This blog was written by Keagan Rowe, a Bushwise International Field Guide student. Each student takes a turn as camp manager, and writing a blog is part of the experience.
4 min read
My week as camp manager was certainly eventful. While the duties of camp manager did not really require much extra thought as it mainly involved having the camp radio on your person at all times and letting everyone know when meals are ready. The week itself, however, was very interesting.
This week marked the beginning of our practice drives where the idea is to attempt to mimic what you would be doing on a drive if you had guests on the vehicle. I must admit that going into the first drive, despite knowing that it is a practice and the idea is to learn from it, the anxiety to perform in front of your peers was certainly high and I feel like that sentiment was widely spread amongst the students.
Despite the pre-drive jitters, I believe all of us did really well for a first attempt and it was fascinating to see the differences in everyone's style of guiding. Even though this is very early on in our guiding experience you can already slowly start to see the kind of guides everyone will turn into. We have the style of educational guiding where facts and figures are integrated into what you are seeing, the culturally relevant guiding where what we are seeing gets related to the culture of the area and what animals mean to different people in the area, and we see the type of guiding where storytelling dominates the drive.
Now the guiding practice was already special, but what further enhanced our experience was the phenomenal sightings that we witnessed. You expect to see a lot while in the Sabi Sands, but to actually bear witness to some of the animals' behaviours and how they interact was, and always will be, an otherworldly experience.
One of the many sightings that stood out was when we found a female leopard who had just crossed into our concession from Lion Sands. We trailed her for a while and noticed her behaviour shift – she had caught wind of something she could prey on. We sat in silence and observed how the leopard assumed a low posture and began to slowly stalk whatever prey item she had smelt.
With a bit of time and patience a rather large warthog had emerged from the bushes, at this point everyone on the vehicle started to speculate as to what was going to happen. “There is no way she will try and catch that warthog, it's nearly as big as her,” was one of our observations. “But she looks skinny, maybe she hasn’t eaten in a while and has to take this chance,” said another.
And so with our theories being expressed, now came the time to wait and see. What felt like only a few minutes was actually well over 40 minutes of us baking in the sun while watching the leopard take one small step closer every few minutes. But the sun didn’t bother us, and our patience felt like it could last an eternity – we needed to see what would happen next.
The time had come, the leopard was not going to be able to get closer than she already was, the warthog grazed unassumingly about eight meters away from one scary cat. The warthog looked
up at the vehicle, turned his head slightly to the right and finally spotted the leopard. The warthog bolted away as fast as he could, letting out a grunt that one could possibly translate as “Oh crap”. The leopard had failed the hunt this time, but what a blessing it was to be able to witness the attempt.
While the leopard and warthog sighting was certainly a highlight for the week, it was far from the only one. We had a unique sighting that had great comedic value. We drove on the border of Lion Sands and came to a sudden stop when we saw a female steenbok not even six meters away from the road and us. Now this is strange behaviour from a steenbok as they normally run away when vehicles get too close – but not this one.
We sat and watched in silence trying to determine how she could be this calm. It didn’t take long for the truth to come out – we saw her dig into the ground and she was munching on some subterranean bulbs. Our head trainer, Nic, then informed us that this steenbok was likely experiencing the effects of the plant's psychoactive properties.
After getting our giggles out of the way, we observed the behaviour of this little antelope and turned it into a teaching moment of “what else can you see”, talking about how her eyes are glazed over, her posture is un-alert and so on and so forth.
There are many more things that could be talked about as there is never a dull moment while on this course. My take away from this week is that it really served as a reminder on why I am doing this and while I choose this career path. There is no other profession where you get to watch animals in their natural environments like this, and the ability to turn every sighting into an educational moment, or even a comedic moment, is so incredibly unique and unequivocally special that I couldn't imagine a better way to spend my days.
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