I Took My Household on a Hen-watching Safari in Botswana — and It Was the Journey of a Lifetime

Midway via our birding safari in Botswana, my spouse, our two sons, and I had by some means recognized greater than 150 winged species — no small feat for a household that had solely just lately taken up bird-watching as a interest. We’d noticed large kingfishers, pied kingfishers, and woodland kingfishers (the boys are massive on kingfishers). We’d seen spindly saddle-billed storks and sleek herons, bee-eaters, sunbirds, and a difficult-to-find Pel’s fishing owl, with its orange feathers and black, marble-like eyes. However one little sucker remained elusive: the violet-eared waxbill.

This diminutive creature sports activities a tremendous paint job, with pink eyes, a pink beak, violet cheeks, an orange physique, and a hanging indigo tail. Within the footage I noticed, the chook seemed like a figment of the creativeness. However it is usually actually laborious to identify. “Non-public,” even “secretive,” is what the guidebooks say. So one afternoon we made that our mission: violet-eared waxbill or bust. We loaded into our open-sided safari truck, cruised out of our camp within the Okavango Delta, passing herds of pink lechwe and kudu nibbling on the grass, and headed to an empty airstrip the place somebody had allegedly seen a violet-eared waxbill as soon as, a number of years in the past. That’s how determined we have been.

As we rolled alongside, I used to be overcome by the sense of area — miles and miles of waist-high grass stretching in each route, the woody odor of bush sage filling my lungs. There wasn’t one other truck in sight, or home on the horizon. Although larger than France, Botswana has solely 2.5 million inhabitants. It’s huge, empty, and beautiful.

After we arrived on the abandoned airstrip, Diphonso Ditshupelo, considered one of our guides, minimize the engine. He and Ian Lombard, a chook specialist who was touring with our household, raised their binoculars and scanned the thornbushes — a favourite habitat of the violet-eared waxbill.

Ditshupelo, who goes by Dips, sat on the wheel for a quiet second. He cocked his head, then motioned for us to get out of the truck. As we climbed down, he put a finger to his lips and turned to us with a glint of mischief in his eyes. “I believe I hear one thing,” he whispered.

This is the factor about bird-watching. It’s a kind of actions that appears area of interest, even boring — till you attempt it. Then you definitely notice that it opens up an entire different manner of interacting with nature. Hen-watching requires you to decelerate, clear your thoughts, and actually focus. It’s just like the Zen meditation of wildlife tourism. However attempting to identify elusive birds may also be as suspenseful and thrilling as monitoring massive sport. Trying to find them, observing them, attempting to establish as many species as we will, has develop into the proper excuse for us, as a household, to go to among the most stunning locations on earth.

My spouse, Courtenay, and I used to stay in Kenya, and our sons, 12-year-old Apollo and 10-year-old Asa, grew up there, so we’ve been fortunate sufficient to have gone on plenty of safaris in East Africa. However I’d all the time been interested in Botswana, within the south of the continent — a rustic with the world’s largest inhabitants of elephants, among the most sturdy conservation insurance policies in Africa, and a protracted document of peace and stability.

Hen-watching requires you to decelerate, clear your thoughts, and actually focus. It’s just like the Zen meditation of wildlife tourism.

And the Okavango Delta space, a UNESCO World Heritage website overlaying nearly 10,000 sq. miles of northwestern Botswana, is without doubt one of the continent’s finest preserved wildlife refuges. It’s a uncommon inland delta, fashioned the place the Okavango River empties into the desert and creates an oasis for an astonishing number of species, from endangered rhinos and African wild canine to very uncommon birds equivalent to wattled cranes and slaty egrets. After residing outdoors of Africa for 5 years, we have been determined to get again, and thought: Let’s attempt one thing new. Let’s go to Botswana and do a chook safari.

We started our journey in Kasane, a frontier city within the arid reaches of northern Botswana, close to the legendary Victoria Falls. Kasane is the place the borders of 4 African nations — Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Namibia — converge, and since a slick airport opened there in 2018, it has develop into a gateway for vacationers heading into the continent on safari. We linked via Johannesburg, South Africa, and broke our journey by spending three nights at a lodge outdoors Kasane on our approach to the Okavango, a few hundred miles south.

