Walking is wonderful, but driving also has its upsides. It gets you over a larger geographic area, allows you to come closer to the animals before they run away, and keeps you safe from predators.

Within the course of four days in Mana Pools, we see literally tons of animals, both on our walks and on our drives. The mammal species we spot include painted dog, leopard, side-striped jackal, vervet monkey, baboon, warthog, zebra, waterbuck, impala, nyala, greater kudu, eland, elephant, banded mongoose, dwarf mongoose and slender mongoose.

We also see a wealth of birds. For you bird nerds out there here is the list: Retz’s helmet shrike, grey helmet shrike, orange-breasted shrike, bateleur (an eagle), fish eagle, tawny eagle, gymnogene, white-backed vulture, helmeted vulture, hooded vulture, saddle-billed stork, open-billed stork, yellow-billed stork, marabou stork, grey egret, great white egret, cattle egret, squacco heron, Egyptian goose, African jacana (called “Jesus bird” because it can walk on water), sacred ibis, lilac-breasted roller, black-winged stilt, blacksmith lapwing, fork-tailed drongo, Maeve’s starling, lovebirds (photo below), white-breasted bee-eater, owlet, and trumpeter hornbill. Pretty cool, eh?

One of the absolute highlights of our days in Mana Pools is spotting the endangered painted dogs. They are canids but are neither wolves, dogs nor hyenas. They have their own genus.
The painted dogs we see are apparently three sisters. They are part of the “black-tip pack” that features in the BBC documentary Dynasties narrated by the legendary David Attenborough. (Incidentally, while in Mana Pools I read David Attenborough’s 2018 book Life of Earth. I highly recommend it.).

The painted dogs lie in the middle of the road, which is quite typical. It gives them a better overview of things. They snooze, scratch fleabites, and look and listen for potential prey. Impala is their favourite dish. Because of their ability to work together in a coordinated fashion, painted dogs have a hunting success rate of 60-90 percent, which is much higher than the big cats and other predators. They chase the prey until the prey becomes exhausted and then they close in for the kill. They kill by disemboweling which apparently results in a quicker death than suffocation, which is the way cats do it.

Painted dogs also spend their down time bonding with each other. One of the ways they do this is to make themselves smell alike. They poop, pee and rub their anal glands on the ground in the same patch – and then they roll in it. It seems like they enjoy this “smell bath” immensely.

The end of the day
At the end of the day, the setting sun lends a warm glow to the landscape. In the dusk, we see the silhouette of a hippo walk by.

We eat, we talk, we wash, we brush our teeth and then we go to bed. Our last night at Mana Pools is all but silent. We have to get up early next day to break camp and leave by 5:30 am, but the animals’ active nightlife keeps me awake much of the time.

After dark, lions roar many times – a couple of times unnervingly close. Elephants trumpet twice, baboons bark an alarm, hyenas whoop and some kind of grazing animal passes so close by my tent that I can hear its teeth or tongue ripping the grass up. Hippos lie in the water and grunt at each other and different kinds of owls and owlets hoot in the night.