Trailing, and an encounter with an elephant – UCONN Aug 2015 group
We walked out of camp and into the South African sunrise. I stepped over the tracks of three big dugga boys (Cape buffalo bulls) who had recently headed in the direction that Lee had taken with the other students, and silently said a prayer that he would see them before they saw him… I gripped my rifle and carried on.
As we crossed the plains, the students asked questions about termites, termite mounds, marula trees, hyena dung, and impala middens with fresh white rhino tracks crossing them; we stopped to discuss each and might have decided to follow the rhino tracks had not Diana heard the cackling of hyenas and we set off at a brisk pace towards the sounds.
When we reached the sand road I looked down to see a wide drag line with spotted hyena tracks beside and on top of it. We hypothesized that the resident hyenas had stolen a dead kudu from a male leopard the night before (we had seen the leopard with the kill the night before) and dragged it to their den for the pups – over a kilometer away. We followed the drag line, almost to the den, but could not walk into the immediate vicinity on foot – it could have been too disruptive to the pups and scared the adults into moving the den to a new location. The rhino tracks paralleled the hyena tracks, underneath them, indicating they were older. We gazed longingly through the bush in the direction of the hyena den and the rhino tracks as we again heard the hyenas call, this time to the north, but we watched a vehicle pull out of the hyena den and head in the direction of the vocalizations and the rhino tracks– and again our hearts sank a bit as we knew we could not follow on foot where vehicles were going (reserve rules – because a vehicle could inadvertantly scare a potentially dangerous animal into people on foot). We decided to go find our own animals, our own trail, and headed south into the bush.
Again, we discussed the small things such as birds we saw and their behaviour and vocalizations, until I looked down and the shape of a fresh rhino track presented itself to me. The call of a trail is irresistible to me, and I followed, students in tow. Diana and I worked together on the trail; she picked it up sometimes where I lost it, and vise versa. We followed the bull rhino as he patrolled until he crossed the reserve boundary and we could not cross it to find him – it was pure magic and we were sad to have to give up on him.
Taking note of the wind direction, we then decided to parallel the southern boundary of our reserve a couple hundred meters in from the boundary, so that we might pick up something and not give our presence away. Very soon, I picked up a large grey shape in the corner of my eye, and indicated to Diana that there was an elephant ahead. We stopped, and watched; he was unaware of our presence as he fed, breaking down branches and whole trees – not the biggest bull we had ever seen, but big enough. He was moving slowly as he fed, behind trees, and we repositioned the group a couple of times to remain safe but also obtain a better view. Their first elephant sighting – and on foot! We watched him eat for a while, listening to him breaking branches, watching him rotate them around in his mouth and hearing him chew up the bark, then we quietly crept away without him ever knowing we were there and headed back to camp for our own breakfast.