The massive attract northern Botswana is the Chobe River, a gently flowing waterway that pulls massive numbers of elephants, giraffes, buffalo, migratory birds, and waterfowl. We might see many of those animals on the riverbank from our veranda on the Chobe Recreation Lodge, the place the workers have been exceptionally type and the menu featured native specialties equivalent to samp and beans. However the lodge’s most distinguishing function is the truth that, due to a pioneering, decades-long effort, all 20 of its guides are ladies — an actual rarity wherever in Africa.

On our first morning, Gobe Mmereki took us out on a pontoon boat. Mmereki is an actual pioneer. She grew up in a village in japanese Botswana watching the Nationwide Geographic channel and dreaming of turning into a safari information. She was the one girl in her coaching program. Numerous males had bother believing she might drive a safari truck at first, she mentioned. After all she might, and now she was confidently piloting us up the Chobe River in a ship because the sky turned from tender pink to a wealthy blue. The riverbanks have been teeming with wildlife, together with a herd of elephants taking a playful tub, blasting one another with their trunks.

As we puttered alongside, Lombard, the skilled birder who was our private information for the whole journey, swung his binoculars towards the marshy riverbanks. (Knowledgeable birders by no means relaxation. They’re all the time looking out for one thing new, uncommon, or uncommon.)

“Apollo and Asa!” he known as out. “Look. Proper there!” He stabbed his finger towards one thing. “There’s a ridiculously cool little chook.”

I lifted my binoculars to my eyes, however couldn’t see something however a blur of river grass.

“Come on, guys,” Lombard mentioned with mock exasperation. “I’ve advised you this earlier than. You may’t have a look at the bush. It’s important to look into the bush.”

“Wait,” Apollo mentioned (he’s the chook skilled in our household). “Is {that a} new one?”

Lombard smiled. “Good work, Apollo. It is a brand new one. It’s a black-winged pratincole.”

“A what-winged-what?” I requested.

“A. Black. Winged. Pratincole,” he repeated very intentionally in his crisp South African accent. “And it’s fairly uncommon.”

I’ve to be sincere. Once I lastly obtained the little man in my field of regard and centered, my first thought was: What’s the massive deal? It was a chook maybe the scale of a sparrow, with black wings, a white breast, and an orange beak. It was nowhere close to as majestic because the goliath heron that had simply swooped over us. It wasn’t making a cool sound or doing something attention-grabbing in any respect. It was simply rummaging round within the sandy riverbank with its beak, searching for bugs to eat.

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However the black-winged pratincole had a narrative. “It’s a migrant from Russia,” Lombard defined, which meant it had flown hundreds of miles to get to this spot on the Chobe River. “They used to journey in huge flocks of 20,000, however they haven’t been seen in such numbers for a very long time. It’s attainable that a lot of the world’s inhabitants now lives in a single massive flock. Think about if one thing occurred to that one flock. It will be a mass extinction.”

Listening to his phrases modified the way in which I considered birds. From that second on, I had extra curiosity and extra empathy for our associates within the sky. To the uninitiated, many may look alike. However as Lombard helped me recognize, that simply means you’re not trying laborious sufficient.

A fast phrase on Lombard. He’s tall, tan, and loves brief shorts. He seems to be just like the Crocodile Dundee of southern Africa. He was our paid buddy the whole journey, handpicked by andBeyond, the posh journey firm that organized our safari. We met him on the Johannesburg airport after stumbling off an in a single day economic system flight from London, hardly trying our greatest; each of our youngsters, come to think about it, had thrown up on the aircraft. However he was our buddy to the bitter finish, and the way fortunate we have been due to it. Not solely did he possess a jaw-dropping quantity of wildlife data, particularly about birds, however he introduced one thing even higher: he was enjoyable, all the time bursting with an irrepressible and infectious enthusiasm about each animal we noticed, and continuously cracking us up.

“Oh my god,” he belted out on our second day at Chobe whereas we have been driving round searching for a leopard. “That’s one other ridiculously uncommon chook. See in that pond simply earlier than the sandpiper? It’s a feminine pygmy goose!”

