The 2022 Africa Journals, Chapter 16: Story Telling: Finch Hatton

 Chapter 16:   

Story Telling: Finch Hatton 

Finch Hatton gave up hunting and began to espouse … creating reserves, such as the Serengeti, and helping to form a new school of hunters and big game safari guides to help protect protected species and combat poaching.-Freddie del Curatolo

 

 

 

Finch Hatton.   Finch Hatton.   Finch Hatton.

 

How do you know that name?

 

Hints:  Denys Finch Hatton, Isak Dinesen aka Karen Blixen, Beryl Markham.   Got it yet?

 

Okay, how about Robert Redford and Meryl Streep?    And “Out of Africa”?

 

Finch Hatton was a British aristocrat, soldier, and "dandy"  posted to East Africa when he met author Karen Blixen and famed Kenyan aviatrix Markham, and had affairs with both.   He died when his Gipsy Moth crashed shortly after takeoff from an airstrip in Africa.

 

In the meantime, he made an immense impression on many and his name lives on in numerous ways.   For instance, I stayed in the Finch Hatton suite at Giraffe Manor some years ago.   

Now you have enough info to do some Googling on your own.   I suggest starting here.

 

https://www.malindikenya.net/en/articles/words/stories/90-years-of-a-kenyan-myth--denys-finch-hatton.html.  

I found the drawing below of the Finch Hattons lodged on their website.  Start at the reception area, which is also the dining room, etc., and go right.   Follow the trail across the water and our tent was the first one in that line of three tented suites.  

This lodge operates their safaris differently than most.   After a couple days experiencing and observing, I reached the conclusion that rather than a true game safari lodge, its identity is as a place that offers luxury, world class dining, a place to sit back and relax and sight-seeing drives to view birds and animals.

Our game drives started at 6 A.M., but we returned to the lodge for a sit down breakfast. around 9.   Their famous (self-declared) waffles were outstanding and we all enjoyed at least a quarter of one before ordering eggs and what have you.

The dining room.    Here is where our primary focus as photographers revealed itself.  

See the small dark green bush in the left center, beyond the tray table with the red objects on it?  T

that's where we interrupted almost every breakfast and lunch and ran to photograph the sunbirds.

The photo below comes from the Finch Hattons lodge website.   On our last night here, we were treated to dinner under a full moon.   We were entertained by a busy baby running around on the perimeter roofs, and serenaded by a nightjar.

Red-Headed agama.

Every day I would see black crakes walking across the old bridge.

Curious vervet baby stares at us as we sit on the lodge steps and photograph it.

The old bridge.

Eland

Squacco heron

African jacana walking on lily pads.

Baby ostrich

Mum, Dad, and some of their babies.

The same baby vervet as above.

Finch Hattons generates its own electricity.   On the bedside table is the on/off schedule for the generator:

So, we're on a game drive from 6 to roughly 9 A.M. and the power goes off until 12:30, just before lunch.   This is the time we would download the morning photos.

The power stayed on until 3, when it shut down again.   We rushed through lunch and photographing the sunbirds and hurried back to our tents to edit photos.   Or, most stayed around the water and photographed the bird life.   I sat on my deck and did that with my long lens.

At 4 P.M, we were off on a game drive until about 6:30.   We had time before dinner to start downloading, and time after dinner to download and edit.   

Now, one of our group used a CPAP machine in order to breathe while sleeping and the lodge kindly left the generator on all night.   The staff here was exceptionally kind and went out of their way to accommodate us, including not clearing away our half-eaten meals when we dashed off the photograph tiny birds.

This impala is showing the effects of lack of feed and of raising a young calf.

Pied kingfisher watching the water below from the rail of the new bridge.

These Cape buffalo are resting near where two of their herd were killed by lions recently.   It is cleared because it is an unused section of road.

The cute rock hyrax.   They are called daisies in South Africa.

White-crowned bushshrike.

A martial eagle with a full crop.   The martial is the largest of African eagles with a weight of 14 lbs. and a wing span of more than six feet.

Crested francolin.

The beautiful Namaqua dove.   It has a very long tail.

Brown snake eagle.

Green pigeon.

Northern red-billed hornbill.

Von Der Deckens hornbill.

The 2022 African Journals, Chapter 15: Story Telling: Tsavo

 Chapter 15:

 Story Telling:  Tsavo

“The silence of an African jungle on a dark night needs to be experienced to be realised; it is most impressive, especially when one is absolutely alone and isolated from one's fellow creatures, as I was then.” ― John Henry Patterson, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo 

(There’s not much of a story behind most of our game drives in Tsavo, so I’m going to tell you stories instead and intersperse them with photos.)

 

Tsavo.   Tsavo.   Tsavo.

 

Does that name sound familiar?   Is your Random Access Memory (RAM) furiously flipping through your hippocampus in search of something you KNOW you know but can’t quite access, which I think is why it’s called ‘random?”   (Mine gets more random every year.)

