How strange it always is, that first waking in the Luangwa Valley, those few minutes between sleeping and doing as the first grey light hits the sky. I was in bed but the life outside would not wait: and as always it was like being home and not recognising a soul, like being back in your own house and unable to find the bathroom.
I knew that sound, I knew that sound – but I didn’t know what it was, and it was a kind of agony. Was this really the Valley, the place where I left a piece of my heart all but 30 years back? And if so, why couldn’t I put a name to the mad cacklers just outside my hut?
I was due to welcome nine clients to the Valley the following day, co-leading a trip with my old friend Chris Breen, and yet I couldn’t remember the voice of a single bird. You is feeling like you was lost in the bush, boy? Words of James Joyce: you nailed it again, Jim.
And then a wild screaming duet: glorious as the Valley itself. I knew, I knew what that one was, but I still couldn’t put a name to it. It was like trying to adjust to the real world after some traumatic injury: the familiar has become alien and all your certainties have dissolved.
Scream again, you screamers: give me another clue, I beg you. And scream they did but I was no closer. Had I really been here before? Had I merely imagined that last trip, eleven months back, when surely I could recognise the sound of every bird that called?
But that one, that rhythmic repeating bit of song: yes, I knew that and now there was solid ground beneath my feet: Heuglin’s robin, irritatingly and confusingly renamed white-browed robin-chat, but either way an old friend of African mornings. I took confidence: that gabbling, why, I hear that at home in Norfolk: it was Egyptian geese, always garrulous birds.
That’s a bit of pertry there, mate…luvverly
Simon
I was thinking about you & Chris & your recent group of visitors rising Zambia last month. Maybe your Egyptian geese were saying hello whilst you did a recall from last year – maybe they were saying hello we’re here & look out for what’s ahead like the Hippos! I do hope that your trip found you with masses of sightings trouble free.
I’d like to let you know that in the spring of this year I was re-homing my fifth hedgehog. Buttons was in a hedgehog house, in an old rabbit run, which worked out well to begin with but on the fourth night I heard a death call at around 1.00 pm when I was asleep, so I opened my bedroom window and discovered a mammal with white stripes, so what next but to shriek at my loudest voice possible.The juvenile badger returned without hesitation looking for a morsel of food. I suddenly donned my dressing gown and was able to save Buttons yet again whilst putting her into the voyager – next morning she was sound asleep, so she had to go back to The Shepreth Hedgehog Hospital to find a new home. At the time my adrenalin was running wild like in the Zambia, almost a year ago!
I was thankful on both occasions to have survived the experience & it took me a while to work out that wildlife affects us throughout the world.
Best
Alison Cornell
Beautifully evocative,many thanks,Simon
Loved all the new blogs. Thanks Simon. What has the Boy Wonder been up to?