After all, I believed: a pygmy goose! It was a small peach-colored chook with a white head that’s comparatively unusual, paddling across the water lilies and feeding on the seeds and flowers.

As we drove away, Lombard marveled at our good luck — although it wasn’t simply luck. We might have by no means noticed that chook if it hadn’t been for his talent.

“Guys, we simply discovered a pygmy goose whereas searching for a leopard,” he declared, all of the sudden and immeasurably blissful. “That proper there may be the fantastic thing about birding.”

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Earlier than we left Chobe, I needed to get a fuller sense of the place I used to be. It was my first time in Botswana and I used to be itching to know what lay past the lodge gates. So Lombard and I obtained a carry into Kasane, which was sunbaked and abandoned however had one memorable landmark: rising in entrance of the police station was a hollowed-out outdated baobab tree that was as soon as used as a jail, with area for about 10 poor souls inside.

Wanting up on the tree as warthogs trotted down the dusty fundamental drag, I used to be all of the sudden conscious of how far I used to be from residence. A Botswanan policeman leaning in opposition to the tree appeared to learn my thoughts.

“You don’t have a jail like this in your nation, do you?” he requested.

Our subsequent cease was the Okavango, the point of interest of our journey. From Kasane we took a light-weight airplane an hour or so southwest, the brilliant morning solar slanting in via the home windows. Wanting down, I didn’t see many different camps. Botswana follows what it calls a “low impression, excessive return” tourism technique that strictly limits the variety of lodges in conservation areas and the beds inside every. We flew over miles of white sand, waving grasslands, ash-colored termite mounds rising like funeral plinths, and crushed animal paths main like veins to watering holes. When the pilot cracked open the window, in got here that wealthy odor of bush sage once more.

On the airstrip, a broad-shouldered man named Harris Pullen greeted us at a desk arrange within the shade of a thorn tree.

“Mojito?”

We hadn’t even made but it to our subsequent lodge, a distant and beautiful andBeyond property known as Xaranna Okavango Delta Camp, but right here was Pullen, the visitor relations supervisor, handing me and Courtenay every a sweating glass. The drink was cool, tart, and scrumptious. Instantly I might inform that in andBeyond’s palms nobody was going to undergo.

Nevertheless it wasn’t merely the posh that made our expertise so memorable. It was the way in which it was achieved. Each single member of the workers was stuffed with heat. Pullen was continuously hooking us up with nice drinks. The chef, Lungile Mbangi, whipped up wonderful meals at each meal: pancakes and crêpes on the children’ request, beautiful salads and steaks. And by some means, within the two days that we have been there, Yolande Coetzer, the lodge supervisor, managed to squeeze in all of the actions we needed, from fishing to using in dugout canoes.

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That first evening at Xaranna, as we drifted off to sleep in our tent, I heard alarm calls from a herd of impalas — a hissy, throaty sound. I’d realized on earlier safaris that impalas try this solely after they’re actually scared. Later, in what felt just like the nighttime, some guinea fowl cackled. After we wakened and stepped out for breakfast, our “spotter,” who goes by Johnson, was standing in the midst of a sandy path, head down, finding out the bottom.

“Predator,” he mentioned. (Johnson, whose full title is Modala Molaimang, is a kind of direct, no-BS varieties extra snug studying the world of untamed animals than small-talking with outsiders.) He gruffly waved over the children. They leaned right down to get a better have a look at a recent footprint within the sand. Johnson identified a small notch.

“Claw,” he mentioned.

This is without doubt one of the most thrilling issues about occurring a safari: you’re continuously piecing collectively data. From the tracks in entrance of us, the alarm calls we had heard within the evening, and the place of the solar at this very second, Johnson computed {that a} predator had skulked via the camp between 3:30 and 4 a.m. He motioned to the truck. If we transfer now, he was implying, we would be capable to meet up with it.

The seven of us motored out, following the footprints alongside a observe till they broke off within the route of a small forest. Johnson dismounted, gentle, fast, barely making a sound. Normally, stepping out of a truck in a sport park crawling with deadly predators is a giant no-no. Courtenay turned to me, eyes vast with concern: “He’s strolling.”

