But for me, the allure of Sweden as a recording destination has always been strong: I imagined endless forests, a low density of humans and noise, plus a healthy mix of wildlife for European standards. And learning about the Black River sound recording trip, which had its inception in 2017 and was now due for its second instalment in April 2018, I finally had a good opportunity to see and hear it for myself.

Browsing their site, I immediately took a liking to their down-to-earth approach: just join them to a special part of Swedish nature which they know well, and make up your own plan while you’re there. Rent a bike or canoe, or just hike and discover sounds and good recording spots by yourself. And in between these bits of exploration, they will take you to sites deep in the forest and soggy bogs where unique and delicate wildlife events are taking place that time of year. Specifically for April, that meant the western capercaillie and black grouse “leks”: the mating rituals where males try their hardest to impress the ladies.

Spanning just four nights, this was bound to be a packed few days. The trip was organised by Stefan Taylor and Kari Knight, a friendly couple from Britain who love Sweden and know it well. The site is at a spacious and characterful old farmhouse situated next to the titular Black River and surrounded by forests and wetlands. Every evening we were served some delicious food courtesy of Kari, and Stefan would brief us daily about recording opportunities and interesting places nearby.

We had the opportunity to set up microphones at capercaillie leks almost every night. These sites had been discovered by Stefan himself and are traditionally kept under wraps as to not attract hordes of visitors. He only shares them with the small group of people that join him on these trips, and we were always careful to not cause any undue disturbance. The capercaillie is an elusive and quiet bird. Its mating dance is a fragile and obscure event which occurs only for about two weeks each year, where the male is strutting about on the ground while making the strangest clucking and whistling sounds. At night, the males crash-land into the trees nearby their chosen spot, resting before another day of hard work of winning the favours of the females.

While capercaillie leks take place in secluded and mossy areas deep in the forest, the black grouse mating displays happen in the middle of bogs on big open clearings. We set up microphones near one of these sites for one night, with some of us staying behind overnight in the nearby hide to watch the event from a distance. I did not sleep in the hide here nor at the capercaillie sites, as the limited time available meant that I wanted to keep my mornings free to take my other microphone rig elsewhere. As far as complaints go, this was the only downside for me about the Black River trip – the opportunities were too numerous and time too limited to do it all!

Sweden’s nature did not disappoint. I loved the variety in sounds of the morning choruses, the soft nighttime air tones of pure natural quietude, and the drawn out reverberations of the forests and lakes that rendered every recording with a lush washed out quality. I learned that unlike in the UK, the forests are considered public land and wild camping is allowed everywhere. There were many beautiful spots that we recorded at, from new growth to old growth forests, frog-filled lakes and wild boar feeding stations, but my personal highlight was taking out a canoe onto the river and mounting one of my microphone rigs on the front, slowly paddling towards sounds that took my interest.

And importantly, the other people on this trip were perfect company, all of them sound recordists, artists, designers and nature enthusiasts in their own right, eager to share information and discuss wildlife observations, with plenty of geeking out over gear in between. I feel like I’ve made a few new friends out of this trip. Moreover, it all left me wanting for more, and I am highly likely to sign up again next year or at least to come back to Sweden for more recording in the future.

Why choose Uganda? It is a relatively small country that with its great variety of nature is almost a miniature sub-Saharan Africa, offering dense rainforests, expansive grassland savannas and spectacular mountain ranges. It is a top African birding destination, and right now the best country to see mountain gorillas in the wild.

And while not exactly cheap, Uganda is relatively affordable yet not as touristy as neighbouring countries Kenya and Tanzania. So the question to me quickly became: why not choose Uganda?

Me and my partner visited the country in March 2018, right at the start of the long rainy season that lasts until May. Plans to visit during the dry season in January had to be postponed. I was concerned about rain spoiling my recordings, but this turned out to be only partially justified as while it rained daily, it never did for longer than a few hours at a time.

The route I had roughly planned to drive was mildly ambitious as it covered a lot of ground in just three weeks, traversing the entire country in a neat circle. It took us to the natural parks of Mabira, Pian Upe, Kidepo, Murchison Falls, Kalinzu, Kibale, Queen Elizabeth, Bwindi and Mgahinga, featuring between them a wide range of biomes and nature recording opportunities.

Our first main destination was the famed and remote Kidepo Valley national park, bordering South Sudan in the very north east corner of the country. We chose to take a detour and get there by traversing the Karamoja region, which hasn’t seen many visitors in recent years due to negative but outdated foreign travel advisories, based on some past conflicts between locals stealing each other’s cattle with machine guns. The goverment had disarmed the region a few years ago, and predictably we thoroughly enjoyed our couple of days driving through.

The roads in Uganda are always lined by people. Karamoja was no different.

The Karamoja region is the least developed and most arid of the country, and its pastoral people are of different ethnicity than the predominantly Bantu-speaking tribes of the south. There are many traditional mud hut villages with thatched roofs carrying solar panels for charging mobile phones, which are as ubiquitous in Uganda as they are back home. As the road ahead was long, we ultimately were just passersby, though our not-so-discrete vehicle always turned heads and often attracted running crowds of laughing children. My fleeting impression was that of a proud, beautiful and hardened people.

We reached Kidepo Valley National Park three days after we set off from Kampala, having taken overnight stops in Mabira Forest and Pian Upe game reserve. Kidepo is widely regarded as one of Africa’s finest, and I was awestruck by the scenery of wide open savanna grassland where huge herds of mammals roamed. We saw 1000 strong buffalo herds and sizeable groups of elephants and giraffe. It is a true East African landscape in the way I have always imagined it. We spent 4 nights camping here, usually hearing lions roaring close to our tent at night. I could have easily spent another week or so in this wonderful place.

Kidepo currently attracts only a few hundred visitors a year, but this is fast due to change as its reputation is rising and a huge lodge is being constructed in a former mansion of Idi Amin. But for now it is a lovely place to drive around and get lost in, where you can just be immersed by nature and not see another vehicle all day. Even so, limited camping facilities mean you sometimes do share sites with other campers.

Kidepo was also the place where I found a good use for one of the features that came with our car, a 1996 Landcruiser Prado that had a safari pop-up roof modification. I mounted my Sennheiser Double MS rig under the popped-up roof so I could simply drive around, stop at an interesting spot and record surround ambience right there while staying seated and monitoring from behind the driver’s wheel. It was an excellent way of getting snippets of ambience at various locations, and I made good use of this in Kidepo as well as later destinations.

