ZECO TRAVEL TALK

Home! Well at least for me, as I live just over an hour away in Ebetsu. As we neared the Japanese coastline, my phone service kicked in and I was able to call home and check that my partner, Mayumi, was on her way to the harbor and carrying her kimono in readiness for the final dinner on board. That, however, was to be several hours away. In the meantime, after our morning at sea and our Japanese clearance procedures had been completed, we all set off ashore. Most were bound for Otaru City—just a stone’s throw from the dock, with visits to the famous local glass studio, which reached its original hey-day through the production of glass for glass oil lamps and for floats used in the local herring fishery, and to the Aoyama Bettei villa to learn more of the fishery. Meanwhile, a pair of taxis arrived to whisk the birders off to a lovely local valley. Mayumi and I regularly hike to Mt Haruka, a mountain just west of Otaru, so I had chosen the lower reaches of that trail as the site that the birders should head for on our last birding foray of a fantastic trip. Read more

The roars of the male fur seals would occasionally cease just long enough that we could hear the squeals of the tiny month-old pups. Scattered across the black lava rocks, many of these young seal pups were eagerly awaiting the return of their mothers, who were currently currently off on feeding trips. While the pups waited, the enormous adult males (which are 35% longer and more than 4.5 times heavier than the females) each defended their beachfront territory from other males, in the hope that only they would have access to the females on their turf. This morning, we had arrived at one of the world’s great wildlife spectacles: a northern fur seal rookery in the Bering Sea’s remote Pribilof Islands.

Equally impressive was a visit to a tundra-covered bluff overlooking a steep cliff that was dotted with nesting seabirds of several different species. Puffins, murres, and three species of auklets found this vertical environment a safe haven for raising their young, no easy task on an island with an extremely healthy Arctic fox population. We looked down upon black-legged kittiwakes, gliding gracefully along the cliff face while coming and going from their nests. But the highlight of it all had to be spotting the coral-red legs of the red-legged kittiwake, perched on a ledge high over the sea. This species breeds only on four island groups, all of which are located in the Bering Sea.

We came to Geographic Harbor in Katmai National Park hoping to see some bears. It’s always a bit nerve-wracking for staff members; expectations are high, cameras are primed, and the bears are beyond our control. There were a few things in our favor: we had a falling minus tide, which is ideal; the low tide was in the morning, when bears are most active; and the salmon runs are late this year, making the bears more dependent on the clams they can dig from the beach at low tide. Still, there was some staff nail-biting going on.

We needn’t have worried. The morning was a bear extravaganza. None of the boats that stayed out for the full 3-hour cruise saw less than 20 bears. All of us saw cubs, big males, behaviors, interactions, and a whole lot of clam-digging—a feeding method unique to grizzly bears in this part of the world. And all of it happened right in front of us, within a few feet of the zodiacs. Katmai is like a magical place where all the usual violent and fearful rules of bear-human interactions have been repealed. Geographic Harbor had delivered for us again.

While the mountain gorillas are always a highlight of our Uganda expeditions, below is excerpt from the Welcome Home Letter about some of the other exceptional wildlife seen on our April 2010 safari.

A second cruise towards the Nile’s delta on Lake Albert was the following morning’s plan, in search of that most sought-after of Uganda’s birds, the bizarre shoebill. Dueling hippos and defassa waterbuck punctuated our journey, until a distinctive grey silhouette was spotted from the roof of our boat. Disembarking on a midstream island, we crept slowly closer until we were afforded incredible views of this spectacular creature, the quintessential symbol of remote papyrus wildernesses, its massive bill easily visible in the telescope. Our afternoon game drive along the tracks north of the Nile was nothing short of sublime, with the borassus palm savanna literally teeming with African buffalo, Jackson’s hartebeest, oribi, bohor reedbuck (Uganda’s national animal), the elegant Uganda kob, and a herd of the handsome Rothschild’s giraffe grazing the treetops. Read more

