A Bird in the Bush is Worth Two in the Hand ..

(with apologies to an old English proverb)

A motley crew gathered at Nkwali Camp on 6th May 2007 for the RPS Shoebill Safari: three Americans, two Brits, two Aussies (one Zambian-born  and the other Zimbabwe-born) and last but by no means least, our Zambian guide – Keyala Phiri – guru (or to use the correct term ‘fundi’), shepherd, mentor and ultimately friend, but more of Keyala  later.  

Diverse in interests, particularly when it came to birding, the common thread uniting us all was a love of Africa and more particularly the African bush.  We had come together from all corners of the globe in search of the rare, elusive, endangered and prehistoric-looking shoebill stork, which at up to 1.5 metres in height is not a stork in the strict sense but somewhere between a stork and a pelican. 

Shoebill The plan was to spend 6 nights at Nkwali camp in the South Luangwa before heading north into the Bangweulu Wetlands where the water levels allowed the shoebills to venture sufficiently far out from the lake to be relatively easily sighted, relative being the operative term.  After two nights at Shoebill Camp, accessible only by water at this time of the year we proceeded to Wasa Camp for two nights in the Kasanka National Park and then down to the Lower Zambezi, where our home for four nights was Chongwe River Camp located at the confluence of the Chongwe and Zambezi rivers just outside the Lower Zambezi National Park.  (See the formal itinerary)

I would like to share with the many RPS fans who hold on to a little bit of Africa every week via ‘It’s Monday’  just a little of what transpired over the next two weeks.

The absolute stand out of the whole trip was the people we met:

  • at Nkwali there was Obi, tall and a little grave but warm in his welcome to us at Mfuwe International Airport;
  • Fiona, a bubbly and enchanting person who  looked after all our creature comforts, including introducing us to the Malawi shandy and entertaining us with a fine line in impromptu bird dancing;
  • Jacob from Luangwa House whose gentle tenor rendition of ‘mud, glorious mud’ brought tears to the eye, as did his enthusiastic exhortations to share in the natural beauty of our surroundings;
  • Boston the game scout resplendent, suave even, in his dapper uniform sporting new, shiny epaulettes that hurt your eyeballs;
  • Masumba renowned for getting us stuck in the mud yet unfailingly finding a way out;
  • Zebron whose eyes lit up when scones, jam & cream appeared on the tea table as he swooped in like a pied kingfisher after its breakfast;
  • Sebastian,  sporting quite the finest belt in the camp if not the whole Valley,  who taught us the little-known skills of sexing  elephants from their dung, as well as the joys of scratching through a civet latrine for signs of crabs, figs, chongololos and even plastic;
  • Charles whose drumming woke us in the morning and who like some Greater Honey Guide, led us to the source of yet more bountiful, delicious food throughout the day;
  • the combined joyous and totally infectious laughter when  Keyala, Jacob and Zebron got going;
  • our pilots, the dynamic duo of Big Ed & Little Taj, whose competent handling of small planes managed to stay even Keyala’s legendary air sickness;
  • Kim at Wasa camp whose quiet resourcefulness managed to rustle up a power pack, external speakers and a digital data projector in the middle of absolutely nowhere;
  • Victoria, almost finished a Zoology Masters, researching the use of chili as a deterrent to elephants raiding villagers’ crops;
  • Leigh the pre-school teacher leading her tiny charges, or ‘the Lessers’ as Keyala affectionately named them,  in a stirring rendition of the ‘Chongololo’ song for our benefit;
  • Alex the cook at Shoebill Camp who bore our clumsy efforts to teach him how to cook French Toast with grace and dignity (it turned out he could do it far better  than we ever could, especially on a Welcome Dover wood-burning stove! Thanks Keyala for dropping us in it!);
  • Shaft the pontoon operator at Kasanka who had little faith in Keyala’s ability to get the vehicle onto the swaying pontoon. Mind you, Keyala reciprocated the lack of faith!
  • George our guide at Chongwe who we nicknamed the ‘honey badger’ because of the way he swiveled his head from left to right whilst taking the vehicle through the dry river bed,
  • Damson our guide at Wasa stalking the blue monkeys and laconically pronouncing the single word ‘Buzzard’ as we jolted past in Big Ed’s trusty green Landcruiser (sans lights)
  • and finally the people’s piece de resistance, THE PLAY! 