Besides using the pop-up roof, I also left my rigs out unattended for long periods of time. In the African bush there are some risks with this approach, which I have written about before. Nowadays, I do use some deterrents, particularly a toy snake to scare off some monkeys and at one point even had a park ranger fooled — he came to warn me about a snake nearby my ‘gadget’ that he had seen in the bush. I also check trees for any marks such as droppings or fruits that suggest elephant or baboon activity, and then set up a bit further ahead.

After Kidepo, we went south towards Murchison Falls National Park to spend one night of wild camping in the delta, which is allowed as long as you bring a ranger with you for protection. Our ranger Robert and his machine gun stayed up all night tending the fire and keeping an eye out. With his blessing I was also able to leave a microphone rig out at the so-called hippo pool, resulting in some great recordings of very close up hippo vocalisations and grunts.

It was interesting to get to know Robert a little. I was struck by his stories of how tough the ranger training was, learning to survive in the bush for days without food or sleep — and how unprepared he was at the time, as a city boy with no particular love for nature who had signed up just to earn his keep. Rangers like him are the first and last line of defence in keeping the wildlife safe against poachers, and his military camo outfit and threateningly large weapon were not for show. But like all Ugandans we met, he was a gentle and soft-spoken guy, whose dreams of playing for Manchester United had now changed to buying land and farm it for his family’s subsistence.

Having read it was the busiest of all national parks in the country, I had low expectations of Queen Elizabeth NP. Yet during our visit it felt almost as if we had the entire reserve to our own, apart from when a convoy of fancy Landcruisers transporting the American ambassador sped past us. What makes QENP quite special is that it harbours a wide variety of biomes and habitats, including spaceous lush grassland savannas, a large primate-filled forest, a remote swamp that was unpassable this time of year and a river separating Uganda from Congo with some very, very loud and grumpy hippos.

We only spent two nights camping here, one in Maramagambo Forest listening to black and white colobus and rolling thunders at night, and another next to the river where the hippos grazed around our tent and argued all night with each other. I also made several stops to record frogs, which seemed to be hiding everywhere in the grasses here. QENP offers a lot of variety in the sounds that can be recorded and I will likely revisit it when I go to Uganda again in a few weeks time.

African rainforests are normally associated with Central Africa, home to the the Congo Basin, the world’s second largest rainforest. Slightly lesser known are the Albertine Rift montane rainforests, which cover eastern parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo and western parts of Burundi, Rwanda and Uganda. These mountains and forests harbour the critically endangered mountain gorilla, of which there are now only about a 1000 left in the wild – still, that is 25% more than in 2010.

I had never yet visited a rainforest in Africa, and this was one of my main motivations to go to Uganda. It is an inherently different experience from touring through the savannas, as going inside the jungle requires travel on foot rather than by car. You aren’t allowed to trek unguarded into a protected rainforest and must always hire a guide and an armed ranger, while getting a porter can be advisable too. I stubbornly refused to hire a porter the first couple of times, because I wanted to know whether I was able to carry my gear around myself for hours on wet rainforest treks. Once I had proven to myself that I could do it, I swallowed my pride and hired local porters instead.

We visited the rainforests of Mabira, Kibale, Kalinzu, Bwindi and Mgahinga, each sporting their own blend of vegetation and wildlife. Monkeys such as black and white colobus, mangabey, red tailed monkey and olive baboon were ubiquitous; the great apes, chimpanzee and mountain gorilla, of course less so. We did hear both types of ape occasionally in the distance. I was also very happy to hear and record the haunting screams of western tree hyrax in Mabira, a wonderful little critter that resembles a hamster yet is the elephant’s closest relative.

Of course a major attraction for any visitor to this part of the world is to join on a gorilla or chimpanzee trek. In both cases you are lead through the thicket of the jungle to where the trackers have located the animals that morning. The groups you visit are habituated but wild, and getting to where they are is not necessarily going to be a walk in the park, as illustrated in the video below.

Trekking chimps can be relatively hard as they live high up in the trees and move about non-stop. We spent our time trying to keep up with them, occasionally hearing them do their pant-hoots and other vocalisations, sometimes catching a glimpse of them through the thick canopy. As we were almost continously bushwacking our way through the jungle, I did not succeed in getting a good sound recording.

The gorilla trek was different, as we were lucky to get really close and spend some quality time with them. The experience gave me an impression of a species completely content with their surroundings. The big male silverback that was the leader of this family was the most relaxed, happy, easy going guy I’d ever met. He was just lying there on his back and scratching his belly, with more food he could ever eat right at his fingertips. Sometimes he would assert his dominance by sitting up or jumping into the bush, before going back to total relaxation and non-stop feeding.

His cute fluffball babies would grunt softly as they played, often seeking out their oversized daddy for some attention, while the mothers rested in the shade and occasionally quietly communicated. The scenes that we observed painted a rather idyllic picture – it is nice to believe in fairytales sometimes, as while gorillas are indeed a gentle species that is incorrectly portrayed in some films as dangerous maniacs, the leading silverbacks do rule their families with an iron fist.

Road conditions varied wildly throughout our trip, ranging from perfectly smooth tarmac to rough rocky dirt tracks, slippery thick mud trails and plenty of corrugated roads which had the car rattle, bounce and shake. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the driving was always hugely entertaining. I would not have it any other way, and not sitting behind the steering wheel on a trip like this would take away a lot of the purpose and fun for me.

But careful driving was paramount, as Uganda has one of the highest road accident rates in Africa. Local drivers can be a little gung-ho, speeding down towards you heading for full-on collision while not making any effort to slow down or make way. Newly built highways with smooth looking tarmac where driving over 80 km/h would be tempting are potential death traps, as the uneven surface can easily make your car topple over when going too fast.  Large groups of pedestrians, especially children, line the roads at all times, en route to and from their jobs or school and village. And it does take some time before you are used to spotting the very well hidden, often inexplicably positioned speed bumps.

Ugandan towns tend to be hectic and dusty places, often consisting of a single main street with various minor side roads branching off. Buildings are painted in bold colours promoting products like shampoo or mobile networks. You can top up your phone’s credit everywhere, even the most rural and remote villages still have a dinky shop selling sim cards and phone accessories. Food is expensive in the supermarkets, prices often on par or higher than the UK; cheap local produce such as fruit and vegetables is found on the street markets. But even then, buying ingredients and cooking up our own simple meal would usually amount to the same cost as going for dinner in a non-fancy restaurant.

People are kind and helpful, always polite, gentle and soft spoken. It’s a cliché to gush about ‘how friendly the locals were!’ after having visited a country, but Ugandan culture does have politeness ingrained. Stopping to ask for directions without first exchanging a few pleasantries would be considered very rude. You are never harrassed or bothered, although kids might half-jokingly ask you to ‘give them their money’, and without fault will shout ‘Muzungu!!’ when they spot your milky skin. Sometimes the children will line up and do a little dance as you pass along, which is both cute and a little sad as of course it is done in hopes for some small change.

