The female lions do most of the hunting, though we saw one rogue male, full of scars on his nose, who had just taken down a young Cape buffalo. Big cats break the windpipes on their prey, suffocating them before they eat them. The lowly spotted hyena, which can weigh up to 180 pounds, starts eating as soon as it downs its prey. Maybe it is because they hunt in a pack and have to get what they can while they can. We saw one pregnant looking female escaping from a family of hyenas with the remains of the carcass of a warthog. They were still chasing her miles away when our game jeep left the scene.
Dik-Dik, male (Genus Madoqua). Tarangire national Park, Tanzania
Warthogs, by the way, can be fierce with their little tusks. They back into their dens, stolen often from aardvarks, and slash back and forth at anything trying to get them. They run about the plains, their little chests puffed out like any small man you have ever seen, their tails high in the air. Still, they have a hard time looking dignified. They have to kneel on their front legs to eat the grass on the ground.
Each zebra has its own stripe markings, different on each side, and different from every other zebra. They often stand in threesomes and that our guides said they believe is why nature developed those stripes. From afar, predators find it difficult to even divine what that is standing out there on the plain, the optical illusion of such a big animal all full of stripes. The zebras, you have to love them for this, have never been tamed by man. Turns out they have very weak backs, the reason you will often see them standing with their heavy heads resting on a fellow zebra's back. So no one would be able to ride them. And to top things off, only lions and other big carnivores appear to like the taste of their meat. Zebras are lovely, their patterns extending all the way to the top of their tails, making them look almost plaited, like some kind of fancy show horse.
Elephants — happily we saw big herds of them, especially at Tarangire National Park in northern Tanzania. One day during the end of the dry season, we came upon a band of female elephants with their babies in the middle of a dry river bed. What must have been the matriarch, a giant old elephant with one tusk missing, stood with her baby and dug with her pliant trunk in the sands. Pretty soon, her trunk was whisking up dark gray wet sand which she whooped up over her shoulder to cool herself down. Her baby wanted at the hole, but she pushed him away with that one tusk as she dug deeper. Sure enough, soon she found water. She pulled up large draughts, using her trunk like a straw, filling it and then drinking the water. Then she let her baby plunge into the water with his trunk and after he was through, she allowed what appeared to be perhaps her daughter from years ago at the water with her own baby.
We also saw herds of elephants congregating around an ancient baobab tree, which can live for thousands of years. The matriarch was first, peeling off the bark to chew it and release the water the big tree stores. Then, the others joined in, stripping off he bark and chewing.
A final note about the humans perhaps most impacted by the animals we saw in central and northern Tanzania. The Maasai tribe live off the milk, blood and meat of their cows, sheep and goats depending on their knowledge about the wild animals around them in order to survive. The tribes are still semi-nomadic, moving with the seasons and rainfall. The families live in little encampments known as "bomos" that consist of dung and dirt huts encircled by thorn bush. The younger men, warriors who are armed with spears and knives, are charged with protecting their tribe as well as the animals and that task means they need an intimate knowledge of those wild animals.
We had the fortune to go on a walk with two Maasai warriors near our tented camp called Kambi Ya Tembo Sinya near Mount Kilimanjaro. They carried sticks, all the better to drive away any snakes, they explained. They used the sticks to encircle the tracks from the animals: the u-shape left by the zebra, the massive rounds of an elephant's feet, the delicate 'v' shape left by the hooves of antelopes. But our guides also had a sense of humor. On our walk, one of them circled the print of the tread left by a sneaker. "American tourist," he said. They also tracked the scat of the animals, pointing out the softball sized dung left by the elephant, the fuzzy rabbit remains left by a hyena and the tiny hill of small pellets from the smallest antelopes, the dik-dik.
So far, the tribe and the wild animals and yes, we, the tourists, manage to continue in all of our ways, though there is controversy over how long this can go on as human population grows and further encroaches on the wild animals of Africa.
*After the reported incident of the death of Katherine Chappell, the Canadian woman who was killed by a lion while driving through a private wildlife park in Johannesburg, Sonya added this to her own account of the safari she wrote about:
"I have to say i was relieved when we left the serengeti and returned to regular hotels. the experience was thrilling and i am glad for it but probably wouldn't want to do it again. at least there the real intent, despite tourism, is not to make money but to let the animals continue to live by their own rules in the wild."
© 2015 Sonya Zalubowski for SeniorWomen.com
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