The universal appeal of the African savanna

My wife and I were lucky to escape for a long-delayed birdwatching holiday in Kenya over Christmas. To have been warm, sunlit and free while so many in Britain were not won’t endear me to most readers, I realise. Nairobi was rife with Covid and Christmas cancellations devastated the tourism industry. So we had the extraordinary Elephant Watch Camp run by Saba Douglas-Hamilton in the Samburu National Reserve almost to ourselves. Baboons and vervet monkeys wandered freely through the camp, and in the night the river flash-flooded after a storm in the hills to the west, but the tents were safe. Elephants were everywhere, feasting on fresh vegetation after a long drought. My old friend Chris Thouless, director of research for Save the Elephants, explained that throughout Kenya elephant numbers are up, poaching is down and the biggest problem is increasing conflict with farmers and herders. Ingeniously, they have found you can deter elephants from raiding a maize farm by hanging beehives from wires around the fields. Elephants are scared of the aggressive African honey bee.

Francis Lenyakopiro, a Samburu warrior who acted as our guide, proved as knowledgeable about ecology as anybody I have met, but also very talented at singing traditional songs (wearing traditional Samburu dress with a touch of Douglas tartan) round a fire as the sun sank behind the hills. I will not forget his quiet voice, almost a whisper, at a picnic: ‘I don’t want to interrupt your lunch, but we are being watched by a lioness.’

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At Borana Lodge in the Laikipia highlands, where we watched elephants, rhinos, waterbuck and kudu, as well as a bounty of birds, from the veranda of our bedroom, our guide Lawrence Ngugi shared insights into the lives of animals from the cooperative breeding of wattled starlings to the tendency of black rhinos to get aggressive after eating the steroid-rich bark of the candelabra tree.