Another cliché is to point out how ‘Africa is not dangerous at all!’, and while there is an inherent insult in this supposed revelation, it is nonetheless very true in the case of Uganda as well. Crime is low, attitudes are great. There is a permeating atmosphere of enterprise throughout the country, Ugandans are not resting on their laurels. It is not a perfect country, and I don’t intend to paint it that way either. But it is a country very much worth visiting, so much so that when I go back in July 2018 it is also to explore how feasible it may be to start organising group sound recording tours there. If you managed to read this far, then perhaps you could be interested in joining me one day?

And finally, here is a short overview of the various recordings I made in Uganda.

I normally try to record animals in their natural environment, in the wild so to speak. I think there are a lot of unique calls and interactions that can only be observed and recorded that way. But the flip side of recording in the wild is that unpredictability is huge, so you need a lot of time and a healthy dose of calculated luck. Being granted permission to spend a day in close proximity to species as vocal as chimpanzees and lions was a great way for me to get some recordings I would otherwise struggle to get.

The Primadomus complex is a sprawling expanse, housing a very sizeable group of wildlife inhabitants. It is home to more than 14 big cats (mostly lions and tigers), and dozens of primates such as chimpanzees and Berber macaques. The animals are all given considerable space under the Spanish sun, and because it is not normally open to the public, they enjoy a relatively peaceful existence. 

And they deserve nothing less, because every animal here has a very sad history. All came here after being rescued by AAP/Primadomus, for instance from circuses or private individuals who thought it would be interesting to have a chimp or lion as a pet. It boggles my mind how stupid or cruel someone can be to take an animal like that as a pet, but neither human stupidity nor cruelty are known to have any limits.

The stories that staff at Primadomus told me about the personal histories of some of the wildlife under their care were heartbreaking. Take Bingo and Antoine, two chimpanzees who now live together in the same enclosure. Antoine had spent 10 years of his adult life locked up in a basement without any natural light, and Bingo lived for years in solitude in an old zoo after having been abandoned by a circus. I wouldn’t wish any of this to any type of animal, let alone human being, but chimps are sentient creatures and the thought of them going through a life like this is, to me, akin to a human treated as a slave and locked up in a dungeon.

The cats haven’t fared any better, with for instance the beautiful, long-maned older male lion Reza having lived for 13 years in a circus trailer.

The realisation that there are many more animals of all sorts and sizes currently living similar lives in cruel captivity is even harder to bear. Therefore, the work that AAP/Primadomus does is very important and meaningful. It truly is wildlife conservation and rehabilitation in its purest form, and the passion amongst the staff was apparent. I have a lot of respect for this organisation and their people.

It was therefore a huge privilege for me to be given the opportunity to spend some time recording. Of course it was at all times paramount to be respectful and to try to be as little of a disturbance to the animals’ daily routines as possible. That said, in particular the chimps were well aware of my presence, and occasionally showed their appreciation of me visiting by spitting or throwing faeces at me. I found their welcoming rituals funny, and besides, their excitement around feeding times especially gave me some excellent close up vocalisations, so how could I be anything but very grateful?

My next time recording chimps will hopefully be in the wild, as I intend to go chimp trekking when I visit Uganda in January 2018 to record new material for upcoming libraries.

The big cats by contrast were far less impressed, and generally hardly batted an eye in my direction – bar a pair of two young lions, Mojito and Tintin, who were very curious and followed me around with great interest as I walked back and forth alongside their enclosure, setting up microphones.

I was given permission to leave two microphone rigs unattended for an overnight session in the big cats area. This was a golden opportunity, as all night long the lions and tigers did their characteristically deep moaning contact calls and growls. These are sounds that vividly take me back to my tent in Botswana and hearing a lion pride producing the same calls after a successful hunt, a mere few hundred metres away. But this time, my microphones were as close as several meters – far closer than I would ever like to be if it was me back in that tent in Botswana!

I’m very thankful to the people at Primadomus, both for the work that they do and for being so generous with letting me spend the day with mics in tow. Please take a look at their website, and consider donating to their cause.

I had many reasons to join up, but chief among them were a longing to go back to the African continent for more sound recording, and a growing interest in sound art. I was curious to learn from people who work as independent sonic artists and perhaps find a new outlet for my love of recording sounds of the natural environment and its wildlife.

All that being said, the biggest draw was simply to go out and spend two weeks of non-stop recording in the bush. If nothing else, perhaps I could gather enough material to release another African wildlife themed library. And so it happened that I found myself at the end of November of 2016 as one of the participants in that year’s Sonic Mmabolela.

From my previous African travel and recording experience, I was used to always being confined to my vehicle or camp, or using a leopard trap to leave my gear safe for extended unattended recording sessions. Wandering off into the bush with mics in tow was always absolutely out of the question, the risk of running into elephants, buffalo or other potentially dangerous mammals too high.

Sonic Mmabolela however was in that sense the complete opposite experience. The Mmabolela estate at which it was held is an expanse of just over 5000ha of dry bush veld, and while it was teeming with life there were nearly no dangerous mammals present. No elephants, no buffalo, no lions – a couple of hyenas apparently, and a lone leopard maybe. Granted, while the river was mostly dry, the bits that had water deep enough sported some humongous crocs. To tell the truth, the lack of flagship mammals made me hesitate prior to signing up, as I do love the presence and the calls of all of them. But it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Now the bush was a relatively safe(r) place where you could walk around and explore freely – just stay away from that deep water!

It goes without saying that I am not advocating for an African bush safely removed of all potentially hazardous mammals – never would I hope for the experience of Africa’s nature to be akin to that of Europe. But for the purpose of these two weeks of non-stop recording, it was a delight to be in a place where there was so much in terms of beautiful, exotic life & sound while not having to beware much about what may be lurking in the bush.

And life there was – yet death all the same. The residency takes place during the latter weeks of November, almost summer in the Southern Hemisphere, and a time that is particularly spectacular for birdlife. The dawn choruses were the lushest and most exuberant I’ve ever experienced, compounded by the natural reverberations created by the features of the land and its vegetation.

It is also the end of the dry season, and every day was marked by expecting or hoping for a storm and rainfall. While rain would soak our recording plans, the local wildlife was in desperate need of it. We saw and smelled many dead antelope carcasses, perished due to the lack of water. Most of the bush was dry and unpalatable, the few tasty leaves and fruits available cruelly tucked away behind massive thorns. You could clearly sense and see the desperate struggle the animals were going through, but sadly the rains never truly came out in full force while we were there.

