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Paradise Regained – Parc National Zakouma Tchad


Kitsafari

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As the golden shards of light gave way to the robust sunlight, the pans came alive. I wasn't sure where we were. @@Safaridude's disciplined notekeeping said we were east of the camp. But it didnt seemed to matter where we were. Wherever it was, there was always wildlife congestion.
And this morning was no exception - we seemed to have "walked" into a Tiang convention, and buffaloes and giraffes were the invited guests.
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I vaguely recall someone counted at least 20 ostriches at this sighting

 

 

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A pink-orangey beast caked in mud

 

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waterbuck

 

 

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a black bellied bustard

 

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coucal?

 

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abyssinian roller

 

 

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Such beautiful abundance wherever you are! Even the mudcaked specimens. Videos are working well, queleas are flying.

 

"Why do such beautiful birds have such awful sounding voices?" I don't have an answer but I'll offer a corroborating example: Fran Drescher.

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Kitsafari

@@Atravelynn aha Nanny. oh yes, that grating voice - I had often wondered how real that high pitched voice was. :)

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Kitsafari
The great white pelicans were a sight for sore eyes. They gather in Zakouma pans during the dry season waiting for the bonanza of fishes that get trapped in the shrinking pools. Beautiful white fluffy feathers that seemed more enhanced by those almost golden yellow big beaks. Was it the pelican or the stork that delivered the babies? Pelicans seem to have stronger beaks, ideal for carrying that white cloth tied on its beak weighed down by a human baby but storks seem to have a European flavour for delivering the babies. The unanimous story behind that legend, or is it a myth, was that parents were unable to explain to children how babies came about, so they made up the story about the stork, which is as believable as Santa Claus, except Santa is real. Funny, in Asia or at least in SIngapore, as kids, we were always told babies were picked up at rubbish bins. I think I'd rather had been delivered by a pelican - I would have arrived in style.


Watching the pelicans was a joy. pelicans seemed to embody independence and freedom to me as a child; even now as an ageing human, I still could sense it -by soaring so gracefully up in the sky despite the apparent bulk spoke of how unchained they were to the ground.

just a few fun facts about these great big birds: their wingspan ranges from 7-12 feet - as wide as that of albatross. The bird can be as heavy as 33 pounds for males. "Regardless of their weight, the Great White Pelicans fly very well and efficiently by tucking their neck in and extending their beaks forward to produce the most thrust. Furthermore, the pelicans fly in a “v-formation” often, in order to reduce the group’s drag." from a Boston Uni blog: http://blogs.bu.edu/bioaerial2012/2012/09/24/pelecanus-onocrotalus-great-white-pelican/


having said that, i shall now bombard you with loads of pelican photos....



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can marabou look cute? maybe when they are fraternising with the pelicans


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pelicans, yellow billed storks, saddle billed storks, egyptian geese (i think), egrets


I'm not sure why the pelican in the following series yawned open his beak - perhaps it was really a yawn but it was fascinating to watch that bird pushing its gular pouch out of its beak. why it did that - I have no clue.


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just an incredible diversity of birdlife


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Taking flight...


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is it possible for marabou to look good, I asked myself again. In Zakouma, shockingly, yes!


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Kitsafari
Day 3 - Part 2: Fly Camping!


we left slightly early this afternoon as we wanted to get into our fly camp before dark. But first, forgot that we saw yet another roan before we got back into camp. but like the others, it was shy and didn't want to pose for us.


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And then, in camp, a visit from a female agama who was very attracted to the beautiful and colourful Moorish carpets on the floor


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I don't recall much of the first part of the drive south to Salamat River and to our fly camp in Tinde. After a wonderful lunch at CN (as usual thanks to Jamie who is a fantastic cook and manager but who will leave CN this year to publish her own cook book), a drive along an empty part of the park with nothing to see on a hot lazy afternoon was too much to bear and the rhythmic rocking of the truck lulled me to sleep. we were all quiet in the car - were the others as dozy as I was?


it was fairly close to the river when we saw this bird - I don't have an ID of it, and would love to know what it is because it is an unusual one with this red streak down its chest to its underbelly. HOpefully, @@Galago or @@inyathi will help identify it.... :)



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As expected, being close to the river, the area became more green. Then as we reached the River Salamat, watched out for crocs, and then

we saw a familiar antelope - Puku! but not quite - it was a kob, that interestingly occurs in this part of the park and not up in Rigueik Pans. I'm not clear why that is so. But the kob reminded me so much of the pretty puku in South Luangwa. In fact, much of the park brought me back time and again to SNLP, and with it, feelings of familiarity and pleasure as I had loved my time in there. At some parts where bushes dotted along the roads, I half expected elephant shrews to dash in and out.


