By Gwen Casey from Carleton College
Around 6pm, as the sun becomes red from the dusty horizon, we all pile into 3 trucks and drive to an open savannah several kilometers away from our Kaziikini campsite. We are headed out for a Natural History walk, one of our rare opportunities to explore the bush by foot and get a closer look at the plants and animal tracks that we typically only see flying past our truck windows.
On driving transects, our goal is to see and count herbivores and opportunistic predators as we spot them right outside our vehicle. However, for our Natural History walks when we are outside the safety of the truck, we try to avoid running into any animal larger than ourselves. Instead, we rely on tracks and scat to record the species that have passed through an area.
Leading our group of 12 is Dix, an animal-tracking expert and one of our Botswana instructors. Dix worked as a community escort guide and was part of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust before joining Round River in 2017. During transects, Dix rides with the rearview mirror pointed out his window so he can keep an eye on the side of the road and look for tracks. On our Natural History walks, he keeps one eye on the ground to decode the traffic of tracks and scat on the sandy ground.
Here are some track and scat highlights from our Natural History walks so far:
When we arrive at an animal marking, Dix will give us each a chance to observe it and guess its origin. For the track pictured above, footprints aren’t our only clue. Looking closer, one can see vertical scratch lines that give away its origin: a porcupine! Porcupine quills drag behind the animal as it walks creating the diagnostic scratches.
Hyena scat might be some of the most recognizable that we’ve learned so far. Completely white, it gets its color from the bones that hyenas digest after they’ve eaten through an animal carcass. Typically, we find hyena scat in large latrines where multiple hyenas of the same pack will poop to mark the edges of their territory, or the “corners of their backyard,” as Dix puts it.
This one stumped us for a while. Both liquid and solid, it looked neither like typical antelope pellets nor the large cat scat from our ID book. “Hyena?” one of us guessed, pointing out the white color. Dix shook his head. “Warthog?” He smiled but shook his head again.
The culprit? An ostrich! It made more sense once Dix explained: like other birds, ostriches have a cloaca where they expel liquid and solid waste at the same time. Once you put aside the enormous size, it appears similar to smaller bird poop that we’re more familiar with – whitish in color with distinct solid and liquid portions.
Elephant poop is hard to avoid in the bush. Typically left in piles of several squat cylinders, Dix showed us how to distinguish it from similar-looking hippo scat by breaking it apart. Hippo poop will be composed of softer, aquatic vegetation while elephant poop will contain torn bits of branches and woody plants. In Kaziikini, we found many piles like the photo to the right, with a dusty composition and holes like cottage cheese. These elephant droppings had been taken over by fungus-growing termites who burrowed into the pile to consume the woody matter.
Giraffe tracks are the largest hooved prints that we find in the delta. Emphasizing their size, Dix always has us place our foot alongside their long tracks that easily surpass a women’s size 9. Like several antelopes, giraffe scat resembles acorns with their caps removed. However unlike other ‘acorny’ animal scat, giraffe pellets fall from a lofty 2 meters high causing them to have uniquely cracked exteriors and a dispersed landing.
While tracks and scat can be used to document many species, they are especially useful for more cryptic animals such as wild dogs and large cats. Dix would come over to the kitchen tent on several mornings during our stay at Kaziikini after scanning the outskirts of our campsite to announce that a leopard or lion had walked through our site during the night. If not for their tracks in the dusty sand, these animals would have passed by unnoticed. The track pictured above was from a leopard (notice the 3 lobes of the paw unique to cats) that we saw during our stay at the Mopane camp.
For me, these Natural History walks have been some of the most special experiences in the bush. They are so different from the science classes that I’ve taken in high school and college. Instead of having a standardized curriculum, we are taught tiny morsels of information as we happen to encounter them. Maybe we are lucky that evening and find a leopard track, or maybe we mostly see impala poop. But regardless, the anticipation to see something new keeps me alert and close behind Dix.
Our Natural History tests have nearly the same format as our walks: at the end of our stay in a concession, we drive a little ways from our campsite and our instructors take turns pointing out the birds, trees, and tracks around us and asking us to identify them. While it might be hard to study for these on-the-spot questions (who knows what bird is going to fly overhead that day!), it feels like learning in the most real sense and one of the best ways to get to know the Okavango Delta.