were an elephant)

Brotherly love

 

Just to be clear, raising a baby goat is a sh*t ton of work (literally). We’re bottle feeding 4-5 times/day. He freaks out if I’m out of his sight (runs around the house screaming for me!). Without Amazon 48-hour delivery, I’m resorting to old dish towels and binder clips fashioned into a diaper (which cut down on some of the mess when he comes in the house). Spike is not so sure about all this… The long-term plan for “baby goat” is to be bottle fed until he can eat on his own (Google says 6-8 weeks) and then hopefully he will join the farm manager’s goat herd. In the meantime, I’m especially enjoying “goat parkour” where he launches himself in jumping fits off any elevated object.  

 

My heart breaks when I think of leaving all my African loves (Paul, Spike and Baby Goat) next week. I really have to stop following in love with things that live in Africa.

 

Monday, June 21, 2021

Loud leopard, mucky mud and a baby boomslang


The night is pitch black and the temperatures pretty darn cold (one morning the weather station we travel with announces 35 degrees!). I open my eyes and see absolutely nothing! I rotate under the weight of several blankets and snuggle up to Paul, who is my own personal heater (my inability to regulate my temperature due to a thyroid issue makes me not well suited for temperatures that swing 50 degrees in a day). Over the evening I hear several creatures just outside our tent. The snap of a branch as lone bull elephant has an evening snack nearby. The whooping dysmelodic call of a hyena, in its singsong way. The honk-wheeze of a hippo in a nearby lagoon, sounding like he’s laughing at an inside joke.  It’s hard to remember the first days of camping in Africa (back in 2007) when I didn’t know who made what noises.

 

For the first couple of nights at our campsite in Savute National Park we hear a leopard making the rounds near our tent. He’s close, but not too close. The call of a leopard is hard to describe. They travel solo and will make a call as they go, identifying their presence (and territory) which approximates rapidly sawing wood with a big handheld saw. It’s an in and out sound that seems to make noise on the inhale and exhale. On our final night, he comes in for a closer inspection. Stealthily he approaches the tent in utter silence. How he manages to get through the carpet of leaves and brush without a rustle of a leaf is beyond me. Just inches from our heads he shouts his call. We freeze! Not a move. All that is separating us is a layer of canvas. We. Don’t. Breathe. For what seems like several minutes. The silence is deafening. We know he is right next to our tent, but we hear nothing. In the morning we find spoor (footprints) practically on the corner stake of the tent. The next time we hear him call, he’s left our immediate vicinity as if he has evaporated and reappeared farther away.

 

Leopard Spoor

Leopard Spoor Right Near the Tent

One of the things Paul struggles most with in the States is the predictability. While some find this comforting, he finds it boring, unchallenging, unstimulating. Being in the bush, you never know what you might encounter on any given day. It might be large herds of giraffe browsing the leaves of tall trees. Or a family of elephants crossing the road – moms, aunts, and a range of young ones. It could be a pride of nine lions up under a shepherd’s tree taking a nap. Their stomachs look empty. They eye our smelly diesel vehicle with curiosity.

 















Some days are more challenging than others. Our task for the week out is to survey the campsites for mobile safaris of HATAB – the Hotel and Tourism Association of Botswana, to see what condition they are in after over a year of pandemic non-use and to check the driving conditions and road accessibility in light of the heavy rainy season. We confirm, for example, the conditions of the bridges in Moremi Game Reserve. First Bridge is passable, Second Bridge you must go around because it needs repair, Third Bridge is completely broken to pieces by rushing waters, and Fourth Bridge we make it across (twice) but some logs are in need of replacing. These bridges are critical to getting around the park. With Third Bridge out, for example, we must backtrack several hours on bumpy sand “roads” to get from one major part of the part to another.

