Welcome to the new “Hwange” blog. This will, I hope, continue where the “DART blog” left off some time ago.

    The main topic of conversation these days as we wait for the rain, is heat. Even at breakfast time, before 7.00am, we have to sit in the shade of the pillars out on the veranda to avoid the uncomfortable heat of the low sun. By mid afternoon there is nowhere to escape. Outdoors the heat is intense and the leafless trees give no shade, indoors the fabric of the house has heated up and it remains stifling long into the night. October 2011 was said to have been the hottest in Zimbabwe for 50 years with many places, including Sinamatella, recording temperatures in the forties. November hasn’t been any cooler so far.

    If all this is uncomfortable for us, it’s worse than that for the animals. The 2010/2011 rainy season was patchy and ended early so the dry season has been longer than normal and the vegetation cover was poor at the start. Now it is almost non-existent. In the Kalahari sand parts of the Park the critical issue is water with the pumped pans struggling to provide for huge numbers of desperate elephants. Around Sinamatella the springs are still running well and water is not the problem – food is what the herbivores need. As a result animals are dying all around the Park, from the heat, lack of water and lack of good food.

   Yesterday we were at Mandavu Dam and the contrast of the still good water supply with the bare surroundings was stark.

These Zebra appear to be standing in a desert. In fact they are just a few meters from the largest remaining sheet of water in the Park…..

…but water without food is no use.

     So far the most obvious deaths have of course been elephants. When a small animal dies the carcase is soon eaten but a dead elephant stays around for a long time. We have been seeing mostly medium sized carcases such as these two at Manga 3.

But there are also plenty of small ones.

    We can only wonder how many small animals of other species have died. We have noticed greatly reduced numbers of small birds such as Firefinches, Blue Waxbills and Grey-headed Sparrows coming to our bird bath but whether or not that is due to birds dying we don’t know.

    On the bright side, there are of course some animals that are positively thriving at the moment. We have never been so aware of vultures

And no doubt the Hyenas are pretty cheerful as well.

     This is all just part of a natural cycle and arguably the Park will benefit from losing some elephants for a few years but that doesn’t make it any easier to live with and I hope the next posting to this blog will have numerous pictures of rain and green grass.