 

Here are some hints:

 

A railroad in Kenya.  

 

Val Kilmer and Michael Douglas.

 

“The Ghost and the Darkness.”

 

Nothing yet? 

 

Okay, here is the answer:   The Man-Eating Lions of Tsavo!

Chandelier in the dining room made from Coke Zero bottles.

The chandelier at night.

Ice cream with a thin slice of broiled pineapple.   Note the china.  Fancy, fancy.

 

Here’s the story:   In 1898, British military engineer Col. John H. Patterson was assigned to oversee the building of a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in southeastern Kenya for the Uganda-Mombasa Railroad   

Soon after his arrival, two lions began killing and consuming railroad workers and local inhabitants.    

Lions killed these two Cape buffalo recently.   The buffalo were weakened by the drought that prevails across southern Kenya.

A Drongo, also called "The Thief" because it watches where other birds cache their food and steals it.

 

As the number of victims rose, Patterson faced losing all the workers to desertion, as well as his own safety.   The workers’ tents were enclosed within a boma (a large barricade built of thorny trees and branches.   Fires were burned all night long and guards kept watch.

 

Still, the lions got through to the men.   Their cunning was uncanny.   Patterson waited at night in trees to shoot the lions and often realized he was being watched by the lions but he could not see them.

Superstition took over and men deserted in droves, calling the lions The Ghost and The Darkness.

 

We abandoned the dining table when someone spotted sunbirds in a nearby bush.    This is a Hunter's sunbird.

Finally, Patterson was able to kill one of the lions.   Three weeks later, he killed the second lion as it charged him.

From Wikipedia.

 

The workers returned, the bridge was completed, and Patterson received world-wide acclaim.

 

The lions of Tsavo are larger than lions elsewhere.  The two that Patterson killed measured nine feet long from nose to tip of the tail, and was almost four feet high at the shoulder.   Accounts say it took six or eight men to carry one back to camp.

So, imagine a sheet of plywood that is 4'x8'.   Imagine a lion superimposed on that sheet of plywood.   Its tail would stick out beyond the panel.

 

From Wikipedia

White-bellied go-away bird, so-called because their "gwaaa" call sounds like "go-away."

The taxidermized mounts of the skulls and hides of the lions are on display at the Field Museum in Chicago.

 

If you go to see them, you’ll see that these lions look different than your notion of lions.  They have no manes, only scraggly hair around their necks where gorgeous manes usually grow.   Why don’t they grow manes?

 

Theories range from evolutionary changes due to the manes constantly being caught in the thick brush of the region to a lower testosterone level.   Even today, the lions of Tsavo have no big, bushy manes.   They are large cats, though, and they carry the genes of the man-eaters.

 

Baboon in late light

There are a few reasons asserted as to why the lions turned to hunting men.   There was a cattle plague in the area and food supply was low.   Poor burial practices (if any men were buried to begin with) accounted for the lions realizing humans were an easy food source.

Caravans that passed through the area often lost members to illness and their bodies were not buried.   So, too, the Arab slave traders failed to bury any lost captives.  

The lions began to see humans as a food source.

More table abandonment.   Hunter's sunbird

Hunter's sunbird.  I hope the staff didn't think we were barbarians with no table manners.

 

Accounts differ on the number of humans taken by the lions from 35 to 140.  Most likely the only accurate count was  that kept by Patterson of the loss of railway workers only.

 

Which brings me to the movie with Kilmer and Douglas, “The Ghost and the Darkness.”   First, they used smaller and less aggressive lions in the movie and these lions had gorgeous manes.   Kilmer portrayed Patterson.

 

Douglas plays the part of a great white hunter Charles Remington, sent to Tsavo to kill the lions.   The Remington character is pure fiction.

Helmeted guineafowl

Von Der Deckens Hornbill

 

At one point in the movie, Remington and a number of Maasai warriors have surrounded one lion in a large thicket of saplings and thorn brush.  The warriors are armed with spears and are wearing the traditional red shukas (something like a toga) and massive headdresses or face ruffs.    These appear to be two to three feet long and made from ostrich feathers.  Others have parts of a lion’s mane attached.

 

 

 

Maasai face ruff made from ostrich feathers.   Not my photo.

Ostrich feathers and lion's mane headdress.   Not my photo

So, they have the lion surrounded.   The signal is given to enter the thicket.   My two thoughts are, 1), how are they going to get through all those thorns with those face ruffs, and 2), no way would I go into a thicket, where visibility is severely limited, wearing a lion’s mane on my head when everybody is looking to kill a lion. 

Relaxing around the fire that evening.

For a more complete telling of the man eating Lions of Tsavo, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Patterson_(author)

His book, "Man Eaters of Tsavo" is available on Amazon as an e-book for $0.95.   I read it last night and it is intriguing.   Which is why I was reading the last page at 4 A.M.

See the red airplane routes from Nairobi into Tsavo park?   I think our camp is located quite near there.