By Adam Blachly of Middlebury College
I’ve always been a believer that education is one of the best ways to connect with the natural world. Education is a tool for appreciation, for questioning, for research. While there is fundamental beauty in the natural world, that beauty is enhanced through learning. So far in the arid savannas of Botswana, that mantra holds strong.
We spend most of our time here doing transects, approximately 20 kilometer stretches of tire tracks through the bush of Northern Botswana. We count any herbivores, predators, and birds that we find. I’ve been assigned to Transect #3 for several days now and have gotten used to the dozens of dips and hummocks throughout the drive. Yesterday, however, I drove with Dix, our local instructor who is an encyclopedia of Botswana natural history. His knowledge proves to be more in depth and more helpful than anything I could get out of google. While we jostled our way across the uneven landscape, he told me how the land didn’t always look so dry. There used to be a river here. There were hippos and storks and cattle egrets. For every ditch we crossed, we were traversing the riverbed of an abandoned waterway. Suddenly the landscape transformed. The once-nondescript grasses were growing from water-worn soils. I imagined troves of fish bones hidden under the forgotten banks.
A couple of days ago, on an early morning game drive, our instructor spotted tracks in the sand along the main road. We stopped the cars and got out. A string of 4-toed prints meandered along the road’s edge. They were large, and while some debris and grass-seed had collected in the nearby zebra prints, these prints were clean; they were fresh. They were also the biggest cat prints I had ever seen. They had to be lion. We got back in our cars, and after driving a couple hundred meters, we realized this was not a lone individual, it was a pride. Further along, we came to a section of road that looked disheveled; dark, kicked-up dirt carpeted the sand. Looking more closely, we realized we were following a giant herd of buffalo. Their tracks weaved in and out of the surrounding scrub, and so did the lion, overlaid on top, fresh this morning. We continued the hunt for nearly half an hour, eventually losing their trail in a dense mopane woodland. We stopped where the tracks disappeared into the vegetation, imagining the lions somewhere just out of sight, perhaps feasting on a fresh carcass. What we could’ve seen as a sandy tract in the savanna, we instead saw as a great stalk – a lesson in reading the landscape.
This is what I’ll try to do: learn these stories, tell these stories, and strive to tell more. Stoke a love for this place and these people. Then, as Leopold writes, “Conservation will follow.”