Night Sounds in Kenya

Monday August 29, 2005

Here's Jeff, rolling up our tent after our first night camping.

The stars are so bright. There are no streetlamps to pollute their light. I notice that here below the equator the constellations familiar to a Canadian sky in summer are absent. Instead, Orion the Hunter, seen striding through the winter skies of home, lies languidly on his side.

The dark comes down quickly here. By eight o'clock it was hard to see without a flashlight and by eight-thirty last night we were all in our tents. It had been a long day.

We had all been awake more than twenty-four hours and were tired, but sleep did not come easily to me. I didn't mind really: it was a delicious feeling lying in a sleeping bag in a tent my first night in Africa, listening to the night sounds.

I could hear the lapping of the lake nearby and some deep-throated animals laughing nearby: hah-hah-hah...hah-hah-hah. The sound of hippos giggling amongst themselves I learned in the morning.

Jeff and I woke up around three in the morning to a strange and loud animal sound:

RONK! RONK! RONK! RONK! RONK! RONK! RONK!

It sounded like a group of five-hundred-pound bull-frogs calling from near our tent. We had no idea what it might be, but later learned the colubus monkeys had been having a convention in a nearby tree.

Towards dawn the bird chorus started. Brrr---brap brap...brrrr! cried one that remained unseen and unidentified even though I attempted to imitate its squawks for our guides.

They laughed at my hippo and colobus imitations too but at least they recognized those ones.

"What was it then?", somebody in the group wanted to know listening to my animal noises. "Ah, it WAS a hippo!"

After our earlier warning about the hippos, I had scanned the campsite carefully with my flashlight before walking to the toilet area during the night. Apparently hippos eyes glow red like a predators. I could relax. Nary a red eyeball reflected. Only a pale wispy ground mist.

Now, although slightly wary venturing out of the tent in the night by myself, you know, Nature called anyway. That, and the large bottle of Tusker beer around the campfire before bedtime. I was glad after all because if I hadn't had to get up I would have missed the owl.

He was perched on a tree branch near the showers. I wouldn't have seen him except that I'd followed the hooting. Hooo....hoooo....hooo. He was large and by my flashlight I could just make out his large shape.

I was thrilled. A bird book from the truck identified my owl as most likely being a Verreaux eagle- owl, a kind of owl that will wade into the water to catch fish and who may particularly like to snack on hedgehogs.