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Cars filled up the narrow dirt road. People leaned out of windows, wielding camera lenses the length of their arms. Su and I found a space, parked in the middle of the crowd, and scanned the savannah. Heat waves rolled off the ground and distorted the view. My eyes flicked from tree to tree. Wildebeests meandered through the yellowing grass, but that was nothing remarkable. Surely all these people hadn’t stopped just to watch wildebeests?
Su leaned out of her window and called to the car next door, “What’s going on? Is there a rhino or something?” The man kept his eyes trained on the animals, but he shook his head and said, “No, it’s- look!” The wildebeests had suddenly stampeded, kicking up clouds of dust. What are they running from? They swung back the other direction, and I could finally see the cause of the traffic jam. A cheetah! Cameras clicked all around us.
I had never seen a cheetah in person, but it was unmistakable. The dark, tear-track marks around the eyes and snout, the small solid spots, the massive pendulum tail keeping it from falling over as it swerved around scraggly bushes. It nearly brought down a young wildebeest, but the calf dodged left at the last second. The cheetah slowed to a walk, and then sat under a nearby tree and panted for a while. Understandable – cheetahs are built for sprinting. They can only maintain their top speed of 55 mph for 20 or 30 seconds maximum. Fascinated, Su and I watched it snooze and stretch and stalk the wildebeest herd for several hours. We were one of the last cars from the traffic jam to leave the scene. I would’ve been happy to stay longer, but Su reminded me that if we didn’t get back to Lower Sabie Rest Camp by nightfall, we’d be locked out and fined.
We were in Kruger National Park in northeastern South Africa. It was early April 2013. We had an unusually long spring break that year, so we had decided to do something completely different and go in search of the cast of The Lion King. We, like most visitors to the park, came with a checklist of animals we wanted to see. The first priority was to find the Big Five: African bush elephants, Cape buffalo, leopards, lions, and black rhinos. Historically, these were the five most difficult and dangerous game animals to hunt. Now they’re mostly used as a tourist gimmick; safari businesses lure in visitors with promises of seeing all of the Big Five. Of course there are plenty of other fascinating animals to see, but the Big Five are found throughout the park, and they’re one of Kruger’s major draw cards. Elephants and cape buffalo are the most common (and surprisingly, the most dangerous). Lions and leopards are far less numerous; they’re threatened by trophy hunters and habitat loss. Black rhinos are the rarest of the Five, critically endangered due to the illegal rhino horn trade. Kruger is at constant war with poachers.
After we’d checked off four of the Big Five, we moved on to other famous African animals. Giraffes, impala, wildebeests, hyenas, zebras, warthogs, hippos, and the more common white rhinos are all popular, as are a multitude of unique birds like hornbills and saddle-billed storks. It’s considered a point of pride to check boxes for the rarer, seldom-seen animals. During our week in the park, we encountered no one who had recently seen a black rhino, and only one person who had seen an African wild dog, of which there are only 150 in the park. Su and I later realized just how fortunate we had been to have seen the cheetah. They are the rarest large species in the park with a mere 120 animals.
Kruger is among the largest and most popular game reserves in Africa with up to three million visitors each year. It has the triple advantages of being extremely visitor friendly and accessible, being within easy driving distance of Johannesburg, and having an incredible array of wildlife. A grand total of 148 mammal species call the park home. People are drawn to these iconic animals because they’re usually a novelty. We tend to think of them in the context of zoos and circuses. But in Kruger, people and cars are novelties. Humans are the ones who don’t belong. The 2,500 kilometers of road crisscrossing the scrubby grasslands seem as out of place as a rhino in suburbia. All of the rest camps are fenced in, the camp gates are locked from sunset to sunrise, and you’re required to padlock your fridge or turn it against the wall so baboons and vervet monkeys can’t steal your food. At Lower Sabie, you can hear hippos bellowing outside the fence all night long, and jackals prowl around the edges of Tamboti Bush Camp. People must stay inside their vehicles at all times when outside the camps, or be accompanied by an armed park ranger. All of this gives the impression that the people are in cages while the animals roam free, which I personally find rather refreshing.
Today, Kruger’s main focus is the conservation of its animal inhabitants, and heavy penalties are attached to hunting in the park. But ironically, the park owes its existence to hunters. Back in 1900, the area now known as Kruger National Park was a collection of private game reserves, set aside specifically for wealthy Afrikaners to hunt for sport. The reserves were eventually brought together and merged into one national park – South Africa’s first – in 1926, which was named for South African Republic president Paul Kruger. The park has since grown to be approximately the size of Wales. Now it’s one of the parks, reserves, and sanctuaries across South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique that make up the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Peace Park.
Kruger is primarily subtropical savannah – flat grasslands dotted with scrubby trees and crisscrossed by wide rivers, including the Sabie, Olifants, Crocodile, and Limpopo. Granite outcrops and small muddy ponds dot the landscape, adding some visual variety. Bush-willow and thorny acacia trees poke up through the dusty earth. Near rivers and ponds, there are swaths of buffalo grass and scraggly mopane bushes. Here and there you can find the world’s southernmost baobab trees, which are estimated to be around 4,000 years old.