Johnson moved like an infantryman: slowly, rigorously, conscious of all the pieces round him, like one thing was about to spring out of the bushes. A couple of minutes later he climbed again into the truck, whispering one thing to Dips, our lead information, in Tswana, Botswana’s nationwide language. We rumbled ahead. Then the automotive abruptly stopped.

Johnson couldn’t suppress a smile as he turned to us and mentioned: “Lion.”

Two male lions lounged perhaps 100 ft from us, underneath an acacia tree, sitting with their heads up and entrance paws straight in entrance of their our bodies, sphinxlike. They have been huge — scientists say that Okavango lions are the largest and strongest on the earth due to the plethora of sport of their ecosystem and the truth that they usually should trudge via water to kill it. Apparently, these two had been sitting in that very spot underneath the acacia tree for a while, however nobody had seen them besides Johnson, who not often bothered with binoculars. His eyes have been the binoculars. We pulled nearer after which nearer nonetheless.

Not like different safaris I’ve achieved in East Africa, the place each carnivore has a hoop of 10 vans round it, this time we have been totally alone. No different vehicles. No signal of anybody. Simply us and these two 400-pound apex predators. Their paws have been the scale of oven mitts. We have been so shut I might observe the person veins of their rip-you-to-shreds shoulders. Not like the others I’ve seen within the “wild,” these brutes have been clearly not accustomed to individuals looking at them. I felt a way of hazard being so shut. Their yellow eyes tracked our each transfer.

The Okavango turns into a community of emerald-green islands and slender channels stuffed with hippos, fish, and waterbirds. 

“Take a look at the scale of that stomach,” Dips mentioned. “He will need to have had a buffalo or a zebra.”

I’ve to confess that, as spectacular because the sighting was, I felt a way of reduction wash over me as we drove away.

Again on the camp, we loved our personal feast — wonderful filets of Botswanan beef, salads, recent bread. Bellies stretched like lions, we waddled again to our tents. They have been elegant and spacious, with polished wood flooring and screens as an alternative of partitions. Our mattress got here geared up with a small air-conditioner, and as we tucked ourselves in, we have been surrounded by wafts of cool air, a cacophony of whirling insect sounds and birdcalls — and the occasional not-so-distant grunt of a lion.

We packed the following two days with actions that the children particularly favored. We fished in a shallow pond and paddled round in mokoros, Botswana’s distinctive flat-bottomed dugout canoes. It was January, which is wet season, so we had some ponds to discover however not almost as many as there can be in just a few months’ time. From July to September the skies clear and the Cubango River that flows from Angola, within the west, brings a staggering 10 trillion liters of water washing throughout central Botswana, doubling the scale of the delta and reworking the dry savanna into one of many world’s largest swamps. The Okavango turns into a community of emerald-green islands and slender channels stuffed with hippos, fish, and waterbirds. Mokoros develop into indispensable for navigating all of this and reaching greater floor, the place mammals like buffalo and zebras, and all of the predators that stalk them, focus in nearly unbelievable numbers.

However there’s no dangerous time to go to Botswana. After we went, we nonetheless noticed sport in enormous teams, and because it was winter within the Northern Hemisphere we have been in a position to spot many migratory birds, like that pratincole that had flown in from snowbound Russia.

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As the times handed, we stored discovering birds we hadn’t seen earlier than. We noticed a striped kingfisher chase down a dragonfly and snatch it with its beak. “The primary kill of the day,” Dips mentioned. Asa noticed a lilac-breasted curler, frequent however nonetheless astonishingly coloured. “You may see its blue wings and the black-and white-stuff beneath,” he noticed. Lombard noticed a humpbacked hadedah ibis squawking in a lifeless tree. “South Africans hate that chook. So noisy,” he scowled. “That’s a trash chook.”

He defined that, not like mammals, most birds don’t have to fret about predators as a result of they’ll fly away, that means there’s no want for camouflage. As an alternative, they flaunt spectacular colours to draw mates throughout lengthy distances. Floor birds, that are extra weak to predators, have a tendency to not be as colourful.

On one early morning drive, Dips advised us concerning the village on the fringe of the delta the place he grew up. His job was herding goats. That may be a laborious life. I’ve seen it: little boys, aged 12 or youthful, out within the searing solar, surrounded by stalking predators, accountable for defending their household’s wealth. It was whereas doing this toil that Dips fell in love with birds.

