Wildcast

I would be lying if I said I didn’t look for Mandlovu again today. And of course I just didn’t find her, although the search wasn’t an all day one.

I had a few friends to entertain. You may wonder what ‘entertainment’ means in the bush. Well today’s entertainment firstly involved tree climbing to see who could get the highest. Of course it was only the kids climbing AND me!
As I descended the tree a dung fight erupted. Elephant dung, the size of small soccer balls was at least dry, but hard and flying all over the place. Rhino dung, much the same, was also finding itself airborne. And then came the buffalo dung, still slightly wet. This invariably disintegrated and like pellets from a shot gun, splatted all over us.

Game over, we moved on hoping to find elephants wallowing at Chekwa pan. When they didn’t arrive to perform we took the opportunity to perform ourselves and in we went for a full on mud wallow. The kids weren’t too keen at first but being American kids, I convinced them that if they wanted to be real African kids they had to wallow. And so they were initiated!
Eventually we did find a couple of bulls on Banyini open area.

And moving on a small cow herd further to the east, but still no sign of Mandlovu and her herd.
In our search we almost ran over this lone buffalo bull resting up in the Ilala palms. These ‘dagga boys’, always on their own, are no more a part of the herds as they are too old and they become real grumpy old men. And potentially extremely dangerous, not being keen to move out the way and always ready to charge if you’re on foot. Beware!

At sunset we ventured down to the Chiredzi river as the orange ball of the sun disappeared below the horizon.
And almost immediately the huge full moon rose in the east. What a stunning sight!