M A D I K W E Game Reserve, South Africa.

In May this year, Jos and I spent five wonderful days in the Madikwe Game Reserve in the north of South Africa, close to the Botswana border. Madikwe was initiated in 1992 with the aim of benefitting local communities, among others, through sustainable wildlife tourism activities. It was stocked with imported game in the biggest translocation exercise ever undertaken, called Operation Phoenix. A staggering ten thousand animals of twenty seven species were brought here from other African reserves.

We stayed at Mosetlha bush camp, www.thebushcamp.com, a basic but comfortable and wholesome collection of open sided, twin bedded, wooden huts for a maximum of sixteen guests, where the emphasis is very much on providing an authentic bush experience. There is no electricity and you have bucket showers using hot water from a donkey boiler, but believe me it's great fun, the food is good and the rangers are real experts in bush lore.


Waterbuck female and young.

Of course, the reason for visiting any game reserve is (or should be) to see the wildlife and experience something of the interrelationships between the birds and animals, the vegetation and the landscape. Madikwe did not disappoint. We had nine game drives and a bush walk during our five night stay and each outing produced new and unexpected sightings. As Tabie our excellent young ranger said, every encounter is unique. The first evening for instance, we came across a fine herd of waterbuck, who seemed happy with our presence and gave me some good opportunities to try out the Canon 500mm f4 IS lens on my Benbo tripod and Wimberley head (in monopod mode, as it wasn't possible to open up a tripod on the back seat of the game vehicle without losing friends). More skittish animals would have made life much more difficult so I am grateful to this docile group and the soft evening light for giving me some very useful practice with the big and heavy 500. In fact I'm now a bit of a waterbuck fan. Below is Dad, wistfully chewing a blade of grass. Above is some of his family.


Waterbuck male.

That same evening, as we were having our first sunset stop for tea and biscuits (beer and crisps if you prefer), we were joined by this fearless black-backed jackal. He was hanging around in the hope of a free snack and howling to his shyer mate in the twilight. He got no handouts and eventually loped off, disappointed, into the sunset. Best not to get wild animals accustomed to seeing humans as a source of food was Tabie's advice. Photographically, the problem was getting far enough away from him with the 500mm lens, and the fast receding light levels. 1/50th second at f4 with a 500 is not good but the Image Stabilisation feature on the mighty 500 helps by boosting the shutter speed equivalent by a couple of stops or so, ie. around 1/200 to 250th. Nevertheless, most of the attempts were hopelessly blurred and the lucky shot below demonstrates the value of taking multiple exposures in tricky situations.


Black-backed Jackal


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The African wild dog is one of the star attractions of Madikwe. These dogs are pack animals and efficient hunters and despite their prodigious reproduction rate (females can give birth to sixteen or more pups in a single litter, the most of any mammal), they are an endangered species. They form close knit social groups, which hunt as a team and share the kill, even amongst sick or injured members of the pack. However, the cost of this intimacy is that diseases such as rabies and distemper quickly spread through the group and can wipe out a whole pack.

Wild dogs have voracious appetites, often kill twice a day and they prey on animals far bigger than themselves including adult breeding stock, so no game reserve can afford to have too many wild dogs around. Thus their activities are closely monitored and their numbers controlled if this is considered necessary. Notice that the dog in the shot below, that we encountered at dawn, is wearing a radio collar, used to track movements of the pack.


African Wild Dog male.


We came upon this battered old male some days later. He turned out to be badly injured and limped painfully off after the rest of his pack. They had killed a Kudu about a hundred yards away, had probably led him to it to feed and he was now resting and digesting.


African Wild Dog, old male.


Tabie, our ranger, disappeared into the dense bush, rifle in hand, looking for the kill. He led us to it on foot when he'd established that the pack had gone and it was safe for us to look. What you see in the photograph is what remained of a 160 Kg Kudu. Just a stripped skeleton and a few yards away, a cleaned hide. Tabie reckoned that the whole animal would have been devoured in around 20 minutes!


Alan, Jos, Romy and ex-Kudu.


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Red Haartebeest.


Haartebeest are frequent in Madikwe. They are said to be the fastest antelope. There are several subspecies, with a variety of colour and horn shape. This is the Red Haartebeest, which has lyre shaped horns.





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Dead Leadwood trees.

The skeletal remains of Leadwood trees are prominent in many areas of the reserve. They don't signify any sort of accelerated tree death, just that the Leadwood has very dense hard heartwood, which is resistant to fungal attack and can remain standing for fifty years after the death of the tree.


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Giraffes are unique and wonderful animals and it's something of a surprise on your first safari to see them looking around with their heads well above the tree tops.