The schedule of the residency was rammed, in a good sense: there were usually at least two 3+ hour recording slots each day, plus time set aside for studio work and discussion.

And through those discussions I quickly learned that Francisco Lopez, the director and conceiver of Sonic Mmabolela, is on a whole different level indeed than I am. Hearing him talk about his work, about the state of sonic arts put in context with the historic progression of comparable arts such as photography, the questions and challenges he posed, all in his quite erudite command of the English language often meant that I felt out of my depth and on new grounds. Working as a sound designer for commercial entertainment projects, I face different questions and struggles than someone who has an independent sound art practice.

Most of the other participants were independent artists and musicians in their own right. They had all presented their work at the start of the course, and I was truly impressed by a lot of it. So as a result from being surrounded by people who work professionally with audio in a whole different way than myself, I started looking at my own approach to and motivations for sound recording from new angles.

I love categorising the sounds that I hear. When I listen to or record an animal call that I have not heard before, I can spend hours going through all the various resources at my disposal to figure out what the name of the species is. It’s not something I’ve ever questioned, but one thing that stood out to me from Francisco and Barbara’s approach is that they wouldn’t care so much about naming the sounds we were exposed to.

I point this out as perhaps my love for categorisation has something to do with my work – as a sound designer who maintains a large library of sounds that are used for projects, categorising my recordings properly is a crucial element of the job. Whatever the case, it is not that their ambivalence made me question why I want to bring order to the sounds I hear and collect. I still do it and I still love it. But it did introduce me to a new, more artistic perspective on capturing and representing sounds from the natural environment.

To quote Francisco himself from one of his online essays which I highly recommend –

What makes his viewpoints especially strong to me is that these come from a man with a scientific background in entomology and has worked extensively on-site in rain forests studying the behaviour of insects. These are not the words from someone rejecting knowledge, but rather promoting an expanded view on recording and interacting with the world around us.

Similarly, where I may obsess about a perfect technical recording, a typical question that would be posed in this group is what a perfect technical recording really is. That seemed so rhetorical that it made me question myself. While I still consider good recording technique paramount and I feel that to break the rules you need to master them first, I came to realise that my own baseline and fundamentals towards recording are formed by whatever my personal perspective is, and that I’ve never really stood still to put that into words.

One theme that kept coming up was the skill of listening. It was discussed at length and put into practice during regular sessions that were dubbed as concerts. The idea of these concerts was quite simple: we would take a bunch of chairs, drive to a nice location somewhere in the bush, sit down for an hour or so and listen. No talking, no doing something in particular apart from the very act of listening. We were also encouraged to not record during these concerts. I did struggle with abstaining from recording, for fear of missing out on ‘some moment’ which I would regret not capturing. But this was exactly the point – to just be there and leave your ears and mind unfiltered from the analysis and mental activity that engages when you’re in recording mode.

Getting ready for another concert

As easy as sitting down for an hour sounds, I found these listening sessions quite challenging. I eventually came to the conclusion that I haven’t got a very well developed skill to ‘just listen’, as in an almost meditative state. I found I am unable to switch my brain off, to stop processing what I am hearing in the ways I always do – to contextualise and analyse all the incoming aural information. I would either sit and focus intensely on the sounds, or I would let my mind wander off to someplace else, feeling like I was not listening any longer. There seemed to be no real middle ground possible where I felt I could transcend cerebral activity whilst still listening in a meaningful way.

All the same, I did feel I picked up valuable nuggets of analysis from those listening sessions. I would focus for instance on how wind moves through the trees, and how localised this can sound per tree rather than necessarily being one smooth flowing movement in a 360 degree fashion. Or I would deepen my appreciation for how wildlife calls enter the space often in a sudden and almost jarring way, going silent again without fanfare, in which I believe lies a valuable tool and lesson for sound design and compositional work.

As a field recording and sonic arts residency, one of the objectives was to produce a piece of work using recordings made during Sonic Mmabolela, and to present to the group by the end of the two week period. There was no directive or format set in stone towards this, apart from the work being no longer than 10 minutes maximum. One could choose to simply present a recording, perhaps create a composition of some kind or even do a live performance – it was open to your own interpretation.

I intended to simply present a recording, but found motivation in the inebriation that came with the penultimate night of the workshop, in which we all relaxed and let the wine flow more freely than the nights before. While I have produced a couple of sound installations for art exhibitions in the past and have a decade of professional experience as a sound designer, I had never before set out to use my field recordings to make a piece of music.

The below is what I composed that night at Sonic Mmabolela, and consists solely of recordings captured during the workshop. I processed the material in various ways, but no external content was added. It’s also not been edited, remastered or touched up since.

What’s more, all the pieces produced by the other participants, which contained many very interesting approaches, are collected in a free downloadable release on the Free Music Archive here. I highly recommend having a listen to the full thing.

During the workshop I became close to one of the participants, George Vlad, who I already knew from Twitter and who was the only other game audio designer that took part. As such we naturally gravitated towards each other. We also had very similar equipment, both sporting a Sennheiser Double Mid-Side surround setup, amongst other rigs.

Besides, George and I found we had similar goals: we both intended to release a sound effects library of Southern African ambiences after the residency would end. It was therefore a logical conclusion that we should combine forces and collaborate, and this lead to the creation of two quite different libraries of content recorded during our time there.

A few weeks after returning from Sonic Mmabolela, we released a collection of sounds of one of the Landcruisers that were used to get around the Mmabolela reserve. This was a fun and quick library to put together. Since then, we spent roughly three months working on another collection, a much bigger library consisting of  5.5 hours of savanna ambience recordings, recorded and presented in both stereo and 5.1 surround, entitled Southern African Ambience.

This all leads to the inevitable conclusion: if you are a sound recordist, designer, artist or composer, I can most thoroughly recommend you consider signing up for Sonic Mmabolela yourself. If two weeks of undisturbed recording, productivity and sound-related discussion is not enough to convince you, then I should also mention that every night you’re presented with most excellent food prepared by master chef Neil Lowe. I am not on kickbacks, and I don’t have a discount code. But do yourself a favour, and sign up that form – I strongly doubt you would regret it.

Namibia is a land of extremes: huge empty deserts with glowing red sand dunes and rock formations shaped as if placed by giants, a wild coastline littered with shipwrecks, whale carcasses and immense seal colonies, lakes and salt pans attracting all the wildlife that you’d expect from an African country, and lush green tree and shrub savanna in the Caprivi strip bordering Botswana, Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

Its natural extremities not withstanding, this is a country easily traversed by car, boasting endless straight-lined gravel roads through its vast expanses of nothingness and national parks. Unlike Botswana, a 4×4 vehicle is for many areas not even a necessity, though having one opens up parts of the country that would otherwise be inaccessible. As for our trip specifically, we only needed the 4-wheel drive engaged on a couple of trails in Namib-Naukluft national park.

