Luangwa: Battlefield of Hippo (Part 3)

The buck doesn’t stop at space and territory issues, there’s more than just lack of water for the hippos to be concerned about during the dry season in Luangwa. Their food supply literally withers away too. Most of the dry, caked earth in the dry months in Luangwa has little to no ground cover. Black cotton soils expand and contract in the heat pruning roots and rendering little edible life. So how do 30000 hippos survive? A magic, albeit little recognised, life source afforded by nature– the sausage tree! It is true in many wildlife areas that most creatures stay away from the enormous sausage-like fruit that lie under the tree (thanks to gravity) until they shrivel. But in Luangwa, the sausage tree means life to many but especially the hippos!

Huge, majestic, sausage-laden Kigelia Africana dominate the valley along the river course and adjacent floodplains. With little other cover on the earth, the sausage trees covered in electric green pre-summer flushes and rosy flowers stand out like towering mountains. Although the puku and impala feast on the fallen flowers and yellow baboon snap off the tender shoots, it’s the full grown, massive sausage fruit that the hippo seek. Where one would find the occasional fallen fruit beneath an Okavango based sausage tree, it is a rare occasion to find any such fruit lying about in Luangwa and this is because the hippos devour them with a determined voraciousness. One even spots hippos merely standing beneath the trees waiting for a fortuitous sausage to fall – even during the middle of the day!