Rangers Journal Festive Time
Hello again to all our fans !!
Hope you all had a great festive time, as we had here in the savannas of Madikwe.
The lodge was super busy… as always, and we had some amazing gusts join us for this very special time.
The rains have come on thick so far this year, so the bush is looking really pristine, and I myself have not seen it like this for many years now, as it seems the drought of the last 5 years has given up a little to Modjadji, the rain Queen.
Ok so this is a joint newsletter including the highlights from December and January all in one.
So let’s start with Andre’s highlights from December…
Greetings from the Tuningi team we hope you had a lovely festive season and a happy new year.
We had a huge amount of rain this month, and with all this rain magical things tend to happen in the bush. Madikwe looks like a green emerald jewel exploding with new life, by new life I mean its baby season folks.
The impalas and Blue wildebeest are giving birth, and we are having so much fun watching these little babies enjoying their new life. All the babies are bouncing and running around with youthful energy and exploring their new world. Unfortunately, with the abundance of babies around they also fall prey to the carnivores, especially the Wild dogs that’s why we have not released our 2nd pack yet.
The Wild dogs are doing great and looking very healthy. The pups are keeping up with the adults and getting fed well. With a lot of mouths to feed they need to hunt every day and we’ve been lucky to witness brilliant sightings close to our lodge this month. We cannot wait for the 2nd pack toe be released that we can have more sightings of these wonderful animals.
Monomoholo and Kwandwe the 2 male coalition still rule in the Southwest and the Northwest of the park. It is clear our local Southern pride the Mica and Jamala pride prefer the presence of Monomoholo. He is busy mating with the females so hopefully in 3 and a half months we will have cubs in the South west. Mica the old lady of the pride is busy showing her daughter Jamala X the ropes of leading the Southern pride because she is getting ready to retire as she has started to lose condition.
The 2 Cheetah brothers are a very successful hunting combination every time we see them, they tend to be full and lying in the open and posing for the camera. On a sad note the female cheetah that was pregnant lost her cubs. It’s a big shock to us and everybody in Madikwe. The cause of losing her cubs are unknown , hopefully she learned from her mistakes and it will make her a stronger cheetah and more experience mother.
Our local territorial male Leopard, Munye kept himself rare as per normal, but we managed seeing him few times. The most memorable sighting was on the 31st December stealing the show just he like he knows how. We followed him threw some nasty rocky areas and we were awarded seeing him jump into a Marula tree. A new female Leopard starting to show herself more and more. Unfortunately, she is still very skittish, and only allows us to see her from a distance. Hopefully in the future she will be more relaxed and giving us amazing sightings.
All this rain makes the heavy weights very happy, Rhino black and white, Buffalo and Elephants sightings were out of this world. The big herds of buffalo approaching a waterhole is a sight to see. The big water holes are changing into swimming pools for elephant herds, and it brings a lot of joy on our guests faces and making for some memorable sightings. It’s always a nice surprise seeing a rhino wallowing in a secretive pan full of mud keeping himself cool in the mud on warm summers day.
From me and the Tuningi team have a blessed new year full of love and enjoyment
Andre
Ok, thanks Andre for that great news from December. So let’s get into the highlights from January….
So, I will continue with the heavyweights of the bush, the elephants. They are living in “ELEPHANT HEAVEN” at the moment with all the waterholes full to the brim and all the natural mud wallows providing them with all they need to manicure their thick skins on a hot summers day.
Swimming and playing in the water is a daily chore now, as they splash around in the muddy happy holes, lowering their core body temperatures, and also just for the pure enjoyment of the mud on their skins as it sloughs off the insects which pester them this time of the year.
Who says it is only in East Africa where you can see tree-climbing lions?!
They have been sighted here in Madikwe too… Yep I witnessed on one crispy post rainy morning our southern pride females jumping into a very random bush, from which they seemed to use as a better vantage point for something they may have been hunting earlier.
Now lions are not known for their grace in trees, but they do seem to enjoy the challenge that gravity has put before them, as their 150kg bodies hang on to the bark splitting claws as they jostle for a more comfortable position.
While we are talking about the southern pride, the Mica female, the prides “rock“, has been showing signs of deterioration, as she has just gone past her 18th birthday in late November, and she is now the oldest lioness in Madikwe’s history.
She still has decent looking teeth, so as long as she can still stay with the pride on a regular basis, to eat, she will break all age records for lionesses in the wild.
Monomoholo, the dominant of the 2 males here in the south pride has also been playing “ bodyguard” for the last month, and has been seen hanging out in an area where we think 2 of the females may have cubs in the hills around the airstrip. We are keeping a beady eye on this development, and hopefully next month we will show you some images of brand new lion cubs !!
The north pride has also been taken care of by Kwandwe, and he has been seen with the females a lot this month, as he knows that Monomoholo has the south covered, but joins him at the drop of a hat, when they suspect trouble is imminent.
We had one sighting of jackal pups that pushed the cute factor through the roof. There were 3 of the little buggers, and I will leave the images to speak for themselves, as they waited on their parents to return from a hunt one morning.
The next series of images shows elephants digging up soil and eating it, at very special areas here in the bush, called mineral hotspots, and basically all of the herbivores utilise these areas to boost their systems with minerals they do not get, such as sodium, calcium, magnesium etc in the plants that they eat. The term we use for this behaviour is called “GEOPHAGIA” which means to eat soil.
This time of the year the savanna pops up among the pallet of greenery, splashes of colour in the form of wild flowers. There are hundreds of different species popping up everywhere, much to the delight of the Brown Veined White butterflies which stop by these flowers to sip some sweet nectar as they continue their epic journey from the northern cape all the way to the Indian ocean where they lay their eggs on the way and then mysteriously just die in the middle of the ocean.
The wild dog pack is doing very well, and the puppies have just been given their bi-annual rabies shots, and seem to be in tiptop condition. The adults have been killing regularly, and are keeping the ravenous pups well fed. The other pack in the holding facility will hopefully be released this month sometime, and we eagerly wait for the number of sightings to increase twofold.
I found them one morning on the northern fence line where they had killed a huge male kudu, and were in a very playful mood after filling their bellies to exploding levels. They have a very strict social structure among their ranks, and so playing is a vital part of wild dog politics.
Ok.. well that’s it from me… I will leave you all with a few bonus images…
All the best,
Gavin and the T-Team