It is a vast country, spanning a landmass almost as large as that of France and the United Kingdom combined, while home to just a couple of million human inhabitants. There are plenty of wild and remote corners to find. Yet, if like us you travelled here coming from Botswana, then Namibia can somewhat dampen the sense of adventure depending on which parts you decide to visit. Suddenly you come across a fuel station at least once a day, national park administration offices have computer-based registration systems, and if you stick to the rules there are no worries about river crossings and deep sand to get stuck in.

Wildlife does, though to a much smaller extent than Botswana, roam free in Namibia as well, as guide books warn of the dangers of desert elephants when camping close to water sources. But places like the world-famous Etosha national park feel much more like a controlled experience, with its fenced campsites, shops, restaurants, swimming pools and neat gravel roads.

Grumblings of too much comfort and touristy developments aside, Etosha is in some ways deserving of its reputation as one of Africa’s best wildlife viewing places. Its wide open plains allow for an excellent field of vision, but most spectacular are the water holes that you can leisurely visit at night, being merely a short stroll from your camp site or luxury suite. These waterholes are dimly lit and surrounded by seats, safely tucked behind low stone walls and electric fencing, allowing us gaping tourists to watch wildlife go about its nocturnal business undisturbed.

It makes for an experience that is akin to viewing National Geographic documentaries in real-time. Some of our absolute highlights of African wildlife watching happened during these nightly waterhole visits – seeing a cautiously approaching giraffe suddenly being chased by shades in the dark (most likely lions); hyenas skittishly circling wary elephants protecting their young; all and sundry of the African bush appeared to stop by these places every night to provide some entertainment.

The recordings below were made during two separate nights when we visited these waterholes. In both cases, we observed two rhino meeting and greeting each other, an event that goes accompanied by various excited exhales, grunts and surprisingly cute squeaks and squeals. These were recorded at about 50m distance using my handheld Sony D100, resulting in not the cleanest of recordings, but illustrating the moments nice enough nonetheless.

Ultimately, observing and recording wildlife was just part of the reason to visit Namibia, and everything combined I had already spent 2.5 months doing so anyway in both Zimbabwe and Botswana. So from Etosha we continued southwards into the spectacular deserts, passing gravity defying rocky outcrops and otherworldly vegetation while generally finding ourselves blissfully alone – a day could pass easily with hardly coming across another car on the road.

There was however one wildlife spectacle that we were not to miss, the huge colony of cape fur seals based on the stormy shores of Cape Cross. During the breeding season this colony may reach upwards of 200 000 members, though when we visited the numbers were smaller – but large enough by far to produce a great chorus of wailing calls and frightful grunts, and an accompanying aroma that must be experienced rather than described.

Yet there is a great sadness to the context of the sounds that are shared below, and it is somehow fittingly expressed by their whimpers, weeps and growls, seemingly conveying both sorrow and aggression. There is a culling in place in this so-called protected reserve, resulting in thousands of deaths each year by the hands of man, using clubs as their blunt tools to butcher these animals to death.

The incredulous explanation of the Namibian government for this policy is that these seals simply are too numerous, their food consumption resulting in losses to the local fishing industries. Even if we would attempt to consider this explanation as vaguely reasonable, the severity of these damages are disputed, and provide regardless no justification as to why this specimen of a human being is profiting from the cull.

A more uplifting example of a species that lives together in large groups is that of the nifty sociable weaver. These birds are commonly found throughout the southern Kalahari region due to the presence of certain stiff grasses, important materials for their nest construction. And their nests are a feature to behold, often humongous in size, their apparent weight giving the impression of imminent capitulation of the host tree. But it’s not just trees that are are favoured by these skilled little weavers, as many a nest can be seen hanging from telephone poles.

Over a hundred pairs of birds can live within a nest, giving it features similar to an apartment block. Entire generations live together within its catacombs, the young helping out with raising their siblings by doing daily chores of maintaining the internal chambers and finding food. They are a very busy and chatty type of bird indeed, illustrated by this recording that captured a bunch of them frantically contributing to the maintenance and renovations of their nest.

Our last stop, as it were, was South Africa. For me personally it was a fairly bewildering experience to stay for a few days in a city as bustling and large as Cape Town, after having spent over three months almost exclusively in nature with never a lot of people around. And for the context of this website and the purpose of this post, I will keep this section about South Africa relatively brief, as during this part of the trip not many sound recordings were made.

After the three weeks of driving along the coast from the Eastern Cape back towards Johannesburg, the impression that we were left with upon leaving was that we had only just started to see a glimpse of the country. While this is of course always true when your visit is for a mere few weeks, the sheer size of South Africa with its mixture of cultures and its diverse natural beauty makes this perhaps even more strongly so.

I made my only recordings here during a whale watching trip that we took with a few other visitors, on a little rubber boat that sped along at sometimes alarming speeds. This was the first and only time I got to use a hydrophone while in Africa, and the experience left me wanting for more. As soon as we were out on open sea I dropped it into the water, instantly hearing all manner of squeaks, tones and clicks coming from the common dolphins swimming nearby.

The following recording combines three short snippets of these sounds, each playing back at full speed and then followed at roughly half speed straight after. The dolphins produced a lot of ultrasound frequencies that we normally can’t hear. As these recordings were made at 96khz, some of this content was preserved. Therefore the slowed down versions showcase a richer & fuller sound, pitching down all those frequencies to within the limits of our own hearing range.

As touched upon before, this country is nothing if not very diverse. Yet it must be said (and perhaps expected), the conversations we tended to have with locals often expressed fear and anger about the political and sociological issues that plague the nation. In fact quite a few people we spoke to expressed a wish to leave the country, and some (white) South Africans even went as far as explaining, without irony, that things ‘before the change of government’ were better.

But there were plenty of positive attitudes to be found as well, the crown of which must probably go to an entertaining guide that took us for a hike into the Drakensberg mountains.

He relayed stories of his country both funny and brutal, most disturbing of which were those of his first hand experiences with extreme violence. Yet he was probably the liveliest and best humoured man I had come across in a long time. Most tellingly, he emphasised how the people of South Africa have already withstood so much that there surely must be nothing left that can bring this nation down. In the man’s own words, “If South Africans want to pack up and leave the country, then let them go – we don’t need them here!”

