Zimbabwe - Hwangwe - Verney's Camp

Sightings August 2019

August had been the best month in 2019 so far. As most of our natural pans had dried up, high concentrations of game are popping up to make use of our artificial waterhole.

August has been a month of special sightings. Where to start? We can talk of a group of guests who had the privilege of seeing a pangolin less than two kilometres from our camp.

This month we had a couple of good wild dogs sightings. More than five groups of guests bumped into these special animals. The dogs seem to have established a denning site in our concession. A pack of three dogs were seen in hot pursuit of a Steen Buck on an early morning game drive towards the end of this month. On the same day, with the same guests, we bumped into the same pack chasing hyenas at the Manga 1 waterhole in our concession.

One of our endangered species, the roan antelope, are now becoming part of our daily sightings as they often come down to drink from our waterhole. Some times there are huge herds of more than ten animals, which is interesting as their population numbers have decreased dramatically over recent years.

Enormous elephants herds are now seen at our waterhole. Five hundred can be recorded per day. As we are now going deep into the dry season, many of the young elephants are tiring after walking long distances to and from the artificial waterholes and become vulnerable to opportunistic predators.

We also had a couple of good hyena sightings this month. As they take advantage of elephants who have died natural deaths.

We have also had a resident lioness coming to drink at our waterhole frequently.

Some of our sightings include kudu, zebra, warthog, steen buck, sable and wildebeest. A lot of birds are also sighted in and around camp. We are happy to see so many yellow-billed kites coming back in town.

Until next month!

The Verney’s Camp Team