Our first Uganda trip of 2010 was a resounding success! In order, we had spectacular cruises on the Nile, with highlights being close, scoped shoebill and huge numbers of ellies, hippos and crocs; and an amazing game drive north of the Nile, with our first lions, thousands of migrating storks, raptors and swallows, and massive numbers of ungulates enjoying the fresh grazing that followed the summer rains. Kibale’s chimp-tracking was perfect, with chimps of various ages observed at close range, including one old guy who posed for eye-level photos for ages, plus killer views of grooming red-tailed monkeys, foraging grey-cheeked mangabeys, and black-and-white colobus. The Bigodi swamp walk almost exceeded Kibale’s primates, with red colobus absurdly close and a group of the rare L’Hoest’s monkeys. Down to Queen Elizabeth Nation Park, with a large pride of lions out on our first afternoon, and mating lions and giant forest hogs the next day. The Kazinga Channel cruise was a highlight for many, with bathing ellies, vast numbers of Palaearctic migrants, 100+ waterbird species, and many hippos with very tiny babies. Further south to Ishasha, along a road absolutely smothered in butterflies, with huge herds of buffalos and a pair of the famous tree-climbing lions, up a tree. But let’s face it, all this would be forgotten if we missed the gorillas… Read more

Legadima, a Setswana word meaning “lightning,” is the name of a five-year-old adult female leopard that lives at Mombo in the Okavango Delta in northern Botswana. Guides and visitors have been watching her since she was a tiny little cub less than two weeks old. She is the subject of a documentary film and a photographic book called Eye of the Leopard, both of which document her life in intimate detail.

She recently successfully raised her first litter of cubs, two young females, now two-years-old, named Marung (“cloud”) and Pula (“rain”). With the independence of these cubs the guides at Mombo began to wonder when the next litter of cubs would be born. Every time Legadima was located the guides would study her carefully: Was she pregnant? Was she maybe moving towards a den site? Was she lactating? Read more

It’s not every day you have the chance to be the first expedition group to see a bird… EVER! One such opportunity presented itself as we arrived in the Togian Islands, a remote archipelago scattered across the gaping expanse of eastern Sulawesi’s Tomini Gulf, on our inaugural Best of Indonesia expedition.

In April 2008, a team of Indonesian researchers, in collaboration with Dr. Pamela Rasmussen of the University of Michigan, had described a small, yellow songbird from the Togians as a species entirely new to science. Named the Togian white-eye, or zosterops somadikartai, after one of Indonesia’s pre-eminent biologists, this diminutive creature’s global range is restricted to just three of the larger islands in the Togian group, where it occurs in small numbers in native forest habitats. Clearly closely related to a more widespread species occurring on adjacent parts of the Sulawesi mainland, the Togian white-eye is unusual amongst the world’s 100 or so species of white-eyes in that it lacks the large, white eye-ring that gives the family their name.

As renowned for its inaccessibility as for the richness of its coral reefs, the Togians lie well off the track of backpackers and expedition vessels alike and, as we pulled into our anchorage south of Malenge Island, the excitement in both passengers and expedition team was palpable. A nocturnal scouting party found friendly locals, who confirmed our suspicion that we were the first expedition vessel ever to visit the islands, and agreed to act as guides for our “White-eye Quest” the following morning.

A small band of stalwarts set off pre-dawn, picking their way inland through plantations of coconut and cacao towards the forested, limestone ridges behind. It soon became apparent why the white-eye had eluded discovery so long: they are neither numerous, nor conspicuous. Other avian attractions proved more co-operative, one standout highlight being a steady procession of hornbills, parrots, fruit-doves, and pigeons attracted to a large wild fig tree in fruit. Finally, just as the heat of the day grew intense and the cicadas started to whine, we detected the tell-tale, trilling song of a white-eye and it wasn’t long before a small party of the birds flitted into view… and we became the first expedition group to see the white-eye without the white eye.

For those of you who have traveled with me before, I sincerely hope that you enjoyed seeing our little bit of Africa at a very different time of year—the Mombo and DumaTau brought back some happy memories and, of course, created new ones. The lush landscapes, the flowers, the beautiful cumulonimbus clouds contributing to some stunning sunsets, and the baby animals were all differences from a trip in the dry season.

This trip wasn’t purely a natural history trip and I hope that you enjoyed meeting the Nama people with their wonderful “click” language, the beautiful Himba who are able to survive in unbelievably harsh conditions, and of course the happy smiling faces of the Kunda people of Mfuwe in Zambia. Read more