But no one comes to Kruger to see the trees or the rivers. It’s all about the animals here.
One of the most memorable episodes from that trip occurred on a hot, dry morning a few days before the cheetah sighting. We’d been up before dawn and driven north from Tamboti to Olifants. Su wanted to go in search of elephants – they were supposed to be nearby. The camp and the nearby river were named for them, after all. I desperately wanted to see another rhino, up close. We had caught a glimpse of one the previous evening, but at a great distance and in poor light. So we ventured out in our tiny, boxy rental car with all windows open (the AC didn’t work). We found neither elephants nor rhinos that day; instead we found the spectacular, harsh reality of life in the savannah.
We reached a fork in the road. “Which way?” asked Su. I pointed to the right. It was a smaller, rougher road, so we’d be less likely to see other tourists, and maybe more likely to see animals. After a few minutes of washboard gravel, we spotted some giraffes off to one side. They were staring in the direction we were driving, unfazed by our intrusion. Well, unfazed wasn’t quite right… it was more like they were completely distracted by something down the road. We snapped a few pictures and moved on. I draped my arm out of the open window and tried to unstick my sweaty legs from the seat.
Suddenly Su grimaced. “Ugh, do you smell that?” I frowned, sniffed, and almost gagged. There was a truly horrific stench drifting in through the windows. We rolled them up and immediately started looking for the source. We found it fifty yards down the road.
It was a giraffe, or rather, had once been a giraffe. Now it was four awkwardly splayed legs, an enormous ribcage, seven absurdly long vertebrae, a grinning skull, and some shredded patchwork skin peeled back to reveal the meat underneath. Farther back there were a dozen lionesses resting in the shade of the acacia trees. Transfixed, we watched as one approached the carcass and buried her nose in the rotting flesh, smearing blood all over her chin. After a while, another two joined her at the feast, but made sure to give her plenty of space. Flies hovered everywhere, vultures looked on from a nearby tree, and Su and I roasted in the car with the windows blocking out the smell.
Rather morbidly, I wondered how the lions had taken down a fully-grown giraffe. They obviously couldn’t leap high enough to grab a giraffe by the throat. Maybe they had attacked when the giraffe was drinking and had its neck stretched down to the water? But there was no sign of a lake or a stream nearby. That evening, I asked a park ranger at Olifants about it. She told me that the trick was to get the giraffe to run. Normally a giraffe walks in a very slow and stately manner, but if the lion pack can scare it into running, there’s a good chance that it will tangle up its long legs, trip, and fall. Then the lions pounce before the giraffe can get back up.
Unlike most cats, lions are sociable with each other and live in tight-knit groups called prides. The lionesses do most of the hunting as a pack, and the senior female leads the charge. They attack from behind, clawing and biting at the hindquarters of their prey until it collapses, or sometimes lunge for the throat from the front (giraffes are a special case). Sometimes lions hunt alone, but they are much less likely to succeed than a pack. But even when working together, lion hunts end with a successful kill only ten percent of the time. So to get the rest of the protein they need as obligate carnivores, they scavenge from other predators whenever they can. It seems abhorrent to us to eat carrion, but it’s important to remove dead animals and process them back into nutrients to feed plants. It’s a slightly more disgusting version of the circle of life presented in The Lion King.
Spotted hyenas also help to clean up corpses from the savannah, but not as often as many people think. In fact, lions steal from hyenas at least as often as hyenas steal from them, if not more. Kruger’s hyenas in particular hunt more than they scavenge; their favorite prey is wildebeest. In fact, less than an hour after we left the lion feast, we came across a hyena family polishing off the last of the meat from a wildebeest skeleton. I was expecting them to be slavering, cackling brutes like they are in children’s stories, but they were actually quite cute. Two adults carefully watched over four or five cubs as they crunched on ribs. Hyenas’ jaws are immensely strong; they’re built for breaking bones open to get at the marrow inside. Much like lions, hyenas occasionally hunt alone, but their chances of catching prey increase significantly when they work together.
Teamwork pays off for African wild dogs too; they have a higher successful kill rate than any other African carnivore – eighty percent. Like lions and leopards, wild dogs are obligate carnivores (sometimes also known as hypercarnivores). They owe their hunting success to their highly social nature. They work in teams, splitting up so some chase the prey, while others cut off its escape and ambush it as it runs. Then when they kill their prey – usually medium-sized antelopes like impalas – the pups get the first crack at the meal. This ensures that the new generations get the nutrition they need. But unfortunately, wild dogs’ success at hunting has made them enemies of local farmers. Bigger predators like lions also sometimes attack wild dogs so they can steal their kills. These days there are estimated to be around 400 wild dogs in all of South Africa, with Kruger hosting the largest population.
It was pretty gruesome to watch the lions tear apart the remains of the giraffe, but we stayed and watched and for hours. We couldn’t tear ourselves away until the lions retreated back into the shade, and the vultures settled in for their turn at the meal. By that time, we were drenched in sweat, and our brains were probably slightly fried too. Still, there was a raw appeal in witnessing the brutality of nature. This was no zoo; the animals were not there for our entertainment. The experience served as a forceful reminder that this planet is home to far more animals than just us humans. In Kruger, we were visitors in someone else’s home.
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