The kob was the first of a handful of species we had not seen in the area near camp, and these included crocs and pata monkeys.



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a pretty baby kob with its mother, which was limping. hoped she made through the nights and recovered from it


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We made a couple of stops along the river, walking down the banks hoping to catch the northern carmine bee-eaters but either they were late in arriving, or we were just too early. But the birdlife in Zakouma was pretty mind-blowing. whereever we stopped, the place was always brimming with birds.


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black headed heron and a squacco heron?


I loved this spot. We sat on the banks and just watched the comings and goings of the birds at what was a bend in the river. across where we sat was a wide bank that presumably could be a nesting place for the northern carmine bee-eaters. But it was empty, although there were a few that hung around in the branches of a tree, not giving a clear view. The northern cousins of the southern carmine bee-eaters look exactly the same, but for the head. In the northern birds, the blue top extends to the entire head while in the southern birds, the blue stops just after the eye level.


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Nevertheless there was other action that kept us busy for a short while.


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African open billed stork



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there was once when Squack and others had seen a lion which had then quickly gone up the banks and vanished into the trees by the time I went down. At another spot, we got down to the banks. I can't recall what we were waiting for but the baboons were modelling for our photos.


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as the sun was setting, we made one more stop for the pelicans with their beautiful plumage. there were a couple of brown ones among them, perhaps the juveniles?



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And with that last stop, we turned down the banks. we had reached our luxurious fly camp site .
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@@Kitsafari There's obviously a lot more water than there was either of the times when I was there, but the both the game and the birds seem no less prolific, if this is what it's like in February then it looks like a pretty good time to go.

 

Back in post 126 you have a Senegal coucal.

 

The beautiful black and red bird is a black-headed gonolek a close relative of the very similar crimson-breasted shrike that you can see in Southern Africa, mainly in Namibia, Botswana, northern S.A. and the Hwange area of Zim but it has a white wing bar. The crimson-breasted is sometimes called a gonolek but more usually a shrike I'm not sure why they don't seem to have standardised the names, you can see the black-headed in East Africa most likely in Uganda but it does occur in western Kenya and also over the border in northern Tanz. I would guess they must be pretty common in the bush and woodland along the Salamat River and are one of the nice birds to see in Zakouma.

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Atravelynn

What a happening place the river is. Wonderful pelican activity and a brave or foolish waterbuck. Any place where you can accidentally forget to mention yet another roan is a winner!

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Kitsafari

@@inyathi thank you for the ID - the gonolek was indeed a striking bird and one I had not seen before. we didn't see many of them in Zakouma. I did see a crimson breasted shrike in Tswalu but somehow didn't associate it with this.

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Oh you have been busy while I have been away. Catching up was fun though - some very diverse bird action on that branch in the water :)

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Kitsafari

@@pault thought it best to fill up the TR before a short hiatus sets in..

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I've seen several reports on Zakouma over the past 3 years and the one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the sheer abundance of wildlife. It is incredible.

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Les Racines du Ciel…

 

While Kit does a stellar job with her lovely writings, musings and her really beautiful photos (thank you, Kit, for taking on this herculean task on your shoulders – not to mention the Guassa report as well!), I thought I’d interject on a slightly different aspect of the trip – one that meant a lot to me personally.

 

I may have mentioned this somewhere on ST, but my first ever trip to Africa was in January 1984. I remember landing in Algiers one cold and wet January morning, extremely surprised by the Africa that greeted me (as opposed to the Africa of my naïve imaginations). The airport road was lined with the oddest juxtaposition of alternating palm trees and pines as it wound its way up to Algiers - a stunning white city that tumbled down the hillsides to the edge of the Mediterranean Sea.

 

Algiers looked deceptively French, and its bistros served mouth-wateringly good ‘soupe de poisson’ accompanied by the most elegant ‘roux’ you can imagine. Algerian wines were a tad rougher but no less delicious. As for the patisseries and boulangeries in Algiers – in those days, even the humblest neighborhood establishments could give Paris a run for their money.

