Well, hello there! I hope that you are fabulously well and have had a brilliant start to the New Year. Here in the Luangwa, what an end to 2024 and start to 2025 as the temperatures soared and we wandered whether we were going to ever get some rain. The teams attacked Christmas with epic enthusiasm and along with some of the other camps embraced the Christmas carols. It seems the animals also brought their ‘A’ Game with lions being everywhere including the Nkwali pride of 10 taking down a warthog on the way back from Carols and then on Christmas morning the 2 males joined them.
Then the rain came, and boy did it arrive with a simply enormous storm making everyone dance around with great joy as the temperatures dropped and the bush took back its vibrant colour.
As is always the case this time of the year we keep an ear and eye out for our “special rains birds” mostly the Pitta. This year so far though no one has heard or seen one so there is a little bit of competitive spirit between the guides on that front. The guests are however being spoilt by regular sightings of the Pel’s Fishing Owl who has finally come out of hiding and is now regularly being seen at the Nkwali lagoon. As the rains arrived so did the bugs and the bushbabies have been feasting around the lights in the evening and then during the day the baboons have been digging up the bugs around the very same lights which in turn means the lights are taking a real beating. Each more morning they are standing in very lobsided angles and the poor groundsmen are now adding light straightening to their daily routine.
The leopards have also been doing us proud with plenty of sightings of various ones. However, our female that we see regularly opposite camp has had a cub who is now a few months old and becoming less shy and been spoiling the guests with glimpses here and there but for the first time this week it was up in a tree on a puku kill with its mum.
We rounded off the year with quite a special sighting from Kanga. He was out with his guests Mario & Fiona Real who have been coming to us for 12 years and counting, when they came across something that neither Kanga nor the Reals have witnessed before! It was a big python busy wrapping its coils around a young impala. I mean this is when you realise the strength of these creatures, it was quite incredible to see. As if this wasn’t enough, the following day they went back and found the python in place having swallowed the impala. How the heck it manages to do this is quite phenomenal and probably something that I would hope not to witness. It doesn’t however take away the impressiveness of it. And there the python stayed for several days unable to move as it digested its enormous meal taking the concept of full, fat and sleepy to the ultimate level.
So, on that note to be honest with you, there is no other story that could possibly compete with this. I shall therefore bid you a very fond farewell for the week and hope that you have a fantastic week with plenty of smiles and laughter and don’t forget to look after one another.
