Bulawayo

     OK, I know this is called the Hwange blog but we were in Bulawayo last week so I thought some scenes from the big city would make a change.

     Bulawayo is Zimbabwe’s second city and the main city in Matabeleland.  Sue and I are never quite sure where we would call ‘home’ – Sinamatella where we spend most of our time, Mlibizi on lake Kariba which is a sort of spiritual home, Hwange, Victoria Falls or Bulawayo where our family house is? I suppose Bulawayo has the best claim to being home and, much as I enjoy the bush, it’s always a pleasure to be there.

     Our house is in a small-scale farming area right on the edge of Bulawayo. We approach the city from the north and our first view of it is………

 

   As you can see, there is not much modern architecture in Bulawayo. In many ways it is a city where time seems to have stood still. The cars for sale are not exactly up to date……

 

    A lot of the other transport is pretty old-fashioned……

   And the “Luna Park” travelling funfair which is just setting up on the edge of town has a distinctly 1960s look.

  Bulawayo’s streets are famously very wide. This is Main Street, looking towards the city centre

    Not much traffic in that picture and the same applies even in the central business district where there is still room for hand-carts (known throughout Zimbabwe as ‘Scanias’) amongst the cars.

 

   There is a clothes market near the City Hall every Saturday. The clothes range from heaps of second-hand to smart new and Sue and our daughter Alison seem to enjoy searching for bargains….

    I spent two hours sitting in the car waiting for them. Close to where I was waiting is this statue. That's exactly how I felt as well........

   Bulawayo has an Art Gallery in a beautifully restored old building. Some years ago an exhibition was mounted in which paintings representing the “Gukurahundi” killings of Ndebele people back in the early days of independence were put directly onto the walls. The killings are a sensitive subject and the Gallery was quickly forced to cover its windows with newspaper so that the exhibition was not visible. They remain covered to this day.

   Back at Sinamatella after three relaxing days at home I found a big anti-poaching operation about to get under way. A large number of police support unit, rangers from Main Camp and Umtshibi and rangers from Sinamatella are being deployed for a while to do an anti-poaching sweep and it is intended that the operation will be repeated as often as possible. Recently the poachers have been targeting elephants as well as rhino. Hwange has plenty of elephants but that’s no reason to let them be killed of course so anti-poaching operations will continue as long as there are people elsewhere in the world who put a high value on tusks, bones and horns.

  

News

     We have some good rhino news to report for once. Last month Nick and his colleagues at Main Camp found their White Rhino number 27, hiding in thick cover with a tiny new baby. Unfortunately they were not able to get close enough to see the sex of the calf and they didn’t get good photos but it’s great to hear about an increase in numbers rather than a loss for once.

   The supposedly pregnant female at Sinamatella hasn’t produced a baby yet. I was with rangers monitoring her for a day last week. We didn’t see her clearly for more than a few seconds at a time but she certainly looked big. Whether or not she is pregnant, only time will tell.

    It has been clear for a while now that we are not winning the battle against the poachers and there is no sign that the demand for horn will reduce in the near future. It seems impossible to keep a large wild population ranging at Sinamatella so we have been looking at alternative strategies. Trevor and I have been working for some time on a proposal to put up a fence around about ten square kilometres of good rhino territory at Sinamatella and protect at least a breeding nucleus of rhino within that. It is a strategy that has worked well elsewhere and we are confident it can be successful here.

    Trevor has also looked at the idea of a much smaller ‘rhino centre’ at Victoria Falls that can support one or two rhino for education and tourism purposes and raise money for the bigger Rhino Conservation Area (RCA) at Sinamatella. He has identified suitable land and approached the town council about using it and has received a lot of backing for the idea, including from the National Parks hierarchy. We have now started working on getting proper approval for the project from National Parks at Sinamatella and then up through the chain of command to Head Office in Harare before the really difficult bit – raising the money.  I’ll keep you posted as things progress.

     Meanwhile, this post started on the subject of rare babies, let’s finish with something about much more common ones. We have in Zimbabwe (and elsewhere in Africa) a bird sometimes known as the ‘feathered locust’. It is the Red billed Quelea which feeds on small seeds and can be a tremendous pest in small-grain crops like wheat and sorghum.

 

Male Quelea in breeding plumage.

   At this time of year when their food exists in super-abundance, the Quelea breed in colonies of up to millions of birds. We currently have a colony forming below Sinamatella Camp where there are probably tens of thousands of birds building their nests in a patch of thick bush near the old rhino bomas.

 

Nest building.

   Each bush can hold many nests close together and the noise of the birds is clearly audible at least a kilometre away. When the eggs are laid and start to hatch predators, from snakes to eagles to Jackals and Mongoose will gather to rob nests or feed on babies that fall out but thousands will survive. A Quelea colony is a noisy and rather smelly but fascinating place. We’ll try to follow this one as it develops.

 

Nests are close together

  

Sue is still adding to our large collection of early morning photos, but as usual, when the view is like this it is hard to resist.

 

Looking towards the sunrise from Sinamatella hill.

A day that starts as beautifully as that has got to be good, even if it rains…….

Rainbow over the flood plain

The Impala are getting fat on all the good food, but we still haven’t got a photo of any of this season’s babies. They just won’t stand still to be photographed.

Near Mandavu

The trees and flowers are also doing well of course.

 

Seed head of Natal Mahogany Trichilia emetica

Aloe flower with dragon fly

And even though the rivers are muddy, they are full of water.

 

But the rainy season isn’t all gentle. We had a terrific storm one night a week or two ago. From inside the house it sounded as if the world was coming to an end and the wind was so loud we didn’t hear this tree come down, right by the house.

There was not too much damage around Sinamatella. A lot of branches had been blown around.

 

And leaves were stripped from some of the trees. The wind was so savage that Sue found leaves that had been impaled on the thorns of other plants by the force of it.

 

   When I went up to the camp site in the morning to check for signal from any of our implanted rhino, I found there were campers staying right on the edge of the hill. They had slept through the storm in a roof-top tent and I asked them how they had managed not to be blown away and they said they had sat inside the tent and held it together with their hands. They seemed to be completely unconcerned!

   I made a trip out to Tshakabika that day. We covered just 58km but it took nearly ten hours, most of them spent with two rangers trying to get the car out of a deep, muddy gully. I didn’t have the camera with me so I have no photos of the situation as it happened but Sue was on hand to get a photo when I came home.

 

Not a pretty sight