The 2025 Botswana Journals, Ch. 5: Everything Needs Sustenance

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I struggled to find a name for this chapter of my journals.  One of the first things that came to mind was the cutesy “The Circle of Life,” made popular by Disney’s The Lion King.   It misses the mark and sounds silly to me.

The “cruelty of nature” was another thought that I dismissed as trite.  Being eaten by another creature so it can continue living is only cruel if you’re the one being eaten.

So, I went with the obvious, the literal, the truthful: everything needs to eat.   You will not find any gory photos in this post, unless you think a bird swallowing a fish or an insect is gory.  There will be a couple of deceased critters, though, but little, if any, blood.

So, let‘s get on with it.

We’re on a drive into the Chobe National Park today.  Quite soon, our guide spots something beind us and far off.  (Note:   I am constantly astonished at the keen eyesight and hearing of Africans.)

He turns the Land Cruiser around and drives at least a quarter mile (??) to our left, where we see the luckiest black-backed jackal in the world.  It has a dead impala all to itself.

The guides speculate that something killed the impala and was then scared off the kill.   What is amazing is that there are no hyenas or vultures or lions nearby.    Only a tawny eagle high in a tree waits for a piece of meat.

The jackal is on high alert, not believing its luck.   It attempts to drag the small animal behind a bush.

Jackals are small canines, standing about 16 inches high and weighing 17 to 25  lbs., so dragging the dead weight of a roughly 120 lbs. female impala is quite a feat.   We leave the jackal to its fortuitous meal.

 

 

 

 

Then, there are the baboons.  From the Internet:

            Baboons are opportunistic omnivores whose diet includes a wide variety of plants and animals. They eat fruits, grasses, seeds, roots, and bark, and will also hunt and eat birds, rodents, insects, and even young antelopes. Their diet is adaptable to their environment and what is seasonally available. 

  This little one doesn't have to forage for a while.

   

    One afternoon during a game drive in Chobe National Park, we came across some Little bee-eaters actively feeding their hatchlings in a nest burrowed into the berm on the side of the road.

     Good time to practice shooting birds in flight and we all enjoyed the challenge.

The dark spot (not under the green plant) is the burrow, deep in the dirt.   There's a piece of dead grass across the opening.   The burrow can be 24 inches deep.

        I think we are all grateful that the most enormous animals are herbivores.  This bull is dining on the succulent grasses along the Chobe River, sometimes using a tusk to help tear loose the vegetation.

Hippos, also called river horses, are also herbivores.   They spend most of the day immersed in water, coming out at dusk to graze on grass.

Occasionally, you can spot one grazing during the day.

The beautiful swamp hen forages in the grass for insects, supplemented by animal prey such as frogs, fish, snails, and insects.  They are adaptable foragers that also eat bird eggs and nestlings, and in some areas, may eat human food scraps, seeds, or fruit. 

 Then, we find the African open-billed stork, whose bill has evolved to open mollusks, such as those of  aquatic snails.

Two storks, and what a size difference.   The smaller one is the black stork, also called the umbrella bird for its habit of forming an umbrella with its wings when foraging in water.   The other is the openbill.

The openbill with a snail.

Note how the bottom mandible is inserted into the shell to cut the snail's attachment to the shell.

Ick,   Yuk. Escargot, anyone?

        Next, we have the favorite bird for tourists, according to the guides--the African Lilac-breasted roller, or LBR, for short.   The bird is using its wings to propel itself forward.    It comes up with ???   A cricket, maybe?

        For photographers, the fun part is watching the bird toss the insect into the air and catching it so the head is swallowed first.   This one just swallowed it without the toss.

        Just because a mammal or bird catches dinner doesn't always mean it can keep it.   Hyenas are notorious for stealing food from cheetahs or lions, even.   Leopards, on the other hand, carry their prey into a tree (if available) and thus escape the marauding hyenas.

        In the photo below, an African spoonbill has caught something that might be a fish or an eel.   It's running away, and at first I thought it was afraid the great egret was after its catch.

          Nope, looks what's coming in from stage left.   It's a gray-headed heron with a long and more pointed bill than the poor spoonbill with its softly rounded bill tip.

        Two seconds, by my camera's clock, is all it took for the heron to snatch away the spoonbill's catch.

        And the spoonbill goes back to the water to fish again.

        When we first saw this pied kingfisher, it was sitting on the ground in a rock-strewn area with a fish in its bill.

