February has been “One Big Movie Scene”

Another beautiful month has past at our Selinda Reserve. Although it’s the rainy season we did only get half an hour of rain in the afternoon every third day. It’s actually a nice way of freshening up the area. We did get 2 huge thunderstorms which shows Africa at it’s best. The way those dark grey clouds move in is very dramatic. The impressive thunder accompanied by the lighting, which sometimes lasts three seconds, makes this crossing between The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars scene complete.

We had another beautiful scene last week when we followed 4 lions hunting during a morning drive. They were carefully stalking something hidden in the bushes. While slowly spreading out you could see that they were quite suspicious. The moment the four of them went in for the kill the potential meal jumped out of nothing on to the branch of this one big tree in the middle of those bushes. And there it was, a beautiful male leopard. Too quick for the “Wapuka pride”.

We were watching the leopard, the leopard was watching the lions but the lions were already focused on another victim, an unaware warthog passing by. They nailed it in a couple of seconds. We have been watching this whole scene building up for at least an hour before we moved to the next viewing. It sounds a bit cruel, but it was a great way to start our game drive.

Back at Selinda Camp we’ve had some great (and small) animal encounters as well. Because Selinda is an unfenced camp you have to be careful were you walk at all times. Especially when there is an elephant in camp. And every now and then this friendly old, big bull pays us a visit. He just wanders from tent to tent following his own path. It’s actually quite nice to watch him do his gardening. If you walk into him, just step back, give him some space and he leaves you alone. He doesn’t give us much trouble. And if he did, it’s his right since he was here long before we were.

A strange thing happened the other day. We had just installed brand new lampshades on our main deck. After 2 days one of those shades had been “attacked”. There were a couple of threads hanging loose. We thought our curious ‘house’ elephant, with his rough trunk, had just been interested in what we had done to the place. How kind of him, but a little more care would have been nice.

We left the shade to see what would happen next. Every day it got worse, but ‘our’ elephant had already moved on… So what was it? It baffled us for a week before we found out we’d blamed the wrong ‘guy’. While having our 4 o’clock tea we caught ‘him’ in action while he silently climbed up the lamp and carefully ripped off the treads, one by one to take to the other side of the deck, across the pool area were this clever tree squirrel was building a little love nest.

Fences or no fences, during storms or sunshine, every day in our camp you will witness some sort of scene, with all kinds of animals, great or small. Hang in there, we’ll be back, next month with more news from the Selinda Reserve.

Lots of bush greetings,
The Selinda Team