Elephant and Buffalo Skulls
Gary, Douglas, Uri, Sid, Ram, Dawn
After the Serengeti, Tarangire National Park is probably the most visited National Park in Tanzania. It is justifiably famous for its elephant herds, and it is home to a wide variety of creatures big and small, common and not-so-common. On Dona and my first trip to Tanzania, it was the only place we saw a leopard.
We had to check out of Serengeti park at the south gate to Ngorongoro Crater on the way out. We parked and waited in the vehicle while Douglas checked us out. There are a lot of baboons and other animals accoustomed to humans hanging around the gate, and one of them climbed onto the hood and then onto the roof. They were in the habit of raiding cars for food and we were a prime target. As I recall, we had packages of cookies in various states of consumption lying around. All of a sudden Ram let out a shreik — the baboon was coming in the window. The baboon backed off after Ram's outburst, although s/he may have managed to grab some cookies; I don't remember. But the rest of us cracked up.
There is a big Elephant Skull with an Mbogo (African Buffalo) skull below it at the northern entrance station to Tarangire National Park. They're pretty impressive. You can get a good look at how elephant teeth grow by looking at the skeleton, and this buffalo skull had a great example of horn moth larve growing on it.
It's a pretty good drive from Ngorongoro gate to Tarangire park, and we arrived in late afternoon. We drove a few short loops before checking in at Tarangire Safari Lodge, where we were just in time for dinner.
It wasn't long before we ran into a small group of elephants. This was a time of plenty after all the rain, and they were in no hurry to get to wherever they were going. One of them had only a single tusk, but it was a pretty good sized one. Not big by historical standards, but it seemed pretty big for this day and age given the huge amount of poaching for ivory that still goes on across Africa and Asia. I found an interesting article from researchers at the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington about the effects of poaching on elephant populations.
Elephant poaching occurs for various reasons. We tend to think only of the trade in illegal ivory, but live animals are also poached for the tourist trade in southeast asia, and conflicts with villages living in elephant country is also a problem. There are some signs that poaching may be diminishing, but it is really too early to tell, and given historical trends it seems unlikely in the long run without stepped up protection, enforcement, and conflict mitigation efforts.
We were originally supposed to have two nights at Tarangire Safari Lodge, which would have been great. Unfortunately, due to some mix-up / booking problem we only had one night, and our second night was at Sangaiwe Lodge clear at the south end of the park. I was excited because we had never been to the southern part of the park, but Douglas warned us it was a long drive.
Tarangire National Park is also well known for its African baobab trees. These guys are cool. They are pachycauls — plants whose trunks are disproportionately larger than their branches. And it turns out the pachyderms beat up on the pachycauls.
Douglas explained to us that elephants use their tusks to pry the bark loose, then rip it off with their trunks so they can get at the water- and nutrient-rich tissue beneath. A baobab can store up to 80% of its volume as water, making for pretty good drought resistance. However, increasingly severe droughts due to climate change have left them susceptible to damage so severe they cannot recover.
At one point our road was blocked by a big lion, apparently protesting something. He was definitely not interested in moving,
A bit further on we came upon a couple of lionesses who apparently had been in a fight. One of them had a big wound in the top of her head. I suspect she was probably a bit irritable. We didn't push it.
We came across two differenrt kings of mongooses. banded and dwarf. The banded mongoose lives in large colonies, and we saw some bands of mongooses scurring around; we also found some dwarf mongooses, which are more solitary. The dwarf mongoose is the smallest carnivore in Africa.
We came across a few leopard tortises along the way. I've been hoping to find a really big one of these guys/girls but so far haven't run into any giants. I think this one was about 30 cm long; they can be up to 70 cm.
At one point we found a Pearl-Spotted Owlet, which was really cool. As a defense mechanism, they have two black patches of feathers surrounded by white on the back of their heads to resemble eyes. There's also a black patch that resembles a nose. It's a pretty good deception; you'd never know it was looking the other way unless you get up close.
East Africa is world-famous for its termite mounds, huge structures constructed by these industrious creatures. The tallest termite mound, relative to the size of a termite, is taller than the tallest building in the world. In terms of their margin of structural safety, they are far more stable than our strongest buildings. The architecture of their mounds has been extensively studied for natural ventilation; skyscrapers have been modelled after them for efficient cooling, saving millions of dollars annually.
The parks of Tanzania are such a treat to travel around. Birds, birds, and more birds. Cool birds, colorful birds, crazy-looking birds, birds with their mouths stuffed with termites...
We drove south along Silale Swamp hoping to see a lot of different water birds, but by the time we were in the area it was towards the middle of the day and we didn't see a lot. We stopped for lunch at an official picnic area, where there were some squirrels which were too used to people, and some ostriches nearby.
It is always a treat to be surprised. The picnic area looked relatively barren, and while there were a few trees around, it was not what I would call a "grove" of trees — the trees were widely spread out on a hot, grass-covered hillside. Yet soon after we sat down we found a number of birds we did not expect.
I think this butterfly (below) is really cool.
I'm not sure what the species of the squirrels at the picnic area were. As nearly as I can tell they were Unstriped Ground Squirrels (Xerus rutilus), mostly because ... duh ... they didn't have a stripe down their back.
At one point we had to stop and wait for some sun-bathing blue-cheeked bee-eaters who were hogging the road. We weren't sure whether they were just sun-bathing or trying to dry off after a shower. At first they looked like they were dead from colliding with a vehicle — unlikely given the slow speeds of vehicles on the rutted and bumpy dirt roads in the park.
We found a Yellow-billed Stork at the edge of the river which had just caught a largish (for it) fish. The fish was maybe 20 cm long and looked to be some kind of bottom-dweller, as it had whiskers, The stork was having one heck of a time getting it eaten. It would get the fish sideways in its beak, then carefully manipulate it so it was head-first and length-wise, then tip its head up a bit and try to swallow. Each time it tried to swallow the fish would instead slide out a bit; the stork didn't seem to be able to get its head pointed up enough. We finally gave up watching and carried on.
We came across giraffes singly and in small groups. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers giraffes to be all one species, but scientists are still trying to sort them out. Depending on which camp you are in, there are one, three, four or eight species. These are Maasai giraffes.
After a very long day in the vehicle we arrived at Sangaiwe Lodge at the extreme south end of the park. We almost didn't make it, as much of the last few kilometers of road was pretty much under water. It was raining, and we were a bit down from the long day, lots of driving and not as much time to relax and look for wildlife. Dona and I both had Tse-tse fly bites we picked up at lunch. Ram and Dawn hit the pool, Dona and I crashed, and I'm not sure what Sid and Uri did. Our accomodations were more than spacious, and if we had had a few more days to explore the southern end of the park it would have been great.
I had hoped to see more of the south end of the park, but some of the crew had to get back to Arusha in time to catch planes — Ram and Uri were heading to Uganda to find some mountain gorillas, and Dawn had to fly home. Everything was still wet as we reluctantly packed up and headed back.
Sid, Dona and I were going to spend the night at Kiota Guest House and then do some more exploring.