Likely, your eye will be drawn to the insane clusters of air traffic that obscure those parts of the map where the United States, Asia and Western Europe lie; the latter being where I generally call home. But go down from Europe to Africa, and we are greeted by space, emptiness, a lovely void of air traffic.

While a few airplanes dot the skies over southern and eastern Africa, seeing this image late 2014 reinforced my will to visit the southern part of the continent, and bring my microphones with me. The never-ending cacaphony of anthropophonic noise in Western Europe, caused by continuous overflying air planes, highway drones and general overpopulation is without a doubt one of my main annoyances – not just as a sound recordist, but as a human being. I crave for a degree of quiet and solitude, for a place that is wilder and more real than the perfectly cut grassy fields and micromanaged spaces that we call ‘natural parks’ in Europe and the UK.

And so I flew down in March 2015, to first spend a couple of months in Zimbabwe, learning about the environment and recording as much wildlife and nature sound as I could, about which I have already quite extensively written & shared recordings of on this site.

After my time there, I flew to Johannesburg in May to meet up with my girlfriend and pick up a rented Toyota Hilux, equipped with all the tools and toys for a few weeks of camping, self-drive game drives and sound recording in the nature of Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.

This map here shows a rough overview of the route we took. And to summarise the itinerary briefly: we started in Johannesburg and then went north into Botswana, where we spent about 2.5 weeks, camping and driving through Makgadikgadi, Nxai Pan, Moremi and Chobe natural parks.

We then headed for a day into Zimbabwe to visit the Victoria Falls, after which we drove for another 2.5 weeks through Namibia, the country of vast empty deserts, huge seal colonies and strangely formed mountains.

From Namibia we headed south to Cape Town where we exchanged the big 4×4 for a tiny 2-wheel drive, and continued alongside the South African coast, dotted with whales and dolphins, and up into the Drakensberg mountains before returning the car in Johannesburg after another three weeks of driving. The overall route we took, encompassing roughly 10.000 km, was therefore traversed in eight weeks.

Since coming back from this trip, a lot of my friends have asked about safety – the general perception being that it must be utterly dangerous to go camping in countries where there are beasts that can eat you. And while I had a degree of hesitation about this as well before flying down, the truth is that with a few basic precautions, which can generally be described as common sense, the actual experience is one of true relaxation and enjoyment of being in a place that still boasts nature as it is supposed to be.

And to me personally, the best aspect of Botswana in particular is how wildlife by and large roams free. The policy of the government seems to be to not build fences around their natural parks (nor the campsites inside these parks), and to not really develop their wilderness areas either. There are no paved roads here inside the reserves, and to be able to take on the deep sand, bumpy tracks and occasional river crossings a 4×4 vehicle is a must.

It makes camping in Botswana a wonderful experience. The cost is relatively astronomical, as international visitors often pay $50 pp per night for a patch of sand with no electricity and only a fire pit, though always with toilets and running water nearby. The upside of this policy is that there aren’t many campsites available, so you don’t come across hordes of tourists – apart from the northern part of Chobe national park. Indeed, we would often spend hours of driving within pristine and rugged nature, observing wildlife in peace and solitude, with not another car in sight.

You set up camp and get visited almost every time by elephants. You keep your distance and always watch out for any warning signals, but these gentle and intelligent mammals are generally at ease, and anyway prefer to avoid you as well – they just can’t resist those tasty camel thorns and mopane shrubs that grow close to where you pitched your tent. At night, the hyenas circle the perimeter of your camp, eyeing you and smelling the meat you are roasting, so you shine your torch into their eyes to keep them at bay. You keep your camp fire going as to further deter any wildlife coming too close – though honey badgers have no problems raiding your camp while you are present anyway. You hear plenty of calls, rustling and movement of close-by animals in the dark, and once you retreat into your tent, listening to the sounds of the night continues to be a real pleasure.

This policy of not fencing off the wilderness areas has lead to a huge presence of elephants in particular. No one knows the exact numbers due to the migratory nature of the herds, but I have heard estimates of a total population of 200.000 – this, in a country that only inhabits 2m humans. And while it does lead to conflicts between man and wildlife, in particular because elephants love gorging on the crops that humans grow (and lions can’t resist a goat or cow from time to time), the Botswana government has a policy of compensating for damages and loss caused by wildlife.

Another reason why the wildlife generally seems to flourish in this country is due to a hardball approach towards poachers; the anti poaching units of Botswana are heavily armed and take no prisoners. While this is good news, there is still an enormous threat facing elephants caused by poaching throughout the continent, and at current rates extinction is a dire and very real possibility. Lions are in danger as well, amongst many other species – not to mention the white and black rhino, which even in Botswana are sadly only present in the few reserves that have fences built for protection.

We travelled this country in May, which I believe is a great time of the year to visit. Just at the cusp of winter (which starts roughly in June), the temperatures are pleasant, and the vegetation still lush and green. It is also just before the high season, ensuring a low number of fellow visitors. The downside perhaps is that the still-thick vegetation makes game viewing harder, in particular when one insists on seeing cats. We have in fact not seen a single lion, leopard or cheetah during our time here. On the upside we have heard lions plenty of times at night, sometimes very close to our camp – to me, a much more spectacular experience than seeing them lazing in the sun. Have a listen to the recording below to get a sense of the awesome power of these cats.

Botswana’s nature is wonderfully diverse as well. While by and large essentially covered by the Kalahari desert, it’s also home to beautiful white salt planes and of course the lushly green, well-watered and world famous Okavango Delta and areas around the Chobe river. These last two in particular are a huge draw for wildlife due to the abundance of water and vegetation. That being said, the Central Kalahari Game Reserve is a proper desert and known to be one of the best, most remote wildlife viewing areas of southern Africa – and a place that unfortunately we have not been able to visit this time. The Kgalagadi and Tuli reserves are two other Kalahari desert areas teeming with wildlife that we are yet to visit.

Here’s a selection of pictures from Botswana to give a general feel of the place, as we experienced it:

And with regards to sound recording, I did a lot of it. In fact I made so many recordings that combined with what I captured in Zimbabwe and Namibia, there’s a total of about 400 hours of material. I am at the point of writing still in the process of going through all that I have recorded and making selections of what I consider the best bits. I intend to release a sound library of this material, aimed at documentary makers and sound editors/designers later this year.

In a previous post about equipment safety in the African bush, I wrote about various ideas to protect my gear while on the road, as I wasn’t going to be able to lug the big and heavy leopard cage around that I used during my stay in Zimbabwe. I didn’t end up needing any of those suggested precautions (chilli powder, thorn bush, rubber snakes) as I decided to only record while in the car, and at night with the microphone rig set up on the roof of the car – with the recorder inside the tent. I figured no hyenas would climb on top of the car, and while baboons might have they roost in their trees at night. We always woke up at or before dawn so I’d take down my equipment before any baboons could get to it.