They look strangely prehistoric and dinosaur like but perhaps that's because they are filling a similar ecological niche in an age of mammals that long necked reptiles did in the Cretaceous era. Or are they?

Long necked dinosaurs like Diplodocus and Apatosaurus certainly existed in the Cretaceous but current thinking suggests that in reality, they could not lift their heads more than a few feet above the line of the backbone; the vertebrae simply locked up before the head could be lifted any higher. So images of these animals browsing giraffe-like at tree top level are probably fanciful and scientists have always been uneasy with the problem of how a thirty ton reptile gets a blood supply to a brain fifteen feet above its body.

Giraffes have evolved a number of physical and physiological adaptations to enable them to live with their heads in the treetops. They have large hearts: 13 kg for an adult male, capable of producing a blood pressure 2-3 times that of humans to pump blood up to the head; an intricate network of valves in the blood vessels of the neck; blood vessels that can bypass the brain when the animal lowers its head to drink; oversized lungs to compensate for the large dead volume of air in the 12 foot trachea and erythrocytes (red blood cells) about a third the volume of those in humans to increase the efficiency of diffusion of oxygen in and out of the cell.

So with such a high degree of specialisation, we shouldn't wonder at the giraffe's lack of mammalian competition for browsing the topmost leaves of trees.


Female Giraffe browsing.




Frisky male assessing females readiness for mating (the sniff test).

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We stayed with this lioness for perhaps half a mile as she roamed the bush, mournfully calling for her cubs but we lost her in the thick bush before we found out whether or not she found them.


Lioness searching for cubs



This magnificent male lion had killed a baby giraffe the day before and was jealously guarding the carcass. He had charged our fellow Mosetlhans who got there just before us in their game vehicle and were still shaking when we arrived. Fortunately he settled down enough for some close observation but he was in thick bush, hence the slightly obscured view.



Lone male lion guarding giraffe kill.



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We came across a group of four enormous bull elephants rapidly consuming a grove of trees one morning. Madikwe has a large elephant population and plenty of tree and shrub rich savanna to support them.


Elephants eyelashes.



Looking for leopards after dusk one evening we came upon this elephant drinking at a waterhole about twenty metres away. A couple of preliminary shots with the 100-400mm zoom lens using flash produced predictable if disappointing results of a well lit, rather flat looking elephant on a pitch black background.

I got Tabie, our accommodating ranger, to experiment with shining his spotlight on the elephant and got some good exposures by whacking up the ISO speed on the Canon 20D from 100 to 1600, which gave a shutter speed of 1/30th second in the dim light. Just enough to hand hold with the lens steadied on the seat back. But the most interesting effect and the one that most captures the atmosphere of the occasion, was achieved by shining the light into the water to illuminate the ele' with ripple contours from the reflected light.

The passing White-Headed Duck was a bonus.





Elephant and duck. Madikwe waterhole. Dusk.


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Lilac-Breasted Rollers are quite common in Madikwe. The LBR has the most lovely combination of blues and browns on its back, tail and wing feathers, which contrast wonderfully with its rose and lilac breast. The bird below sat in a bush just a few feet away from the game vehicle one evening, enjoying the last rays of the sun and stayed there quite unconcerned as I took photographs.

Lilac-breasted Roller.

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The bush camp resident spider was this Golden Orb, whose web was around two metres across, anchored to points perhaps three metres apart. This is the female, who seems to have lost a couple of legs. The male is tiny in comparison and a dull brown colour. He sits on her back to mate, though getting there and getting away afterwards, is probably a perilous operation. The web consists of two kinds of silk, one yellow and one colourless, with a characteristic ball of yellow at the centre from which the spider gets its name. The mummified carcasses of its victims are strung out in vertical rows near the centre of the web. Some of these can be seen in the shot below.


Golden Orb Spider, female.

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The Kudu, one of the largest antelopes, has beautiful spiral horns, which can grow up to five feet in length. This handsome male has the characteristic facial markings, including three white spots on his cheeks.

The shot below and the earlier Waterbuck male, which are totally uncropped, show the value of using a Wimberley head (www.tripodhead.com ) with a heavy telephoto lens. When mounted on a properley balanced Wimberley, moving the camera and lens becomes completely effortless so it's easy to frame the subject exactly. This would be really awkward to do with a ball and socket or pan and tilt head, particularly with portrait views like these.

Kudu male.

Kudu male facial markings.

We met this female Kudu on a later drive. She has a lovely face too; and those ears! Clearly Kudu must be able to sense predators approaching from great distances, even at night.

Kudu female.

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Burchell's Zebra is recognisable by its alternate darker and lighter stripes towards the rump. According to Alan, a fellow guest, the males are black on white and the females are white on black. No trouble sexing zebras then!

Burchell's Zebra.


Burchell's Zebra foal.