Apparently, I've been writing the name of my favorite camp wrong.
It's not Duma Tao. It is DumaTau and it means "roar of lions" (or maybe "roll of lions"?), or so we were told.
The Savuti Channel - just to the west of camp, is renowned for its predators - especially Lions and Hyenas - hence the name, DumaTau. More recently, the area has become well known for its African Wild Dog sightings, which was one of the main reasons we had chosen this camp.
That's all for now. More to come soon!
We headed out to DumaTau after our short stay at Victoria Falls traveling by car, by boat and finally by plane. Before I get started on my favorite part of the trip, I wanted to share with you, an image of the unpaved runway at the DumaTau airstrip and the little 6-seater Cessna that we took. (After seeing the plane, and trying to fit our luggage in it, the 30 pound luggage restriction actually seemed generous).
Now for the main attraction...
We arrived at DumaTau in the afternoon just in time for tea and the afternoon game drive.
Duma Tau is on the northeastern region of Botswana in an area called Linyanti, located just east of the source of the Savuti Channel. It is actually really close to the Namibian border. So close that you occasionally get reception on your cell phone through the Namibian telecom. (So if you can't live without communications with the outside world, this might be the camp for you!!)
It is a beautiful camp situated on a lagoon (see pic below) with 10 luxurious tented rooms. (We thought this was small but this ended up being the biggest camp that we stayed in). The lagoon attracts a fair number of visitors during the dry season when other watering holes dry up, offering great game viewing right in camp. Fortunately for the animals (and unfortunately for us) this year saw enormous amounts of rain. Hence, even in May, there were numerous watering holes around and the grass was really tall and not yet brown and wilted, making game-viewing more difficult but making food and water plentiful for the animals.
(photo from Wilderness safaris)
And DumaTau didn't disappoint. We saw wild dogs every day during our three day stay there, starting with our first afternoon drive.
By the way, African Wild Dogs are an endangered species. There were once about 500,000 African Wild Dogs in 39 countries, and packs of 100 or more were not uncommon. Now there are only about 3,000-5,500 in less than 25 countries. Amazingly, during our three days there we saw two separate packs. One was a 10 dog pack and the other was a 9 dog pack. We were so lucky that the two dog packs stuck around and we got to see each pack multiple times because the dogs are known to have a very wide territory. Sometimes when they move away to another region, there is no sighting of them in the camp area for weeks.
And we were lucky enough to see various aspects of their life - hunting, socializing, sleeping, humping (see pic below - "humping" because the youngster was unsuccessful...), chasing away hyenas...
The only thing that we didn't get to see was the actual kill, which I don't mind too much. I don't think I would be able to stomach seeing and hearing an impala (such a beautiful animal which I hear is their favorite meal -pics to be posted in later entry) be eaten alive.
And they are such successful hunters too - 80% of hunts result in kills, which is much higher than any other predator - a fact further confirmed by the fact that the wild dogs were always followed by numerous scavengers. The pack of dogs that you see was followed by two spotted hyenas and vultures. In fact, our first sighting of the dogs was when we saw a hyena devouring an impala bone which he scavenged from the dogs and the dogs came over and chased the hyena away. Too bad we don't have any good pictures of that! It was amazing to watch but it was after dark and the photos all came out a little too blurry...
Here's a pic of the spotted hyena. Everyone says they are ugly. But I found them to be oddly beautiful...
That's all for now. More to come soon!
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