 

But it isn’t just the French influence that is apparent in North Africa. Arabia is infused in their language. The entire length of Africa is reflected in the many shades of their skin. Italy is evident in their many Roman ruins and long Roman noses. Those colorful rugs I know well from Turkey and beyond. And that curly black hair is distinctly sub-Saharan.

 

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North Africa is a jumble of cultures and ethnicities, customs, cuisines and languages – each separate but also melded together to create a very distinctive North African identity that runs across the breadth of the continent – in a straight line from Mauritania to Sudan and all the vast countries that lie north of that imaginary line.

 

I fell in love with Africa that year. Sadly, Algeria’s ‘troubles’ began soon after our sojourn there and we never got a chance to go back to North Africa. This trip to Chad was my first safari in francophone Africa and I was both surprised and delighted by the onrush of memories that engulfed me as soon as I saw the dusty arcaded avenues of N’Djamena, the jalabiya-clad men on the street, some of them wearing the blinding-blue turbans I had seen in the Berber highlands of Algeria and Morocco. The same distinctive French calligraphy on African storefronts. From my brief glimpse of it, N’Djamena lacks the sophistication of an Algiers and a Casa, but it is definitely and quintessentially, an African-Saharan-French outpost city. I would love to go back and spend more time exploring N’Djamena as well as some of the other little towns and hamlets that cling precariously to the edges of the desert.

 

In fact, there were moments when I felt I was living the pages of a Tintin story, complete with a flag-flying crenelated fortress and Mr. Twaffle in his Legionnaire's hat :D

 

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As I was getting ready to leave for Chad, I received a small parcel in the mail. It was from my dearest friend, Perrine, from my college days in Paris. She is an ardent bibliophile. When she heard that I was headed to Chad, she managed to unearth for me, from goodness knows where, a first edition of Romain Gary’s Les Racines du Ciel (The Roots of Heaven) – a book about a quixotic character on an improbable mission to save the elephants of Chad from hunting and poaching. Of course, I took the book along with me to Zakouma and bored everyone else to tears by pulling it out of my backpack at the littlest pretext! But I also read it in my tent and in the lounge tent at Camp Nomade. It felt special to be reading this book in Chad 60 years after it was written and when the eles are so much a part of the Zakouma story.

 

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@@inyathi used charmingly written French-English bilingual headers in his TR which made a strong allusion to the Francophone aspect of Chad. And I must say, it does help a little to speak the language, especially because it makes it easier to talk to the people who work so hard to make these safaris possible for people like us. Mahamat, the head guide at Camp Nomade speaks excellent English, of course, but he and I would lapse into French from time to time for a bit of comfortable chatter about things not strictly safari - such as the many languages of Chad, the tribes of his country etc.

 

As some of you may know already, the famous Gerewol festival of Niger is not limited to Niger. The Wodaabe live a trans-frontier lifestyle and an equally large Gerewol Festival is also held each year in Chad since there is a sizeable Wodaabe population here as well (in 2017, the festival will be held in September). This could form the nucleus of a memorable trip to Chad and I hope I can do this at some point myself in the not too distant future.

 

http://www.cntraveller.com/recommended/amazing-journeys/gerewol-dances-chad-africa

 

Up until now, I have been single-minded about wildlife-wildlife-wildlife on all my trips to Africa. Not that I have not enjoyed meeting the people, but truth be told, it has always been about the animals for me. This trip changed things. I think I am beginning to see that Africa cannot be about one thing to the exclusion of the other.

And I am wildly excited now about discovering and properly exploring the hidden nooks and corners of francophone Africa…

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@@madaboutcheetah I really love Ken's photos of Zakouma. Again I consider it a privilege that I'm fortunate enough to visit Zakouma next year.

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@Sangeeta Thanks I have an old second-hand English copy of  The Roots of Heaven but for some reason I forgot to take it with me on either of my safaris. I have to say that I found it a slightly curious book, but I’m very glad to have read it, as I had known about the book for a long time. Anyone going to Zakouma should try to get hold of a copy, I got mine second-hand through Amazon. As far as I can recall, I’ve only seen parts of the film, but I believe it was shot in Chad, so perhaps I should try to get hold of a copy.