As for a wider reflection on equipment and recording techniques used, that is maybe something for another post, as I would do quite a few things differently next time.

But for now, here is a playlist of some of my favourite snippets of wildlife sounds recorded during those 2.5 weeks I spent in Botswana.

Part 2, with recordings from Namibia & South Africa, is here.

To recap briefly, the reason why I set off to Zimbabwe for two months was to follow a FGASA course, which was going to train me at lightning speed how to be a safari guide. That course is now done and dusted, I’ve passed, and I can conduct a guided safari/field experience from a vehicle now. But the point here is that as soon as I mentioned my sound recording plans to the course instructor, he immediately and strongly discouraged me to leave my equipment out there in the naive way that I had imagined it was going to work.

My brilliantly thought out plan was: I’ve got a bunch of long and strong cable ties, I will just tie my mics to a tree and job’s a gooden. His immediate answer to that was that baboons will come and check this strange shiny new thing out, and absolutely destroy it within minutes. And if the baboons won’t get to it, then the elephants might. And if not the elephants, then count on the hyenas to run off with your expensive toys. Want to set up and record by the water? A hippo will come and shit all over your mic before it crushes it to bits. So his suggestion was to use a cage, and a strong one at that – a cage to trap leopards with would do the job nicely, and it just so happened that this reserve here owned one of those.

Now, while using a big strong cage is a pretty solid way of ensuring that it’s unlikely that  your precious recording gear will be violated, the one problem it does pose is that it is a very heavy cage indeed. This one was designed to hold a leopard in check, after all. And so the new problem you have now is that you are going to have to be quite an annoying person to other people, because from now on you will require a pick up truck and two people to help you drag the bloody thing to your chosen site of recording.

I proved to be very fortunate as I have throughout my stay here received a tremendous amount of help from the people who work here at Nakavango, and also from various volunteers and fellow students who were kind enough to assist me with moving this piece of metal around to various sites within the reserve. I’ve bribed some of them with beer, and all of them are receiving a very large selection of hopefully enjoyable wildlife recordings from me, but I count myself lucky with the people here.

Great. What if I can’t lug a cage around?

This question is relevant to my interests, because come next week I’m setting off on a two months road trip through various countries of southern Africa, camping in unfenced areas where wildlife roam free, hoping to make more sound recordings. I will certainly not be dragging this cage with me, so what now? While I am going to have to figure it out as we go, I have picked up a few ideas from people as to what might help against certain likely problem animals.

Baboons are terrified of snakes. So much so that they can, allegedly, temporarily be tricked by the rubber toy variant. I have in fact been looking for rubber snakes during the two or three brief resupply visits I’ve made into town whilst here, but so far no luck. So I will be visiting toy stores as and when I can while on the road, looking for my rubber snake to dangle around the mics in hopes of deterring baboons to get too close.

It is a pretty widely known fact that elephants, for reasons not quite understood, have a real distaste for the presence of crushed chilies. Farmers use this trick to try and keep elephants away from their crops. And while some elephants have by now developed a resistance to this and will happily come and barge into farmland protected this way, it is still a trick that is supposedly quite successful. Some farmers have now resorted to playing the sounds of buzzing bees near the edges of their land, as bees are another likely deterrent for elephants. Having live bees is of course going to be even better. But regardless of how successful the bee approach might be, playing the recordings of bees while trying to record something else isn’t quite going to cut it, so I will try my luck with sprinkling dried and crushed chilies around the kit.

Building a natural fence of thorn bushes around the microphones is supposed to be a good way to keep hyenas at a distance. It might perhaps help with baboons as well, though it will in both cases depend on how thick a layer of bush you pack, and so it might prove to be somewhat of a hassle to do every night.

It is unlikely that I will try this particular idea out in the next couple of months, but it’s certainly food for thought for another trip to this continent. It was pointed out to me that you can buy electric fences that are small and light enough to be portable, often used by cattle farmers as temporary fencing to keep their livestock within an area. While I haven’t done a lot of research into the possible products that would work for me, it is supposed to be made of light and thin wire and allegedly powered by a silent battery.

But I have no house here and watching them in the wild is always a guaranteed moment of entertainment. People get excited about the big cats, but all I have seen them do is lie flat on their bellies – the baboons however are jumping around, playing, arguing, posing, barking, pretending and everything else that you would expect from a bunch of monkeys.

And for a sound recordist, they are delightfully vocal. I had set up my mics for a few nights underneath and nearby a group of ana trees, favourited by the baboons to roost in at night for the shape of their branches. Their defensive strategy at night consists of the small and young ones to stay on the far sides of the tree branches, the bigger ones more central. If their arch enemy the leopard decides to climb up the tree to try and have a snack, it will first have to pass the big boys guarding the centre. Baboons have vicious canines the size of a lion’s, and have been known to kill a leopard in a mobbing attack.

The hyena is no natural predator of the baboon for it climbs no trees, but the above recording could be interpreted as the baboons taking a respectful silence as soon as the lonely hyena to the left of the channel starts whooping in search for its family members.

That very same night held another event that caused the roosting baboons some stress, as a big apple leaf tree right next to them spontaneously had one of its stems crash down to the ground.

The social structure of the baboon is known as an oligarchy, a word we in the West usually associate with Russian magnates and oil barons. In the context of baboons, what it means is that a troop is lead by a dominant, aggressive male, who is supported by a small group of less dominant but also aggressive henchmen: a bunch of gangsters supporting their gang leader essentially, harrowing everyone else in the troop. So next time you see the rudeboys in their hoodies on the streets, just think of baboons and have a little chuckle.

Be that as it may, baboons appear to be easily upset and bark the alarm for the slightest thing, based on how regularly we can hear them go off on one of their hissy fits. The above sound recording demonstrates one of those domestic arguments, where something set off the one group roosting in a tree to the left, only for the others, including the ones in the tree under which the mic was positioned, eventually all chipping in and having their say.

And finally, here is a curious recording that took me some time and help from people far more expert than me to figure out what I was listening to. My first thoughts were that it might be some kind of bird having a weird call, but as it turns out it is actually a young baboon having the hiccups. While we don’t know why it was feeling this way, we could wager some guesses. The first would be that it is ill, of course. Another option is that it ate the seeds of a red bushwillow, a very popular tree browsed by many animals, but its seeds are avoided as they apparently can cause the hiccups. Perhaps this young baboon hadn’t learned this lesson yet. And the final, more entertaining but less likely option I can think of is that perhaps this particular one managed to steal a bottle of alcohol during that morning’s raid of the nearby lodge, and took a few sips too many before presumably discarding it.