 

Third Bridge


Third Bridge

Third Bridge

Fourth Bridge

Getting around Second Bridge proves particularly challenging (in both directions – we get stuck coming and going!). We make it across several water crossings fairly easily, wheel hubs locked, 4x4 engaged, we splash our way through arriving safely on the other side. But the diversion around Second Bridge is another story. Imagine driving up to a large expanse of mud and water. Several tracks of previous vehicles are evident but it is impossible to know which one to select. If we go to the right, we risk getting stuck in some rather deep mud. If we go left, things look a little better but there is one section of water with no way of determining how deep it goes or what lies beneath the black water. Sometimes Paul will get out of the vehicle and ‘walk the water' to see how high it is and if he sinks but this time there is too much mud  between us and the water to make that trek. So we choose blindly...and badly. We go left and head for the water hoping it’s a quick trip through. We’re grinding our way through the mud and into the water when the nose of the vehicle suddenly submerges and we slam to a stop. Paul is shifting gears, doing his best to see if we can back out of or go farther into and through the water but we are stuck. I mean properly stuck! Water starts to pour in at our feet. The slight tip of the vehicle means Paul’s side of the vehicle is sinking faster than mine. He’s now ankle deep and rising. We spring into action.

 

While I start lifting anything of value up to the dashboard - cell phones, camera, binoculars and grab the mechanism for the winch from the center metal box between us… Paul wiggles his way out from under the steering wheeling and out the window in to the ever-rising black water. I offer to grab his sandals and suggest he take off his pants and shoes so as not to destroy them but he’s out the window before I can get the sentence out. Winch control cable in hand, thigh deep in water, he connects the controls to the winch passes it back to me and grabs the cable from the winch at the front of the vehicle. My job is to push the OUT button while he pulls the cable to the closest small acacia scrub and ties it around. These acacia scrubs are tough. They’ve provided us with winching assistance before and while a betting man would likely put their money on our rather large safari vehicle guessing it would win in a battle of tug of war with an acacia scrub, they would be wrong. Cable secured around the scrub, Paul slogs his way back through mud and water, back through the vehicle window to try to proceed with winching. Equipped with a snorkel, the whole time the vehicle is running and sounding more and more like a submarine. Glug, glug, glug and it struggles to push air out of the exhaust instead of sucking air in, at which point we’d be in big trouble.

 

Successfully back behind the steering wheel, Paul begins to try to give her gas and steer us while I now press the IN button on the winch control and we are slowly dragged out of the muddy water filled hole we’ve been stuck in, by the sheer strength of the steel cable and a rather tenacious little acacia shrub. When we finally reach dry land and open the doors, water pours out the front cabin area. We let out a little laugh and a sigh of relief. We haven’t said more than two words to each other since we sunk short of, IN or OUT.

 

On the way back through the same area on the return trip, we obviously avoid the water filled pitfall but manage to get ourselves properly stuck in mud (no water) by slipping off one mud track sideways into another created by a larger vehicle. So large it left a hole deeper than our tires and we get stuck on the middle underneath the vehicle like a stranded turtle. Properly stuck. Our wheels spin with no success at movement backwards or forward. Paul leaps out again, this time, unfortunately, there’s no small acacia shrub to save us. Our best hope is to dig with the spade strapped to our roof rack for just such an occasion and jack the vehicle up and try to get logs under the wheels for some traction. Paul begins to jack and dig and I start looking for logs/branches. There’s one nearby (we are obviously not the first person stuck here!) and then I go looking for others. There’s a small tree off in the distance, maybe there’s some downed branches. I start walking. Some movement off in the distance catches my eye. I’ve forgotten my binoculars and call back to Paul who is closer to his to take a look. He grabs them, focuses, “A pack of wild dogs!”, he shouts. I am NOT going all the way out to that tree. Ultimately, we are rescued by a self-drive tourist in a rental vehicle that we attach our winch to and drag ourselves out of the mud using them as the anchor. We advise them which way to drive through, as we are now experts on what NOT to do.

