Shakawe

Counting red eyes: the crocodile river below Shakawe

For six nights in late August 2016, three men in a boat worked the Okavango below Shakawe with a spotlight of 1.5 million candlepower. Their survey ran from Etsatsa Island, a little below Seronga, up to the village. They set off each evening at half past seven and kept going until two in the morning, swapping observers every hour so that nobody got tired and missed things. A crocodile’s eyes shine red in the light from more than 100 metres off. By the end they had covered 265 km of channel and counted 433 crocodiles, from youngsters of 35 cm to animals they judged at five metres.

That is about one and a half crocodiles for every kilometre, by spotlight. The team’s own sums, which allow for the ones under water or back in the papyrus, come to 1,931 for the channels they covered. They treat that less as a head count than as a marker to set against the 1,793 worked out the same way in 2008.

Fifty thousand skins

The reason anyone counts them is that the river was once nearly emptied. Between 1956 and 1987 the Okavango’s crocodiles were worked for money, and the researchers put the number shot for their hides at up to 50,000. The belly skins went into handbags and shoes. Maitseo Bolaane, a historian at the University of Botswana, has shown how much the white hunters of the 1940s and 1950s leaned on San trackers, who knew the swamp and could find a nest where an outsider saw only reeds. One of them, Kwere Sereri, is remembered by hunters and villagers alike for his skill. The best known of the hunters, Bobby Wilmot, is said to have kept his northern camp at Sepopa in the late 1960s. The river camp there today tells the story, and I have found it nowhere else.

From 2002 to 2006 a Stellenbosch University project under Alison Leslie caught crocodiles on this water by the hundred: anything under 1.2 metres was grabbed by hand over the side of a 4.8 metre aluminium boat. Sven Bourquin’s doctorate rests on 1,717 animals, each measured, marked and let go. His estimate for the Panhandle was about 2,570, with only some 650 adults among them. Nearly two thirds of those caught a second time were within 500 metres of where they had first been picked up, and a couple have turned up again nine and eleven years later.

Why it matters that this bit is not a park

You see big crocodiles all over the protected delta, yet hardly any nest there. Between 98 and 99 per cent of the known nest sites are in the Panhandle, on the river that runs from Shakawe down to Seronga, past villages, cattle and fishing nets. Bourquin found that nests had fallen by half or more in twenty years, and the monitoring team blames crocodile farming and the growing number of people on the banks.

The detail is in one side channel, the Phillipa. It held 11 nests in 2015 and 11 again in 2016, and the team thinks nine of those were the same females back at the same holes. A female lays about 50 eggs and they take some 90 days to hatch, in early to mid summer. Seasonal fires start in September and burn straight across the nesting months. The 2016 count also turned up something worrying: animals in the middle size class, between 1.3 and 2.3 metres, were down by 74 per cent on 2008. Crocodiles of that size live largely on fish. The team saw far fewer fish in the lagoons than in earlier years, met men working gill nets by lamplight, and suspects the two things are connected.

People on the bank have their own view. In March 2013 a farmer at Samochima, just south of Shakawe, told the Daily News he had lost three goats, two donkeys and a cow in a fortnight. Farmers there had put up barriers of thorn branches, he said, but the animals wandered to where there were none. The wildlife officer at Shakawe had 15 cases on his books for the year by then. A survey of 482 people in 35 villages found half of them afraid of crocodiles, with attacks coming when people fish, swim or fetch water, though by the wildlife department’s records lions and leopards take far more livestock.

The owl that flew off

The other animal people come to Shakawe for is Pel’s fishing owl, ginger, about a metre and a half across the wings, living on fish it lifts off the surface at night. Tim Liversedge, who went on to make wildlife films, studied it in the Panhandle and published in 1980. The figure usually quoted for Botswana is 23 territories along 60 km of river, and one birding company calls the Panhandle around Shakawe the best place on the planet to see it, usually by day, roosting on a big branch.

Usually. Wim Vader, a biologist from Tromsø Museum who came through with a tour in 2008, wrote up what “reliable” can mean. At the first lodge a guide walked them to the roost and all they got was a large owl leaving at speed. Two nights at the next produced wood owls, barred owlets and hippos on the lawn after dark, and no Pel’s. On the way out, acting on a rumour, they took a short boat ride at Shakawe itself and a local man pointed to a huge shape in a tree on the bank. So give it more than one outing. If you are awake before dawn on a moonlit night, listen: the male’s boom carries up to three kilometres.

Vader’s list is a fair guide to the rest. Carmine bee-eaters on the telephone wires minutes after the border, skimmers on the sandbanks, a white-backed night heron only after a long search. As for big animals, records kept by guests at a lodge some 40 km downriver have hippo on about nine stays in ten, elephant on four in ten and the swamp antelope, sitatunga, on about three in ten.