Fatties and Flatties: Crocs and Hippos of Ndumo

This post is dedicated to my friend Terry Oatley, who passed away this week. Terry was one of the great sparks that ignited my love for birding and for the natural world.

We see you in every bird.

What do you get if you cross South Africa with Mozambique and Swaziland? Take a look at where the three borders meet and you might get an idea. The answer is Ndumo Game Reserve: the lovechild of these three stellar states, with a biological richness unrivalled by the best of them.

I'm not talking biological richness in terms of big cats and elephants (Ndumo is a community reserve, so these species would cause all kinds of havoc with the locals), but it BOOMS with a bunch of other stuff. There's buffalo, giraffe, black and white rhino, impala, nyala and many other antelope species (like the rare suni) roaming the forests and plains. In the lakes you'll find crocs and hippos galore, and the bird count is considered to be the highest in South Africa. Big time ticking for the avid twitcher like myself.

Behold! The trees! The water! The birds! The dusty roads and spotty long-necks! Ndumo's got it all!

I was in Ndumo for about two weeks. Despite being such a small reserve, there is a lot to see and I could have stayed on quite a while longer. We were lucky enough to be supervised by the endlessly knowledgable Bheki: a ranger of the park who's been navigating Ndumo for over 20 years! His guidance was impeccable and his familiarity with the reserve, beyond amazing! He was also well versed in the art of changing a tyre. Our Cruiser suffered several flats and Bheki was quick off the mark to swap out to the spare in seconds!

Bheki was always there for us with his trusty gun when we insisted on taking a look deeper in the bush.

The main attractions of Ndumo are the bodies of water that cut and dot up the park. It's where the Pongola River meets the Great Usutu River, and where they spill into the main showpiece: Nyamithi Pan. This is a lake that stretches several kilometres long, and is the proverbial 'milkshake' that 'brings all the boys to the yard'. Hundreds of species of birds flock to its shores to pick, filter and fish their food out from its bountiful waters.

A bird in the bush is worth more or less 1 000, 000, 000, 000 in the hand.

The best time to look out over Nyamithi is at sunrise, when the birds are just arriving for breakfast. I spent a great many hours scanning these waters at first light, so I apologise in advance for the length of the following photo compilation...

Seeing sights like this make it worth being up early and freezing your tits off. This is a compilation of many mornings, hence the different light in each one.

The myriad of birds you'll find here is staggering. I managed to tick several lifers off the list, and observed a solid resume of interesting avian behaviour. Stilts, avocets, lapwings and egrets walk the shoreline, using their beaks in a variety of ways, reaping meals from Nyamithi. Herons and storks look over the shoulders of smaller birds, hoping to snag a bigger catch. Leggy flamingoes rake through the deeper waters, filtering out foodstuffs with their baleen-esque bills. And flocking in amazing numbers, are the hordes of pelicans: one of the biggest characters on the lake.

There are two species of pelican in Southern Africa, and you'll find both frequenting the still waters of Nyamithi. We witnessed a crazy hunting scene where hundreds of these large, ungainly birds worked together - breaking up into small groups, then floating together again over the surface of the lake... Slowly herding schools of fish into a central point. Then came a minute of madness, as their large bills scooped low into the water - filling the leathery sacks that hung below with water and a fresh bounty of fish. It was one hell of a spectacle, as the big white beasts repeated this dance several times before dispersing and riding up on the thermals above.

A wonderful bird is the Pelican. His bill will hold more than his belly can. He can take in his beak enough food for a week. But I'm damned if I see how the hell he can!

The Pelicans might be a massive presence in Ndumo, but there is another kingpin roaming these parts. The icon of the water who sings the anthem of Africa: The African Fish Eagle. The concentration of these majestic raptors on Lake Nyamithi is astounding. The ongoing drought in Kwa-Zulu Natal has shrunk the pan by at least a third, pulling these territorial birds in very close together. The result is daily spats over their catch - with robbery and bullying being a constant hassle for the younger eagles.

The master fisherman. They can be found here in droves at all stages of life, from juvenile to adult.

It's not only about the birds. Nyamithi caters for some much larger residents too... Nyala, Rhino, Buffalo and Giraffe often emerge from the thick bushes surrounding the lake to come drink at its shores. A less conspicuous mammal however, dwells in the cool water during the day - emerging only at night to graze the lush grass that grows amongst the fever trees. I'm referring, of course, to the great hippopotamus: a cumbersome fatty with a bad temper and a high sensitivity to sunlight. Generally, 30 to 40 hippo would be found in the lake, but the drought had evaporated a fair portion of the water - leaving it salty and uncomfortable for them to stay there.

Hippos are amphibious mammals, which is a strange thing to be in itself. But they also look like the

absurd invention of a crazed scientist, a dog-like rhino/pig hybrid spliced with the genes of a suddenly relevant pokemon… Hippos are hilarious to look at and can be fun to watch, when they actually do something.