Miranda, granddaughter of the legendary Norman Carr, held a childhood dream to establish a drama group which as a young adult she has now brought to fruition with the SEKA.  A five person cast made a special trip out to Nkwali to entertain us with a play about the bush developed especially for visitors to the Valley.  Once settled in our row of directors’ chairs and joined by the whole camp staff, we sat back to 20 minutes of sheer delight. The creativity, athleticism, realism, energy and sheer raw talent displayed was both humbling and moving. 

The highlight was the vignette of us ‘tourists’ with our binoculars and digital cameras constantly stopping to take pictures. We were delighted to join in the gentle mockery, knowing that it came from a place of humanity.  For me personally, the singing triggered a teary emotional response marking a home coming to Zambia that has been 40 years in the gestation. 

We happened to have invested in a fancy video camera before the trip so were able to film the whole performance, albeit in an amateur fashion with a few shakes at the outset. This turned out to be a piece of serendipity as we then had the bright idea to download the footage to our laptop and show the video to the staff and their families at all the other camps we subsequently visited. We will long remember the intensely personal joy this small gesture brought to both us and our audience, reminding us of how very easy it is to make people happy even with the smallest thing.  

Moving on, seeing the Bangweulu Wetlands and the surrounding plains covered in tens of thousands of Black Lechwe was a truly memorable experience, made all the more precious by an underlying sense of the transience of this fragile, vulnerable ecosystem. Living in close proximity to the local people, these beautiful antelope simply wandered by the fishing huts without concern making their strange lawnmower-like sounds.  It was wonderful to see them bound through the shallow water backlit against the dawn sky and swim strongly to little islands where they could graze in peace.

The hunt for the Shoebills will live long in our memories and find its way into our family folklore. Keyala and our pilot Taj had warned us that we would have a tough time in our quest. We heard lurid stories of the blood sucking leeches likely to latch onto our lower extremities as we waded through thigh-deep water and the clouds of mosquitoes, all of which resulted in minor hysteria during dinner as we ‘psyched’ ourselves up for the next day.

So it was with some trepidation that we set off early the next morning in banana boats poled along by our local guides. As we silently glided past banks of water lilies, reed and papyrus beds we saw masses of birds in the early morning light: numerous crouching Squacco Herons, squadrons of Great White Egrets and Open-billed Storks, lumbering Copper tailed Coucals, dashing Bee-eaters, diving bejewelled kingfishers, glowing Jacanas, honking geese and whistling ducks. We passed local fishermen going about their daily business in dugout canoes laying out fish lines and fishing nets.

Our guides led us along a narrow channel where some of the larger (and heavier) gentlemen had to get out and walk along a grassy bank which was broached every 10 metres by gaps and reed fish traps of ancient design. Suddenly Batson, with 20 years’ experience of shoebill guiding and the worst cough I have heard in a long while, hissed “Shoebill”.   And there it was – just sitting on the top of a distant tree - and we had not even had to get our feet wet! We then waded and pushed our way through waist-deep grass beds in an attempt to get closer. After about 30 minutes of hard work by our boatmen we got as close as we could without scaring it away. Shoebills are fairly stoical creatures; they do not do much during the day, being nocturnal feeders. Our specimen sat on top of the tree like some avian sphinx and only stirred to snap irritably at some egrets which had the temerity to land beside it. Our prize eventually flew down to the reed beds where it was joined by another Shoebill. After a short while the pair flew off and we all exchanged high fives! There was quite a sense of relief that the Shoebill safari had been successful and we did not have to return empty-handed so to speak.

