The Crowned Crane

By Maripet Koipa, Scout - Chada Katavi 

This is a very tall bird with long legs, and can be found in short grass areas, swampy areas and near rivers.  Crowned cranes are beautiful birds, very attractive to people.  They normally live in pairs.  They have a long, yellow crest.

I can see them every day if I leave the camp and search for them along the river, especially in dry season, when they like to stay near water to search for insect along the riverbanks.

It is the colours of this bird that make it so attractive, and which make it such a well-known bird.

Flowering meadows

By Gabriel Mushi, Guide Chada Katavi

This is not a thing someone expects to find on safari in the bush.  But it is exactly what you will find if you come to Katavi in January. 

Sometimes we stop the vehicle and spend long minutes looking at flowers so even for me being a guide this is a new experience like I’m one of the guests.  Except I know most of the names of the flowers now from studying them recently. 

The nice thing with flowers on safari is even when guests expected to see elephants and lions, a savanna with pink, yellow, white, orange, purple and red decorations is a great surprise.

One guest asked me if he could take a flower for his wife’s hair, and I was nervous because it is just a flower, but it is protected by the laws the same way a leopard’s skin or an elephant’s ivory.  When I explained this to them, they laughed because flowers are flowers and elephants are elephants, but we were able to drive away sparing the life of the flower, my job and their happiness.

This flower is a wild ginger.

Green Katavi

By Philip Pendaeli - Guide, Chada Katavi 

Katavi National Park has been getting drier and drier, just what we wanted to make sure the action in the shrinking hippo pools was good.  This lack of water was causing serious fighting between big male hippos, sometimes resulting in fights to the death.  This is not easy for some people to see, but it is life and death in the bush and it is happening even if people don’t want to watch it. 

Many of our game drives and walks led us to the pools of mud, where even the crocodiles were all forced to move into caves because the hippos were taking all the space.  Then when we were all starting to feel bad for the animals because they were really struggling from lack of clean water, the rains came.

Elephants were trumpeting just from being happy, at least according to some of our guests, and I was tempted to believe them.  They didn’t have to dig with their forefeet and tusks any more to find clean water in the riverbanks.

Hippos and crocodiles returned to the river that is starting to fill with water and will be flowing again soon.  Even some species of terrapins (like turtles) appeared like magic from where they were cased in dried mud for almost six months.  Now we see them walking on the tracks and we try very hard not to drive over them.

Even though dry season is our most popular and busy time at Chada Katavi, somehow I think it is a blessing to look at how green and beautiful the park has become.  And not many people complain about a cloud covering up the hot sun in Katavi occasionally.

Crested porcupines share their caves with snakes

By Frank Japhet - Scout, Chada Katavi

Last month when we were looking for a place to flycamp in Kapimbye area, nearby Kamlangala river (temporary river), we saw a crested porcupine inside the cave which is located beside of the Kamlangala river.  They looked like a family, their number was ranging between 6 and 8.  When we were still over 10 meters away, we saw a snake was looking out from that cave and it went out to sun itself on top of the rocks, but went back quickly into the cave.  Due to the colour and size and length, it seemed that it was a Black Mamba.

This is an interesting symbiotic relationship between Crested Porcupines and snakes although their habits differ in that porcupines are active during the night while Black Mambas are active during the daytime and only when disturbed are active at night.  The people of this area whom have their homes located near by Katavi National Park, prefer to hunt and kill porcupines by using their dogs and spears even, to dig them from their burrows.  Due to this fact, the porcupine knowing that people are looking for them in order to kill them, sometimes live and share their burrows/caves with snakes as their defensive mechanism.

Tree climbing lions of Katavi

By Gabriel Mushi, Guide - Chada Katavi

Katavi has a large number of lions, with different prides in each part of the park.  Though lions are terrestrial, spending a large amount of their time on the ground, they as well climb trees.

Lake Manyara National Park has been so famous for its tree climbing lions, but Katavi lions as well climb.  Lions climb trees mainly to try to get away from the flies, to catch a good breeze and to scan the area around them, mainly to look for prey.

Though they climb trees, they do not look that good or relaxed when trying to balance themselves on branches.  They are not as efficient climbers as leopards are.

Elephants in Chada

By Gabriel Mushi, Guide - Chada Katavi

Elephants are very intelligent animals.  They feed on a variety of plant matter, from flowers, leaves and fruits to pods and even bark.  They use their tusks to debark trees, then peel off strips and chew them.

Recently, while on an evening game drive with my guests, we came across a male elephant, about thirty years old, feeding under an acacia tree.  He was picking up seed pods from the ground, but when he had finished them all, he started shaking the tree.  Lifting his trunk and aligning it up the trunk of the tree, with his tusks on either side, he started pushing hard to shake the acacia pods down.

After that, he continued picking up the pods and eating them, grasping them one by one with the tip of his trunk and lifting them into his mouth.  After making sure there were none remaining underneath the tree, he moved on and kept on pushing on other acacia trees to get more pods that were out of his reach.

Buffalo at Chada Katavi

By Frank Japhet, Scout - Chada Katavi

The cape buffalo are highly gregarious animals, living in large herds up to 4000 in Katavi National Park.

Buffalo drink daily because they are not able to conserve water like some animals, so it is difficult for a large herd to find enough to drink in the dry season.  That is why they split up sometimes.

Due to this dry season, the herds are also breaking up because of scarcity of food.  They must travel a lot to make sure they don’t deplete the grass in one area.

They are grazers on the taller grasses, but sometimes they can browse on other plants, but this is rare.

The smaller units that break from the herds are led by a matriarch cow who leads her clan members who are usually closely related.  In large herds as well, there are older cows who want to be in the front of the herd.  These cows are called Pathfinders.

Other buffalo can be sedentary, not moving great distances because they are not in large herds.  The most sedentary buffalo are older bulls who are solitary or in small bachelor groups. 

The distance travelled by buffalo in a day ranges from 5 to 18 kms as they commute between pastures and water.  In Katavi, even in dry season, there are some areas where the herds are still large.  Rungwa river, Lukima river, and other areas where there is natural spring water are examples.