Thursday, July 29, 2010

Lagoon Camp - Kwando

Lagoon Camp is a beautiful tented camp surrounded by a broad range of environments from wetlands to scrub to plains to more densely wooded ares.


This camp is known for their wild dogs which was our primary reason for heading there. On our first day we were lucky enough to come across the dogs heading out for their daily hunt. They flushed out a large warthog which ran into a den inside a large termite mound. The dogs won't follow in as it's too fair a fight, one on one against a dangerous, tusked warthog. Unfortunately for the warthog, the dogs are smarter. They backed off out of sight and when the warthog poked its head out to check if the coast was clear, it didn't see any dogs. The scene was like the last scene in Gallipoli - the one where you are urging "don't run, don't run....please don't run."

But you know that he is going to run and you already know what the outcome will be.



Wild Dogs do not kill their prey before eating and even though the pack was 18 strong, it took a long time for the warthog to die. The squealing of a dying warthog is a particularly horrible noise that cuts to the bone. If you would like to know what that sound is like, we have a large video file which I will try to upload at some stage.

The weather patterns were changing during out time in Kwando, which unfortunately meant that there was some quiet times on the game drives as much of the game had moved on thinking the rains were coming. The cheetahs that include the area in their territory were a no-show however we did some interesting species - eland, honey badgers and sitatunga amongst them.

No comments:

Post a Comment