Zambia Safari Diary - Day Thirteen

Chaminuka - Lusaka to London - Heathrow

Soon after dawn we were driven back into Lusaka to catch our early morning flight, only to find that the trip had one more surprise to spring on us. Being a private, enclosed, game reserve, Chaminuka can choose what it stocks, and we added blue wildebeest, sable, roan, and tsessebe to our ‘sightings’ list, in addition to further elephant, eland and zebra.

A largely uneventful flight back to Heathrow, enlivened by turbulence due to an electrical storm, appropriately enough just as the film ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was screening. They hadn’t bothered to empty the toilets on the turnaround at Lusaka, and by the time we landed at Heathrow the final one had packed up – but this was of little hardship to old Africa hands such as ourselves.

Conclusion
The general feeling among the guests was that the trip couldn’t have been bettered (it could, of course – come back next year!). Game sightings were both extensive and of exceptional quality, as the accompanying photographs amply demonstrate.

Mammalian species seen (in order of appearance) were elephant, yellow baboon, vervet monkey, bushbuck, giraffe, impala, puku, hippo, lion, warthog, (a variety of the Burchell’s) zebra, scrub hare, elephant shrew, spotted hyena, genet, common waterbuck, tree squirrel, monitor lizard, civet, buffalo, crocodile, leopard tortoise, Lichtenstein’s hartebeest, grysbok, reedbuck, serval, light grey mongoose, leopard, honey badger, wild dog, eland, kudu, banded mongoose, whitetailed mongoose, mouse, marsh mongoose, bushytailed mongoose, slender mongoose, black tipped mongoose, porcupine, blue wildebeest, sable, roan and tsessebe, with only Cookson’s Wildebeest and Aardvark escaping our view out of those species that we might have expected to see (with wild dog and honey badger providing us with real bonuses).

Although we probably saw many of the area’s different bird species, only vultures, the various oxpeckers, guinea fowl, carmine bee eaters, ground horn bill, saddle bill stork, hammerkop, yellow billed stork, tawny eagle, goliath heron, giant kingfisher, giant eagle owl, fish eagle and red hornbill reached our record books.

Of the ‘big five’ we saw buffalo, elephant, leopard and lion, only the rhinoceros not being present; of the ‘little five’ we saw the buffalo weaver bird, the elephant shrew, the leopard tortoise and the ant lion, again missing out on the rhinoceros beetle; while of the ‘green five’ we saw the buffalo thorn, elephant grass, the lions ear flower (leontides) and the rhino thistle (but not the leopard orchid).

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