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Winter days
Newsletter / 17 yJuly 2024

Winter days

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We have been bundling up against the cold the last few weeks but our resident wildlife has been keeping us busy from leopard and wild dog darting at Tafika to lion kills in front of Big Lagoon. Mwaleshi and Takwela opened mid-June so it’s great to have all of our camps open making some of the most remote and beautiful areas of the Luangwa available to our guests again.

Due to the dry year, the bush is thinning and the Luangwa river levels are dropping quite rapidly. This is evident by the bellowing from territorial hippo fights that gain in intensity as new islands appear in the river every week. Unsuccessful bulls take up residence in outlying lagoons and can be spied from our hides.

We noticed during our regular sightings of Tafika’s resident leopard, Kamini, that she had a snare on her hind leg. Nick put his ecologist skills to work and communicated with Conservation South Luangwa (CSL) to organize a successful de-snaring.

This came as a great relief as her condition was deteriorating rapidly and her cub would also suffer the consequences. The Tafika team spent a night guarding Kamini against marauding hyena as she struggled with the effects of the anaesthetic. In the early hours of the following morning Nick watched her move confidently again and make contact with her cub who was safely holed up in a nearby sausage tree.

The lengthy story of Mutima’s travels continue as she was spotted from the Tafika hide at midday for a refreshment. She was totally at ease as we watched her hunt along the Tafika peninsula that same evening. Just when we thought we had this sleek cat settled back at home, she was captured on camera a few days ago at Mwamba Camp which is on the west bank! Who says cats don’t swim because this one obviously does.

We’re enjoying periodic sightings of wild dogs in both our South and North Luangwa camps. The Milyoti pack has visited Tafika several times, terrorizing the resident bushbuck.

The Zambian Carnivore Programme (ZCP) used one of these opportunities to collar a female and re-collar the alpha male as his collar had stopped working. The collars have been instrumental in the success of our wild dogs and Zambia is one of the few countries where their numbers are on the rise.

The Milyoti pack is now made up of only 10 individuals, 7 of which are yearlings so it is a young and inexperienced pack compared to last years force. That said, they hunted persistently along the Tafika peninsular recently and were successful in taking down a bushbuck right next to the Tafika Camp lagoon.

The Trails Walking camps have been bustling with new and returning guests as winter is always a nice time for walking in the Luangwa. Lions have been seen on several safaris with a warthog kill taking place in front of Big Lagoon Camp shortly after breakfast. The guests set a hasty pace back to camp having already set off for their morning safari to watch the action from the comfort of a chair.

Frequent and beautiful sightings of elephant and giraffe have been enjoyed on foot and a sighting of a humongous python curled up in a mchenja tree was a special highlight.

Mwaleshi and Takwela Camps in the North Luangwa opened mid-June and Mwaleshi has enjoyed several lovely sightings of wild dogs and the Takwela team has been welcomed back by the resident kudu herd and elephants that often come to feed in camp. Lions have been spotted in both areas, some were watched crossing the Mwaleshi river reminding us again that the Luangwa cats are not afraid to get their paws wet.

Mwaleshi Camp, although still refreshingly simple, has been fitted with new basin tops, basins and taps. Shower handles have been re-positioned to the side wall enabling us to raise the drums for higher shower roses. We can now accommodate our taller guests more comfortably.

Our RASair Cessna 210 continues to ensure easy and quick connections between South Luangwa, North Luangwa, Lower Zambezi and other remote airstrips across Zambia. We’re happy to have Lian Stander at the yoke this year. Lian took to the skies when he was 16 so has many hours of experience under his belt already.

The most unusual sighting we’ve witnessed recently was a thick tailed bush baby and rock monitor lizard caught in a strangled check mate embrace. It seems the monitor had the bush baby entrapped by the lower jaw and neither were willing to move in case the other gained an advantage. Later the bush baby managed to escape and made an unsteady retreat back to the tree tops. Not that we’re meant to pick sides but it came as a relief when the bush baby managed to overcome this predicament.

Dr Keith and Dr Ginny Birrell have worked for the Luangwa Medical Fund for the past 4 years (of which we have always been members) and they started a Reduce my chance of a stroke programme. In support of our staff health and the Stroke programme, the doctors spent 4 days with us at Tafika providing medical checkups that focused on blood pressure issues and diabetes.

Most of our community only visit the clinic when sick so it was a great opportunity for our team to have free, accessible checkups and receive sound medical advice on how to improve or maintain their general health

Our guiding team is sad to bid Isaac Zulu farewell as he settles into retirement. Isaac was one of Norman Carr’s first protégés in the 1960s and was leading safaris before the formalities of guiding exams even came into being. We are grateful that a big piece of Isaac’s guiding journey was with us heading up the walking safaris in the Trails Camps. His humour, wisdom and experience of the bush will always be fondly remembered and appreciated.


The Tafika Fund

We’re into the second week of the Football for Wildlife tournament. The league consists of 16 teams, half women and half men; 8 teams in the North Luangwa and 8 in the South Luangwa. The teams will battle it out in a 6-week league until the South Luangwa and North Luangwa victors face each other in a final match mid-August.

We’ve been very grateful for amazing donations of glasses by private donors and Specs for Africa. Several people from our camps, the local school and clinic are now seeing easy. Our college students are returning to their studies for semester 2 so many scholarships have been issued recently and the local schools have been gifted with a variety of fancy new stationery and games brought out by kind guests.

A very big thank you for all of your generous donations that make all of these initiatives possible.  

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