In 2008,  SciWrite visited South Africa, Botswana, Namibia, and Swaziland. Besides exploring the art, culture and history of  South Africa, Namibia, and Swaziland, Ms. Diamond visited Stephen Lewis Foundation (see Staff) projects in Swaziland, while Dr. Harding spent an inordinate amount of time birdwatching and studying the huge diversity of ungulate grazers, their predators and other wildlife. Later, Lee's brother Jeff joined him for a custom guided photo safari in Botswana. Our guide was Lucky Garenamotse*, who knew all the birds by sight and sound, could reproduce an amazing number of bird and animal calls, and could give the Latin and English names and traditional uses of most of the plants.

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Ungulate grazers in the buffalo and antelope families

Other ungulate grazers: giraffes, elephants, hyrax, rhinoceros, pigs, zebras

Predators

Birds

Flowers

Notes on habitats and animal behaviour

Ungulate Grazers

Bovidae

In 5 weeks, Dr. Harding saw 24 species of bovids including:

Below are some examples. Please click on the thumbnails to see larger images.

(L. Harding retains copyright to these images except for the cape buffalo, blond-maned lion, and giraffe, which H. Diamond owns; anyone may use these low- to medium-resolution images for educational or scientific purposes. If you would like full-resolution images, or images of species not shown here, please let me know).  Back to top.

Other ungulate grazers

We saw giraffes, elephants, hyrax, white and black rhinoceros, warthogs, bush pigs, mountain zebras (in Namibia) and plains zebras (everywhere else). Back to top.

Predators

In Namibia we saw cheetahs and black-backed jackals; in South Africa blond-maned lions (3 prides in Kruger National Park), spotted hyenas, a leopard, and banded mongooses; in Botswana four more species of mongoose, two more leopards, a pack of wild (painted) dogs, both species of jackal, and the black-maned lion of the Kalahari Desert. We provided photos of the wild dogs, two of which were radio-collared, for identification to the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust, which is conducting research on this species (www.wildentrust.org and www.bpctrust.org).

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Birds

The diversity was astonishing. Not only the total number of species (322 species in 5 weeks), but also the number of species we saw in many of taxa. For example,  not to brag but to express amazement of the avian variety, we saw:

... and on and on, in addition to special species like ostriches, secretarybirds, scimitarbills, wood-hoopoes, Livingston's turaco, Myer's parrot, wattled crane, African spoonbills, and greater flamingos.

A few highlights are pictured below. Back to top.

Flowers

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Field notes on changing habitats and animal behaviour

Hannah and I arrived in Namibia October 26 at the end of the dry season and were in the Kalahari Desert for the first rain of the year. Our first photo of impalas, for example, show the Kalahari Acacia-Baikiaea Woodland to be bone dry: not a leaf or a green blade of grass (see photos below). The Namib desert was even drier; we saw a pair of ostriches guarding a nest on bare ground with barely any vegetation on the surrounding gravel plain, and springbucks looking gaunt. A week later, in Kruger National Park, South Africa (although a different environment, to be sure) the Mopane woodland shrubs were beginning to leaf out. By the time Jeff and I reached the Okavango in northern Botswana, this same habitat was carpeted with new green grass like a city park, the shrubs and trees were in full leaf, many were flowering, and spring ephemerals such as the fireball lily (Scadoxus multiflorus) and another lily, (Pancratium tenuifolium, family Amaryllidaceae, which doesn't seem to have a common English name; see flower photos above) were popping up everywhere. A few shrubs, such as Bauhinia petersiana, coffe-bean bush, were beginning to bloom.

Compare, for example, our first impala photo on October 31 in Namibia in Acacia-Baikiaea Woodland, with one from November 4 in Mopane Woodland in Kruger National Park when shrubs were just beginning to leaf out; and one from Mopane Woodland in Moremi National Park, Botswana, on November 17 (below). Or compare the gaunt tsessebes at Kruger National Park, South Africa on November 5, coming up onto the road where pooled rain made water available in a parched thornscrub/grassland environment in the lower row, left and middle of the table below, with the sleek tsessebes with young north of Moremi National Park on November 20 in the lower rightmost photo.

By the end of November, the baobab trees (Adansonia digitata) were blooming, Makgadikadi Pan and Nxai Pan were carpeted with grass and the surrounding thornscrub was filled with blooming shrubs such as blossom tree (Virgilia oroboides), sickle bush (Dichrostachys cinerea africana), brandy bush (Grevia flava) and trumpet thorn (Catophractes alexandri).

Jeff and I planned that part of our trip for the peak of bird breeding, to maximize our lists, which was perhaps not the best time for mammals as the large herbivores were dispersing from the Okavango Delta and Linyanti and Chobe Rivers and taking their predators with them. Sure enough, there were no large concentrations of game there, except for swarms of impala babies in nursery herds (which the leopards appreciated, too, as we saw one with an impala young in a tree). But when we arrived at Savuti, in Chobe National Park, we had the thrill of seeing ungulates arrive on their summer range. Tsessebes, brindled gnus (blue wildebeest), zebras, giraffes, elephants and others flooded onto the grassland. Right away, we began seeing young of tsessebes and gnus.  Lions were hunting ostriches (we saw two carcasses) when we arrived, but probably quickly turned to antelope neonates. The interplay of the changing seasons and the dynamics of the incredibly diverse and dense large herbivore populations, with their equally diverse predators, were the highlights of the  trip.

*Guide Lucky Garenamotse:

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