There is also plenty of sad facts around elephants and the poaching of their tusks for their ivory. And while these are certainly true and worrisome, the irony is that in this part of the continent, southern Africa, the problems with elephants are essentially reversed – they thrive, and as a result there is too many of them. Though the intuitive reaction might be that you can’t ever have too many elephants, the result is that they cause damage to crops, leading to human-wildlife conflict, compounded by problems caused by the ever increasing transport networks and expanding urban zones. In Victoria Falls town for instance, elephants (and other wildlife) can be regularly seen roaming the streets, which makes walking around town at night rather hazardous.

But let’s focus on the good stuff, from a sound recording point of view – the vocalisations they produce, which are plentiful. While I’ve so far not have had the luck to record a lot of close up elephants, I do have amassed a large library of medium distant to distant sounds, some of which are shared on this page. The above recording was made in the middle of the night next to a big lake where I’ve let my equipment roll for multiple nights. Elephants are often present by and nearby this lake, and this night was no exception. Dramatic trumpeting and growling can be heard in the far right of the recording.

The above is a compilation of elephant sounds recorded over the duration of a single night. As the reserve I am staying is fenced & protected by permanent anti poaching units due to the presence of black rhino, the elephants we hear in this recording are a herd that live outside of the reserve, somewhat wedged in between us and the nearby town of Victoria Falls. This may partially explain why this herd often seems so stressed, as it is possible that they have encountered poaching themselves, and have to live in tandem with human civilisation, including a nearby train track, various roads and farmland.

This third sound was captured during another recording session made at the edge of our camp. Its intensity is almost unreal, so much so that it’s hard to believe that it isn’t a sound designed call from a dinosaur or a creature of another age.

During the FGASA course here, we had fairly regular encounters with elephant while in the vehicle. The behaviour on display was different every time, depending on the individual and its mood of the moment. Quite often we ran into young bulls that were roaming around by themselves, as when the males reach their teenage years they eventually get evicted from the herd, generally because with their teenage behaviour and raging hormones they tend to start to annoy the rest of the herd. As most people know, an elephant herd is structured as a matriarchy, meaning that it is led by an old and dominant female, and consists only of other females and their young.

After being evicted the young bulls start roaming and fending for themselves, sometimes temporarily teaming up with an elderly bull to learn the skills of bush survival. And being young teenagers they display exactly the kind of behaviour that you would associate with that age group: showing off, pretending to be tough and strong, but ultimately shy, a bit nervous and quite sweet. It is only this last characteristic that makes them stand apart from human teenagers, I suppose.

The recording above illustrates an encounter with such a teenage bull. When he saw us he turned towards us, flapped his ears a bit, did a few other tough moves, but ultimately walked off. He did eventually turn around again however, and decided to treat us with a warning display – running towards us and tooting through his trunk. Meanwhile our course instructor Mark decided it was a good moment to demonstrate how you can talk to elephants, and told this young one off for its boisterous display. While this likely wouldn’t have an effect on an elephant meaning serious business, in this case the young one stopped in its tracks, turned away, let go off a little blubbering fart (another signature elephant sound) and walked off sheepishly.

The story above would not apply for the big bull in this picture here. This particular one was in musth, a state of sexual arousal that does funny things to an elephant’s frame of mind. The general rule for meeting an elephant in musth is to stay well clear, if you can. The signs are easy to recognise: he will have an endless stream of dribbling urine running down his hind legs, there is liquid being secreted from the glands on the sides of his head, he will smell very very bad, and will often display pretty aggressive or unpredictable behaviour.

This one showed up out of nowhere, about 15 metres in front of the car, and it certainly made for a few tense moments. Fortunately for us, while he was in musth it was relatively calm, and though he made some warning signals towards our direction it eventually decided to simply move off, probably figuring his time would be better spent finding some female members of his species.

The Zimbabwean reserve where I have been staying now for the last two months whilst following the FGASA field guide training, have a  number of black rhino within the boundaries of their fence, which exists for the sole reason of protecting the rhino. No one here likes having a fence around a natural reserve, but there is sadly no choice if you are going to have rhino as a resident species. Besides the fence, other protective measures include 24/7 patrolling of the fence by multiple anti poaching units armed to the teeth, and sawing off rhino horns to make them less attractive to poachers. Removing their horns is yet another necessary evil that no one here is pleased with, but better to have a live than dead rhino with a stump for a horn.

Horns do grow back as they are essentially similar to our finger nails, and thus it is a reoccurring conservation activity here to catch rhino and remove its horn. Recently another rhino capture was held for other reasons. As mentioned before, rhinos fight and do kill each other, or get each other killed indirectly. For instance, last year one of the young bulls was killed by a crocodile because his father had chased him into the river. And now that another young bull was reaching the age of sexual maturity, it had to be captured pre-emptively to avoid its father killing it, something that is sadly likely to happen. So we now have a rhino that is held in a boma within the reserve, letting it adjust to its new situation before a new home will be found for it. This is the unfortunate reality around these animals.

These recordings here illustrate regular activities of black rhino as they silently move through the bush. The first recording at the top of the page is of a mother and calf, walking through the bush on the edge of a lake. You can hear one of them snapping off branches in the left channel at the beginning of the recording. This is an indicative sound of black rhino feeding. My guess is that it was the calf doing this as with black rhino, the calf tends to follow the mother (white rhino do the reverse, likely because they are grazers and thus have their eyes on the ground while feeding – black rhino browse). Black rhino calves also tend to play with sticks and branches, as they usually have no playmate.

In the second recording on this page, we can hear what appear to be a male and female black rhino slowly shuffling along a sandy patch of soil, which is frequented often by big mammals due to its high concentration of sodium and other nutrients. Animals such as rhino, elephant and others practice something that is called geophagia, or ‘eating dirt’ in laymen’s terms. Another popular attraction at this particular site are the mud wallows, used for getting rid of ticks and for cooling down skin. We can hear these two quietly walking around, sniffing at each other, scuffing into the sand, taking a little splash in the mud every now and then, and also urinating into the bush. Somewhere halfway in the recording, one of the two seems to have been startled by the presence of the equipment cage, as there is a very loud and close snort. Rhinos have fantastic hearing, but their eyesight isn’t much to write home about.

The final recording on this page is again a rhino visiting the same site, but this time something about the sand (maybe it got it in its nose or perhaps it tasted off) seems to have slightly upset it as we can hear it spluttering somewhat comically, before it totters off into the distance with its signature hopping and slightly irregular trot.