I have officially been here in the delta for one week now and am still shocked by everything I have already experienced. There hasn’t been one day that has gone by where we have not seen elephants. Some of the sighting are far away , but most of them have been very close , sometimes too close for comfort. I have almost mastered stick shift here in these bumpy sandy and flooded roads. I have even had to reverse out of the way of a couple big male elephants and a testy female. During the first 4 days a breeding herd of elephants decided to stay in and around camp. Each night I would stay awake and listen to the sound of the elephants eating around my tent and occasionally bumping into it. After the elephants started to leave, a mother leopard and her cub moved in for an evening, followed by a male for another two evenings. Today we pulled right up to a big herd of elephants and sat with them for 2 hours as they fed all around the vehicle. The females were pretty comfortable with our presence but the youngsters approached with caution, trying to look as big as they could to intimidate us, which was more cute than threatening. Later this evening as I was sitting outside at the table I heard a big group of impala snorting very loud and continuously. I figured it was just the males sizing each other up, but when I heard the baboons calling as well, I knew it had to be a leopard, so me and a few people loaded in the vehicle and drove about one minute from camp when we saw a pack of hyenas tearing apart a female impala. We drove right in on the action and could see the blood flying and hear the bones crunching. This was the closest I have been to feeding impala and was carried away in the moment. After about 20 minutes they had managed to demolish the whole impala including the bones, fur and hooves. I love how unpredictable the bush is!
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I am gonna chsck ur sebsite from now on! Its cool, plus im a animal lover and hearing abt them in their natural habitat is awesome. I aspire to travel to madagascar soley for the wildlife and then tazmania just to see a tazmanian devil, might not be the best of ideas but you know me i’ll try it heck may end up being the first pwrson with one as a pet…. prolly even worse idea. thanks for a site that gives us the ability to share your expieriences.
Yes thanks, its definately an amazing experience to be here studying elephants, just when I thought I had them figured out , I was completely wrong. The have such an interesting social life there is much research that needs to be done. Madagascar sounds like it would be a great place to see wildlife especially the lemurs! If you do go take lots of pics!