“They have been the one type of music we had,” he mentioned. “We drew motivation from them.”

He and the opposite boys devised methods to recollect the birds they heard. “I-am-the-red-eyed-dove, I-am-the-red-eyed-dove,” he mentioned within the specific cadence of that chook’s name. Or “work-harder, work-harder,” within the purring rhythm of the Cape turtle dove.

Whereas Dips was sharing this, I felt the truck lurch. Sudden, violent motion within the again seat. Uh-oh.

“Give it.”

“No, you give it.”

“No, you give it.”

I whipped round. Apollo and Asa have been tussling over their equivalent pairs of Swarovski Optik binoculars. Good binoculars make a distinction, and these Austrian-made fashions, which andBeyond lends to company on birding safaris, have been excellent. However in fact there was some imperceptible distinction between the pairs my children had been assigned, and considered one of them was accusing the opposite of switching them. The distinction between Dips telling us how he grew up herding goats and our youngsters combating over $1,000 binoculars was a bit a lot. Botswana, with its diamond trade and lengthy document of stability, has achieved significantly better than many different sub-Saharan African nations. Nevertheless it’s nonetheless vastly poorer than the U.S. or Europe, and the very last thing I needed to do was to come back throughout as ungrateful or entitled. So I snapped on the children after which, for the primary time, an uncomfortable silence fell over the truck.

Courtenay lastly broke it by turning to Lombard and asking, “Do all households battle?”

He sighed. “All households battle.”

A couple of minutes later, although, watching two male impalas lick one another’s faces, Asa mentioned to Apollo with nice tenderness, “Think about in the event you and I did that each morning.”

Dips overheard and mentioned, “It will strengthen your bond endlessly.”

Our final camp was Sandibe Okavango Safari Lodge, one other andBeyond property. Web entry is out there within the suites however not the frequent areas, a approach to encourage company to remain off their gadgets and socialize. The suites are enormous, every with a plunge pool on a deck overlooking the wetlands, the place we noticed scores of latest birds.

Apollo had arrived in Botswana hoping to see a Pel’s fishing owl, one of many world’s largest owls, and one afternoon, whereas strolling throughout Sandibe’s wooded grounds, he seemed up right into a tree and noticed two enormous black eyes staring down at him. It was a Pel’s. Apollo jumped up and down and Lombard, standing proper subsequent to him, pumped his fist like a tennis participant after smashing an ace. He had in all probability seen a Pel’s numerous occasions, however he was as into the hunt as Apollo.

After that we obtained grasping.

“We’ve seen greater than 175 completely different birds,” Asa mentioned. “Let’s go for 200.”

“Let’s discover the violet-eared waxbill,” Apollo added. “I’ve heard individuals saying that’s a very cool one.”

That afternoon on the airstrip was really our final full day. As Dips motioned for us to get out of the truck and comply with him, he stopped to hear once more, and this time even I might hear a joyful whistling. We took just a few quiet steps ahead. Pause. Then just a few extra. And there within the bush, perched on a tiny thorn department and no larger than a shot glass, sat the magically coloured chook.

I watched it for just a few seconds. It heard us coming and retreated deeper into the thicket, identical to the chook books had warned. That was all we obtained — a brief, fleeting glimpse, like one thing from a dream. However as we walked again to the truck, Apollo and Asa have been beaming. “That basically is a valuable little chook,” Apollo mentioned.

Heres the factor bout bird-watching. It’s a kind of actions that appears area of interest, even boring — till you attempt it. Then you definitely notice that it opens up an entire different manner of interacting with nature.

It was the 205th chook species we had recognized, not too shabby for a bunch of metropolis slickers on a weeklong trip. Botswana has round 600 species; the world over, scientists say there are 11,000.

So we didn’t give up there. We determined to go for extra. As a result of with birds, as with a lot else in life, there may be all the time extra.

andbeyond.com; eight-night Botswana birding safaris from $11,900 per particular person.

A model of this story first appeared within the April 2023 problem of Journey + Leisure underneath the headline “All Creatures Nice and Small.”