Tanzanian Tour Maine Auduboners learn firsthand of the wilds of Africa

From Portland to Machias, members of the Maine Audubon Society recently traveled to the East African nation of Tanzania. Located on the equator, the country offers thrilling wildlife-watching opportunities and spectacular scenery. Getting there involved an overnight flight across the Atlantic to Amsterdam, then a daytime flight with views of the mountains of Greece, the Mediterranean Sea, the Sahara Desert and the Nile River.

Over Tanzania, travelers gazed at the Great Rift Valley, formed by two of the Earth’s tectonic plates pulling apart. The valley is an immense crack. We stayed in a hotel built high up on an escarpment. In the distance, we could see elephants and giraffes ambling in Lake Manyara National Park.

Where tectonic plates meet, there are volcanoes, too. Another hotel where we stayed was built into the rim of the ancient Ngorongoro crater. From there, we looked over the valley of the crater, spotting elephants and a few black rhinos.

While paddling canoes on Lake Manyara, we saw a hippopotamus in the water. It reacted to our presence by arching its neck and standing taller in the lake, several hundred feet away. “I’ll keep my canoe between you and the hippopotamus,” our guide cautioned. (Hippos cause the most human fatalities of any large African wildlife species.) Flamingos flew by in the distance, a beautiful pink haze over the water. Wart hogs, African buffalo and a hyena walked by on a beach.

Another day’s highlight was seeing a pair of lions resting high on a rock formation, majestically surveying their domain, the Serengeti plains. It was windy and the male lion’s mane was blown straight back from his face.

We watched as hyenas and enormous vultures feasted on a zebra. The pair of hyenas came loping by. The interlopers got to work right away, frightening away the vultures, cracking and crunching the zebra’s bones with their strong jaws, and pulling out ropes of grass-filled intestines. Vultures and hyenas are the cleanup crews, and, within a day, nothing was left of the animal.

This crew was joined by a strange creature resembling a vulture, the marabou stork. Its head has few feathers and its hunched posture resembles that of a vulture. It feeds on carrion. Storks are related to vultures, and though this is not usually obvious, it is in the case of the marabou stork.

Another long-legged denizen of the Serengeti, the secretary bird, is related, not to storks or herons, but to hawks and eagles. It has the hooked, flesh-ripping bill of an eagle, and its long legs enable it to “wade” in the grass of the prairie, looking for snakes and rodents to eat. Most of our group were more interested in mammals than birds, but nevertheless were thrilled to see such large, dramatic birds.

Because we were mostly nonbirders, we were greatly amused when someone in our hotel gestured toward us and exclaimed, “Look, there they go – the world-famous Audubon birders!”

Maine birders in the group were delighted to see more than 250 new bird species. They often had wonderful names: the “go-away bird” did not fly away; instead, it squawked, making a sound like “go-WAY!” The Squacco heron did not squawk. The hammerhead was a brown heron with a thick bill on front and a tuft of feathers on the back of its head. It did indeed look like a “hammerhead.”

For most of our group, large mammals stole the show. Giraffes looked svelte and spindly, yet incredibly graceful from a distance. Close up, their body size and enormous height of 18 feet were overwhelming.

Hippos appeared comical as they stampeded toward the water, seeming to say, “yuck, yuck, yuck.” In the water, they blew and spouted like whales, rolled over and seemed to playfully chomp each other’s jaws. This behavior and their soft, pink contours belied the danger they can represent to humans.

Most memorable of all were the enormous herds of zebra and wildebeest, the essence of the Serengeti plains. It was amazing to sit quietly in our van and experience close up the sounds, sights and smells. We were right in the middle of hundreds of thousands of zebras and wildebeest. They plodded or cantered along in their dramatic migration, following the greenest grass as rains renewed the plains.

Wildebeest look like a cross between a horse and a cow, with big horns, and a thick mane and tail. Zebra stripes made it hard to determine where one zebra ended and the other began. Presumably, this sometimes confuses lions, too.

Cheetahs are lanky, sleek and speedy, with the physique of a greyhound. We saw one that had killed a gazelle and found it was its third kill of the day; hyenas had robbed it twice before already. Hyenas are slower, but more powerful than cheetahs. It’s a rough life at all levels of the food chain.

A visit to a Maasai village proved interesting. A Maasai herdsman was tall and statuesque standing on a hillside with his cattle, and wearing a bright red robe with a tall staff in hand. We had to bend over to enter the curved entry into a low Maasai home, made from woven sticks and strengthened with a mortar made of earth and cattle dung.

Our young Maasai guide was an excellent birder, but even more vivid than the birds he found was his description of many aspects of his culture, including his own recent circumcision – a rite of passage.

On this tour, our hotels were luxurious and roomy without exception, and the food was excellent.

We were forbidden from getting out of the vans, or straying from the hotels, for our own safety. The vans had pop-up roofs with excellent visibility, and the tour offered several guided hikes. The hotels had many verandas with spectacular views. Therefore, tour policies did not seem too confining, even to Mainers used to roaming their woods freely.

Tour participants quickly became friends as they compared notes on what they had seen, and what they enjoyed the most. Inconveniences of back-country travel, such as bumpy roads and outhouses, were borne with good humor. I will never forget the raucous laughter emanating from the passengers of one van after our picnic was besieged by an enormous swarm of flies.

Other than that, the insects did not bother us; the dry season was ending and the rains were just beginning. A fascinating insect was the dung beetle. I watched one roll a ball of zebra or wildebeest dung, then bury it with its egg inside. The beetle was enormous, several inches long and wide. It was an efficient, seldom-seen but important member of the cleanup crew; no dung mounds were seen after the herd left.

Who hasn’t seen nature specials on TV of cheetahs running down their prey, or lions? Who hasn’t seen a zebra, an elephant or a giraffe in a zoo? Most trip participants, myself included, were motivated by a wish to see these animals in their natural habitat.

For me, it was a glorious experience to see an entire, intact ecosystem, the Serengeti plains, with its unique assemblage of large mammals, including its largest and most fearsome predators, lions, present and easily visible. Other participants agreed that it was the trip of a lifetime.

Judy Kellogg Markowsky directs the Maine Audubon Society’s Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden. She will present a slide show at Fields Pond at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 24. Admission is $6 per person. Proceeds benefit the nature center. For information about Maine Audubon’s worldwide nature tours, call the field trip department at 781-2330, Ext. 215, or visit the Web site MaineAudubon.org and click on World Tours.