Alas, they don’t do much. Most of their day is spent wallowing about in the waters, sleeping and avoiding the sunlight. For our purposes, the lack of hippos in the dam meant we had to do some serious bushwhacking to try and find where on the Pongola River tributaries they had settled. We eventually found them on a quiet corner, sitting behind two semi-submerged fig trees. Although we felt slightly vulnerable sandwiched between the waters edge and the thick bush, it was a fantastic setting and we got some lovely footage of the pod bobbing around the river here.

If it wasn't for the threat of imminent trampling, I could have stayed at this spot all day.

While we were filming, one of my team members went to grab something from the car. He walked up along the narrow path we had forged through the brush, and came face to face with a dugga boy Buffalo in the bushes. Anyone who knows anything about the bush, knows that this is the last animal you want to meet on foot. Lucky for him, the old guy was equally shocked and crashed down the bank and into the river below. This scared the hell out of the rest of us, thinking one of the hippos was thundering up from the water towards our spot. We didn't want to push our luck in this precarious area so we packed up and left the pod in peace.

Classic Dugga. Not a face you want to see when you've got nowhere to run...

There's another inhabitant of Nyamithi that one shouldn't disregard. It's got a toothy grin and a scaled suit, and if you're not keeping an eye on it, you can be damn sure it's keeping two eyes on you. While the hippo numbers in the lake left something to be desired, the number of Nile Crocodiles (or colloquially, Flatdogs) was mind-blowing. There were hundreds of them, littering the banks and cutting through the lake as a straight line in the distance, or visible only as a pair of opticals poking out over the water surface.

The birds seem to pick around them without a worry... Bheki reckons that they're too feathery to frequent the menu.

The abundance of crocodiles is almost entirely thanks to one man: the late Tony Pooley, who worked on crocodile conservation as early as the 1960's. Before 1968, Nile Crocodiles were listed as vermin, and by the start of the 1970's, the wild population in KZN was down to 350. Pooley's breeding and hatching programmes across several parks (but specifically Ndumo) helped to raise that number to over 1000 by the 1990's. I was perusing his book Discoveries of a Crocodile Man while we were in Ndumo, which was a very apt read considering the crocs were part of the main focus of our film. And I think he summed up our frustrations with filming these reptiles nicely when he said:

"Crocodiles are not a subject for those who need a thrill a minute. Day after day I would see no more than a beach of inert scaly forms. Week after week, I would see no more than gently floating shadows on the water."

An interesting piece of history on Lake Nyamithi lies along the point known as nDhlozi: a piece of land that juts out into the pan, shaped appropriately like a crocodile tooth. Until recently, the local Tembe/Tsonga people had been sacrificing chickens, goats and slabs of meat to the crocodiles here. They believe that in difficult times, the crocodiles, who possessed the spirits of their ancestors, must be appeased. To this day, the largest crocodiles of Nyamithi can be found resting on the beach of nDhlozi.

Eish... Dem some toothy textures!

Crocodiles are living archosaurs - the only link we have to the extinct dinosaurs that once roamed the planet. They haven't changed form in over 70 million years. Even as hatchlings, they look exactly like their adult predecessors, just miniature versions of them. We stumbled across a small group of hatchlings floating in a quiet corner of the pan, among the water beetles and tiny skimmers. Every so often they would snatch up a mosquito or fly from the water surface in a similar manner that an adult would do to a much larger item of prey.

Flat puppies :)

Away from the pan, lining the rivers and running up the slope of Ndumo hill are the stunning forests of the reserve. Ranging from impenetrable bush to fantastic Fig Tree forests and groves of lime-green Fever Trees; the flora component of Ndumo matches the bewitching fauna to a T.

Fever Trees are one of my favourite Acacias (or more recently, Vachellia) which got its name from the old belief that if you slept beneath this tree, you would fall deathly ill. Fever trees most often grow near water and it was later discovered that the vehicle for the fever was, in fact, not the tree but the infamous mosquito - and the fever itself was malaria.

Theres something magical about these fig and fever forests.

Inside the forests we had some spectacular opportunities for watching Giraffe. Nearly every day we would find them browsing along the dirt road that connected the camp with the main road. Unfortunately, whenever our video cameras were set up, the behemoth creatures decided they didn't want to feature in our film and disappeared in to the thick forest. It happened so frequently that I was inspired to write the following poem:

You just run and

hide despite the

fact that you're

the biggest beasts

in this forest you

pathetic idiots.

I did, however, get some snaps of the long-necked wallies that I'll include below.

Daddy Longlegs... And baby Longlegs!

The size of the Ndumo staff reflects the size of the park - both are tiny! This becomes pretty evident when you take a look at general maintenance of the roads and bridges. The small staff coupled with the small budgets of Ezemvelo/KZN Wildlife means that Ndumo falls short of its full potential. It would be wonderful to see this park get a solid injection of money and time from the powers that be, until then it will remain a quiet and lesser known gem of the KZN province.

Despite all of that, it's a wonderful reserve that has found a very special place in my heart. I'll be sure to return with some more powerful binoculars and a less demanding schedule. Our last evening here was spent watching the sunset over Nyamithi, listening to the water licking the shore while the shouts and calls of vervet monkeys and trumpeter hornbills echoed over the pan. Bheki said something that I think I'll remember always: "Not all good things are sunsets, but all sunsets are good". Hells yes Bheki.

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