The trip included a number of other ‘Big Moments’ such as watching a spot-lit leopard night-stalking puku and craftily using the noise of the vehicle engine to creep ever closer, getting eyelash to eyelash with a small herd of elephants whilst lying flat on the deck overlooking the Luangwa House waterhole, a flip over the Bangweulu wetlands where Taj took the doors off the plane and we dipped and swooped along with the best of the birds and watching a young bull elephant with a badly infected trunk struggle over three days to drink and eat,  before eventually fading away into the bush to die.  Mother Nature is not always easy to watch.  

We were also fortunate enough to visit Luangwa House, located just down the road from Nkwali. The guests-in-residence, William and Stephanie were generous enough to allow our ‘gang’ to visit for another sumptuous lunch.  We had a wonderful time scampering up and down the stairs, exploring the stunning decor in the four bedrooms, imagining ourselves relaxing in the copper bath tub and cooling our feet in the splendid plunge pool!  Go and check out www.safarihouses.com to see for yourself.

Even better perhaps were the many, many small memorable moments that together make up the fabric of life in the African bush:

  • watching lemon & orange butterflies alight on a woolly caper bush;
  • observing  honeymooners on their first trip to Africa almost falling over a pair of leonine brothers snoozing in the grass,  getting up, stretching and ambling off to scent mark their home to the alarm snorts of impala;
  • discovering where a large croc had taken a rest in a dried river bed leaving the imprint of his feet and belly scales in the sand;
  • abandoning the lunch table en masse to watch an olive grass snake (we thought) take a frog for its own dinner;
  • seeing water monitors mating (which took a lot longer than the baboons!) – a first even for Sebastian;
  • hippo emerging in the evening wearing Nile cabbage like frilly Easter bonnets;
  • watching seven African skimmers swoop in overhead as we took our morning tea break by the river;
  • having an open-air shower whilst a Sun Squirrel, feasting in the overhanging  Sausage tree, rained his debris down to mingle with the shower water;
  • climbing the Fibwe hide 21 metres above the sitatunga and finding leopard droppings at the top;
  •  Keyala seeing crested guinea fowl for the first time ever;
  • watching an old buffalo bull with no horns doing a 180 degree roll in the mud;
  • seeing a territorial dispute between two pairs of African fish eagles;
  • cheering on a male saddle billed stork when he finally managed to manoeuvre an 8 to 10 inch fish down his throat;
  • clearing zebra off the runway before we could take off at Bangweulu airstrip;
  • gliding though the swamps after dark with a myriad of stars above and a multitude of fireflies to light our way.

Spending two weeks together inevitably means a collection of ‘quotable quotes’ which worked their way into our collective lexicon, the best of which were ‘green beaked British twits’, ‘ the monkeys with the blue plastic bags between their legs’, ‘ morning, morning’ (courtesy of Robin Pope himself) and ‘knock, knock’ for our wake up call, ‘naughty bongwe’ and ‘that is a nice one, let’s take a picture!’ (from the play).

Keyala On behalf of all of us, I would like to express our heartfelt thanks to Keyala: he took everything in his stride with patience, grace, diplomacy and good humour: dealing with snakes in the bathroom, wildly diverging dietary preferences, circular arguments over which woodpecker it actually was, endless recaps of what time tomorrow’s ‘knock-knock’ would be at and most of all, juggling the wishes of those interested in fur and those interested in feathers.

 We suspect he even had a bit of fun and we know that he caught up on his sleep compared to life running the camp, where he seems to be on call at all times of the day and night, organising guests and staff social life alike. We felt that we came to know Keyala a little better by the end of the trip, although he was always careful to maintain his professional demeanour.  We learned about Keyala’s Suzuki, his wife and children, his trips overseas, stories about his school days, even the little gentle tricks he has been known to play on guests. We were constantly amazed that everywhere we went, Keyala knew someone there, be it the scout, the ZAWA official or some guy he went to school with!

We had a wonderful, magnificent time that far exceeded our expectations and wild horses (or zebras) will not keep us away. So beware, we will be back!

Trish Shee,
Melbourne, Australia