    

            It flew to a tree branch and proceeded to bash the daylights out of the fish.

        Then another branch, and the bashing continued.

Now completely unrecognizable as a fish, dinner is ready.

        The whole process seems to be to make the fish easier to swallow, for instance, breaking bones, dislodging fins that might get caught in the bird's esophagus, etc.

        

            Now we have the African fish eagle.   Except it, like the American bald eagle, isn't really an eagle, but a type of sea eagle.   I thought this explanation was interesting:

    The African fish eagle is a type of sea eagle, related to the bald eagle, and shares many of its physical traits, like a dark body and white head. It is a large raptor with a wingspan of up to 7.5 feet (2.3 meters), primarily hunts fish by swooping from a perch to snatch prey from the water, and has a distinctive, loud call that can be heard for miles. Unlike "true eagles," which are defined by having feathers all the way down to their feet, the African fish eagle is classified as a sea eagle because its feathers end a few inches above its bare, yellow legs and feet. 

        

            Like the American bald eagle, they are called kleptoparasites because they readily steal food from other birds and animals.   Herons and saddle-billed storks are their favorites to steal from, but not exclusively.

        Next up is the Squacco heron, a small type of heron.   It took four minutes and 240 camera shots before this bird swallowed the fish.

            Whew!   Finally!

            As for these guys, they will get a post of their own in the future.

The 2023 Brazil Journals, Chapter Seventeen

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Chapter Seventeen:

Food! Food!

The Necessary and the Glorious

 

“Life is uncertain.   Eat dessert first.”

—Ernestine Ulmer

 

 

 

It’s six o’clock and the sun has yet to rise.

Everything is  still and there’s barely a ripple on the pond we’re passing in the behemoth vehicle we’re riding in.

 

We see a capybara in the water near the shore vegetation and about twenty feet away is a caiman, pointed in the direction of the capybara.   Well, this is interesting, I think, and raise my camera.

 

Just how close will the capybara let the predator come?  There is no surface disturbance on the water as the caiman slowly gets closer.  

 

Then suddenly, with a powerful thrust of its tail, the caiman attacks.   

But the capy isn’t asleep.  Up and out of the water the capy rises like a rocket.   We can see the pink inside of the caiman’s mouth.   It was anticipating the delicious taste of that rodent.

 

But the capybara soars too high for the caiman and escapes being breakfast.

 

That was exiciting!

 

 

 

We move on and soon see an enigma standing against one of the pasture wire fences.  It’s a crab-eating fox and, while it does the eat crabs it finds during the flood season, it isn’t a fox at all.

 

It is a member of the dog family, Canidae.  It looks suspiciously like a brown/black-yellow tinged coyote.   In addition to crabs, found trapped in pools when the annual floods recede, it also eats small animals, fruit, insects, turtle eggs, and fowl.

 

   And then there is me.   I love passion fruit, that hard-rinded red, yellow, or purple fruit grown on a vine in tropical countries.   Not only is its taste appealing, but it's rich in essential vitamins and anti0xidents.

 

Barranco Alto is a passion-fruit-lover’s dream lodge.   Several desserts feature passion fruit and a few times there are pitchers of fresh juice made from the fruit.

 

One day I go to the refrigerator in the bar to get a Coke Zero and instead come away with Strawberry and Maracujà (passion fruit).  There may or may not be any left in the fridge by the time we leave Barranco Alto.

 

Another surprise is cashew juice!    Cashews are grown on trees that can yield a surprising amount of fruit called cashew apples.   And, at the tip of each cashew apple is a single nut we know as cashews.

Cashew apples.   Note the single cashew on each fruit.

Cashew juice.

 

But the juice from the cashew apples is amazing.   It is bottled and sold in Brazil.  In India, the extract is fermented and is very popular—more so than the nuts themselves.

 

 

On a late afternoon boat trip on the Rio Negro, we come upon several caimans dining on piranha.   This is quite a sight to see.

 

We linger there until the sun begins to set and the long golden rays of light turn the caimans a rich color as they chomp and swallow.

 

Photographers hanging out with hungry caimans.

It is almost dark when we return to the boat launch and there, also lingering in the water, are several caiman.   They, too, re waiting for food.

 

Not us, fortunately, but this spot is where fishermen clean their catches and throw the innards into the water for the caimans and other fish to enjoy.

 

Puts a different perspective on the food chain.