A long night it was, especially after just coming off dayshift and straight into nightshift without any rest.
I was at Bandama by sunset hoping to get elephant drinking at dusk, but they all seemed to have moved west.
Then I heard a lion roar a long long way to the southwest. I called Darryl and we moved into the area, one of us driving while the other waited and listened. So we took it in turns leap frogging ever closer to the calls.
And the night went on, but we were totally dependent on the lion roaring which he wasn’t doing too regularly. It was only around 4am that I found an adult male lion in the very tall grass just north of the Mahande river. He moved off with my approach.
Darryl had picked up the scent of a carcass and we soon found the remains of a giraffe close by, which was already extremely rotten but had been fed on by the lion.
We had no plans of hanging around there with that smell and following the lion was useless as he kept lying in the long grass only to move off when we got close.
I moved on back to Bandama for dawn again hoping for elephant or even buffalo. But all I was treated to was Common Sandpipers foraging on the shores and sporadically having their little territorial tiffs.
On the way home this elephant bull was drinking at the pan north east of Chivi, and at the same time a puncture delayed my departure. (Damn that means less sleep when I get home!)
The airstrip was quiet as most animals were already taking up their places in the shade as the sun worked its way higher to pound down on us.
Birds are fun too. Much easier to “translate” the messages they send to one another.