Edited by inyathi
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@@inyathi Thank you so much for this information. When I read @@Sangeeta s fascinating post I just assumed the book was only available in French. I've just ordered it from Amazon, second hand and a very reasonable price, although I'll have to wait a while as it's coming from the US. And the film is available on Amazon too. I've just watched the trailer on Amazon Prime and I'll watch the whole film after the book. It stars Erroll Flynn (his last film I believe), Trevor Howard and... Juliette Greco (who, for those of you lucky enough to be old enough to remember, was the epitome of cool).

So more great preparation for my trip to Zakouma in February!

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Haha, @@inyathi - yes, that's a very apt word, it is indeed a 'curious' book. I have not read it in the English, but in the French, the writing is brilliant and the story line of a slightly (or very) mad individual tilting at the windmills appeals to me because I like these lunatic plot lines where 'sane' person after 'sane' person gets caught up in the original 'insane' mission so that at the end you can hardly distinguish between the 2 camps at all.

 

@@Galago, would love to hear from you after you read it. I know @@optig has read the book & watched the movie too. I have not seen the movie myself & I wonder if they deviated from the original plot... I saw the movie they made of John Masters' brilliant book ' Bhowani Junction' & was so disappointed. Since then, I stay away from movie versions of classic books until they are vouched for by others ?

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Alexander33

@@Kitsafari

 

Your report just continues to fascinate. The volume and diversity of the wildlife is, as you have mentioned, just exceptional.

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I'm back! and being on sick leave today ( immediately after an overseas trip) ain't no fun. instead it will be quickly forgotten as I thank @@Sangeeta for her lovely interlude! you've introduced a very pleasant diversion, and diversity into a thread that has focussed only on wildlife - it's much like the incredible diversities we saw in Zakouma! I recalled those times when you had your head bowed on that old well-worn book on your lap as the birds sang around you.

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@@Kitsafari please get better soon. I'm looking forward to seeing more of your delightful trip report. I've missed your posts.

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Glamping on the dry bed of a shrunken river was incredibly comfortable. The pup tent was accomodative with a single mattress and more than sufficient space to put my other stuff. I slept well on the mattress. the amazing staff of Camp Nomade led by Tim hauled an entire bathroom and two toilets to the camp such that we had a modest place to shower (with warm bucket water on order) and proper ladies/gents loos. The meals were still as great as they were at camp, although without the frills of well placed cutlery and wine glasses.

 

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the vew from pup tents:

 

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Day 4: Am Douloulou
“The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see nature all ridicule and deformity... and some scarce see nature at all. But to the eyes of the man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.”
William Blake in a Letter to Rev Dr Trusler 23 August 1799
The first day of fly camp would be spent out of camp, which meant we were set for our first offsite lunch. :)
But that was not on our mind when we set out that morning. Elephants were. We had seen only the 2 bulls at Leon's resting place; we needed to see the Herd. No pressure, Squack.
First we explored the areas around and close to Salamat River. On the road out, still dodging the thorny branches that stuck out into the lanes and threatened to tear me out of the truck as a hanging ornament (testimony to the rarity of traffic), we passed three lions under a tree. Nothing unusual about lions lying around trees, but what surprised us was how they first viewed us with interest, and that interest quickly turned into fear. The lions fled and hid behind the bushes, watching us. It was a curious thing. after all, in East Africa and southern Africa, the big cats would completely ignore us, treating us as a dead log or a dead tree for all they cared. But not in Zakouma. These lions fled with an underlying terror. It wasn't so with the other lions we saw in Zakouma, which seemed more habituated. But they were very wary of the truck and its passengers.
not really good shots to follow,but hopefully you can glimpse a touch of fear and wariness in her eyes.
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other wildlife we saw along the way

 

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another beautiful pan along the way... (as you may have already guessed, I had no sense of directions, let alone know the names of the various stops we made)

 

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we came across the black breasted barbet a few times, but it was such a flighty bird, shy of the camera and fleet of wings. I only managed to snap one pic and it was half hidden at that. Squack was definitely excited to see them.

 

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and Squack put on the brakes,excitedly saying stone partridge but just like the barbet, the partridge wasn't too sociable and fled from us.

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@@Kitsafari

 

"just an incredible diversity of birdlife" - indeed!I love your writing, and your photos are excellent. Such an abundance of wildlife in a special place.

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