Day 180: Baboons and Warthogs and Elephants, Oh My!
A taste of African safari.
June 29, 2015: Mole National Park, Ghana 鈥 First thing this morning I staggered bleary-eyed out of my room at the Mole Park Hotel, and immediately almost walked into a baboon along the sidewalk by the swimming pool. Whoa, wake up! Toto, I don鈥檛 think we鈥檙e in Kansas anymore!
Mole National Park, in northern Ghana, is perhaps the country鈥檚 top birding destination, but it鈥檚 also a popular spot for tourists to find their hearts on safari. My second shock of the day came when I sat down for breakfast and realized that, for the first time in a few days, I wasn鈥檛 the only non-African in sight. (Two days ago I spotted a pair of nametagged Latter Day Saints missionaries walking through a village, but otherwise it鈥檚 been an all-local experience in Ghana so far.) Is there such thing as reverse culture shock?
My birding posse has grown to five people: Me, Kalu, our driver Yaw (鈥淭hursday鈥), a rifle-carrying park guard named Robert, and another Ghanian birder named Illiesu Ziblim who is a year younger than me and met us here to tag along for a couple of days. We all crowded into Yaw鈥檚 double-cabbed pickup and rolled out to follow the red dirt road.
The bird sightings flew fast and furious. At one point Kalu pointed out a Senegal Batis in a tree, and when I focused my binoculars somewhere over the bird, I realized that there were two other birds in the same field of view: A Senegal Eremomela and an African Yellow White-eye. Three lifers at once! Because the environment at Mole is so different than in southern Ghana, almost all the birds we saw today were new ones, and it was all I could handle just to keep up鈥攅specially with such evocative names. Would anyone care to join for a Red-cheeked Cordonbleu? And can you keep your Singing, Winding, Whistling, Zitting, Siffling, and Croaking cisticolas straight?
Meanwhile, other animals kept popping into view. Baboons, vervet monkeys, kob (a type of deer-like animal), and warthogs were everywhere in the savanna 鈥 and a little rabbit, too! While we were looking for Flappet Larks and Sun Larks in a grassy field, Robert quietly pointed something out in the distance. I didn鈥檛 quite catch what he said (Ghana鈥檚 national language is English but the accent is very different), and scanned the field for a minute before asking what he had called attention to. Just then a white-faced antelope stood up right in front of us and loped away鈥擨鈥檇 been so focused on tiny brown birds that I missed the refrigerator-sized mammal.
The big highlight, so to speak, arrived when the five of us rounded a corner to find two enormous African elephants strolling next to a waterhole. These were my first-ever wild elephants, and I admit I quit watching birds for a few minutes to soak in the moment. The elephants at Mole live a relatively unthreatened existence; poaching is not much of an issue here, partly because of regular park patrols, and these two looked completely at peace as they munched on leafy branches. Later, another huge male elephant interrupted my lunch when it walked up to the hotel restaurant and began, in a very relaxed way, to eat the landscaping. There鈥檚 no place like Africa!
New birds today: 57
Year list: 3322
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P.S. There is a Wizard of Oz reference in every paragraph of this post. Can you spot them all?