Most our time in the bush is not so eventful. We inspect campsites. Check out road conditions. Find beautiful spots for sundowners. On our last afternoon, with all our “work” done, I set up a hammock between two trees since the heat of the day makes lying down in the tent too unbearably hot. After swinging in the breeze and listening to the birds for a while, I’m packing up the hammock when something catches my attention down near the base of the tree I've just detached my hammock from. I look again and don't see anything. Stepping a little closer, I look again and notice what looks like a moving stick but is actually a snake eating a chameleon. One red dot of blood is visible on the half-consumed body of the poor chameleon while the snake’s unhinged jaw struggles to get the rest of him down. When he’s finished he elegantly makes his way up into the tree. Despite the fact that we know he’s there, we loose sight of him several times because he is camouflaged so well to look like a branch. His cover is blown only by his large emerald green eye. 

We’re not sure what kind he is. When we lose him in the tree top, we consult the app on Paul’s phone but have no luck with identification until we get home and I start looking in our library of books. We conclude that he is a young boomslang. While normally bright green as adults, the juveniles are olive/grey with a bright green eye that changes to black as an adult. He’s hemotoxic and deadly. Really glad he didn’t join me in my hammock!


Giant Eagle Owl


 

 

 

Thursday, May 27, 2021

Mindful in the Botswana Bush

 

While many people took up new hobbies during the pandemic, making bread or knitting, I decided to cultivate my mindfulness and practice meditation. It started with a daily 10-minute meditation with the Calm app and evolved into an 8-week Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) course over the Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year holidays that met weekly for 2.5 hours, required daily hour-long meditations and culminated in a full day silent guided retreat. While it doesn’t sound that difficult to do a 45-minute body scan, just laying/sitting and “doing nothing” can be tricky. My mind is busy. I think about the past and plan for the future and just being here now can be a real challenge.

 

But on a recent Sunday trip into Moremi Game Reserve, it dawned on me that when we go to the bush we are routinely mindful. We are obviously intentionally looking for animals while driving and Moremi did not disappoint. While it was difficult to navigate the road network, because of the high rains many of the main “roads” (and by that I mean dirt tracks) are flooded, we made our way and saw many animals – zebras, elephants, giraffe, etc.

 






But mindfulness is more than just seeing, it is hearing the sounds of the birds and the wind in the trees as we find a quiet spot to have our lunch.

 



It is feeling the temperature changes over the course of a winter day that starts in the 40s and ends in the 80s, peeling off layers of clothing as the day progresses and adding them back on as evening falls.

 


It’s the full body nature of driving in the bush, feet used for clutch, gas pedal and brakes, arms for navigating your way around bushes and forcing the Land Cruiser into 4x4 when we hit heavy sand. It’s the full body experience of bumping down a calcrete road that has not been maintained due to a lack of tourists (every few months they normally drive a grader down the road to smooth out the corrugation but it seems like it hasn’t been done in a VERY long time). There so much jostling and bumping that my Fitbit insisted I did ~27,000+ steps that day despite the fact that I rarely left the passenger seat.

 

It’s the smells I wish I could replicate – the cat pee smelling wild sage, the sweet smell of elephant dung…

 




We can sit quietly for a very long time and watch ellies (what we call elephants) drinking and enjoying a mud bath. We listen to the sloshing and slurping as they make their way through the flood plain.

 







In addition to large things, like elephants and giraffes, we appreciate the small things like a baby sand grouse the size of a silly putty egg.

 


On the way back to Maun we see a stranded vehicle on the side of the road. The rattling roads have worn a hole in a pipe to the radiator and they cannot start their vehicle. We offer to tow the vehicle, guide and two Swiss tourists to the buffalo fence (a fence that divides the wildlife from the cattle). Here Paul performs his best “MacGyver” act and temporarily repairs the pipe using some glue, a thorn from a tree, an abandoned toilet paper roll and some duct tape. We follow them to make sure they arrive at their destination in one piece.

 

The last sighting of the day before the sun sets is a pack of wild dogs emerging from the bushes just off the side of the road. We are especially grateful for this sighting because we know that if we had just continued home without helping the stranded travelers, we would have never seen them. Thanks for that bonus sighting universe, it was much appreciated. It’s always good to be mindful, and grateful, in the bush.







 The Peace of Wild Things


When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


---- Wendell Berry, The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry


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