Title: OKAVANGO., By:
Warne, Kennedy, National Geographic, 00279358, Dec2004, Vol. 206, Issue 6
Database: Academic Search Premier
Contents
THE MIRACLE IS THIS:
THE MIRACLE IS THIS:
Under cloudless skies at the driest time of
The miracle happens in slow motion, for this part of southern
Africa is so fiat that the floodwaters take three months to reach the delta and
four more to traverse its 150-mile length. Yet by the time its force is spent,
the flood has increased the Okavango's wetland area by two or three times,
creating an oasis up to half the size of Lake Erie at the edge of the Kalahari
Desert.
The flood moves on multiple fronts like the columns of an
army. I caught up with it in an area where P. J. Bestelink and his wife,
Barney, run horse safaris. P.J. had tracked the flood's advance to a grassy
plain between two channel systems, the Matsibe and the Xudum. The water glided
across the heat-shimmering landscape like a silver tongue. Up close it was the
color of ginger ale, and it bubbled as it seeped into the dusty hollows and
runnels of the soil. Only a few yards back from the tip, small fish swirled
along in the current -- front-runners of a spawning horde that would soon turn
the floodplains into a fish nursery.
Bull elephants came from the south, blocks of basalt moving
through the tawny grasses. They lumbered toward the widening ribbon of water,
trunks cocked in an S, snuffing the sweet elixir. Standing at the water's edge,
the thirsty animals sucked up trunkfuls and gushed it into their mouths,
spilling barely a drop.
As the seeping floodwater soaked into the thatch of dry
grass stalks, it triggered an awakening of frogs that had been dormant in the
dry conditions. They immediately began calling, some with loud Geiger-counter
clicks, others tinkling like glass bells. P. J. said that catfish too can
survive a temporary dry spell -- by burying themselves in mud. He knew a place
where this happened, a large shallow pan that often dried up in the weeks
before the flood's arrival. We drove to a nearby hunting camp and walked across
a sun-crisped stubble of grass and rushes toward the center of the pan. The
broken shells of aquatic snails lay bleaching on the ground. Openbill storks
had obviously dined well here as the water in the pan evaporated.
"We're too late," said P. J., as we reached the
middle of the pan. The mud had dried up and was littered with catfish
skeletons. Some of these fish would have weighed 20 pounds. Marabou storks,
known as undertaker birds, picked among the bones for scraps of flesh. The
flood was less than a mile away and would soon transform this place into a
broad lagoon, but it had not arrived in time to save the catfish from death by
dehydration. Their blunt skulls, eyeless and desiccated, underscored the
central truth of the delta: Water is life.
From space the Okavango Delta looks like the footprint of a
bird. Water flows into the system through the leg, called the Panhandle, a
strip of land 60 miles long and 9 miles wide along which the Okavango River
meanders in lazy loops. Forward-pointing toes -- six of them -- channel water
through the delta and, ultimately, into the sands of the Kalahari. I set out to
follow this journey of water in flood tide and ebb, above water and below, from
source to sand.
The deltas deepest, most diverse underwater habitats lie in
the Panhandle. The flood peaks here in April, raising the level of the Okavango
River by six feet. In May the level has started to drop. Sediment borne on the
flood wave has settled, and the water in Ncamasere channel, an offshoot of the
main river midway down the Panhandle, becomes clean and clear.
And deadly. The waters of the delta are full of crocodiles.
The Bayei people, one of several Okavango tribes, say as much in a poem they
teach their children: "I am the river. My surface gives you life. Below is
death." For photographer David Doubilet and me, going below the surface
was an essential part of our work. We wanted to see the delta as few had dared
to see it before -- a croc's-eye view. People in passing boats, noticing our
wet suits and scuba gear, didn't hesitate to give their opinion on croc-watching:
They tapped their temples as if to say, you're out of your minds. Perhaps we
were, but it was winter, and we reasoned that because crocodiles are reptiles,
their metabolism would be sluggish. Torpidity was certainly to be hoped for in
a 15-foot reptile with teeth as big as thumbs.
The larger crocodiles spent much of the day basking on the
riverbanks in well-used haul-outs, usually with chutes down which they slid
into the water if disturbed. Some lay with their mouths open, a behavior once
fancifully thought to allow a "cleaner" bird to pick the meat from
between their teeth but now considered an aid to regulating body temperature
and a way of relaxing jaw muscles. In the cool of the night the warmth-loving
crocs came to life for the hunt, floating at the water's edge. Their eyes
gleamed blood-red in our spotlight as we motored up the channel.
Although Nile crocodiles are one of only a handful of
predators that actively hunt humans, I figured that if I initiated an
encounter, thus denying the animal its advantage of surprise, I would retain
the upper hand. And so one night I slipped into the water to observe a six-foot
croc that had submerged as our boat approached. Pulling myself through a tangle
of water lilies, I reached a position directly above the crocodile, then dived
down for a closer look.
Magnificent! The vivid black-on-fawn markings; the two lines
of upraised scutes on the back, merging into the serrated keel of the tail,
jagged as a ripsaw; the gorgeously veined irises of the unblinking eyes; teeth
like a white zipper. I was less than two feet from the animal, and my nervous
system was awash with the adrenaline of the moment.
The crocodile moved. I followed it through the underwater
foliage, playing my torch beam on its squat, muscular legs. Then, with a scythe
of its tail, it sped away into the deep.
Crocodiles are the delta's most feared aquatic predator, but
locals say that hippopotamuses cause more deaths and injuries. Accidental
meetings in narrow channels are often the trigger for an attack. Hippos can
bite a canoe in half with one snap of their jaws, and their teeth can puncture
an aluminum boat as if it were a beer can. The two-ton vegetarians aren't
slowpokes, either. Guy Lobjoit, an Okavango fishing guide, told me he once had
a hippo keep up with him while he was doing nearly 20 miles an hour in his
runabout. "The boat was planing, and this thing was pushing up a bow wave
right next to me" he said. "Gave my ticker a bit of a flutter."
People have been living with the dangers and the bounty of
the delta for at least 100,000 years. The seasonal floodplain, the webbing
between the deltas toes, is a rich part of the Okavango larder. Here the
floodwater forms a lake six inches to a foot deep, dotted with countless
islands. The water brings a flush of plant growth, which in turn attracts
wildlife into these fertile, sun-warmed shallows. The local people make good
use of the molapo, as the floodplain is called. During the flood they fish, and
in the dry season they graze cattle. All year round they harvest fruits, cut
thatching grass and reeds, and hunt game on these productive lands.
At Guma, near the top of the delta, a Bayei man known simply
as Madala, Old One, and a young fishing guide called Fish took me into the
molapo during the flood season to show me something of their way of life.
We journeyed by mokoro, or dugout canoe, the ubiquitous mode
of transport in the delta. The mokoro that Fish poled was made from kiaat, a
teak-like timber, With metal patches covering cracks he called its wounds.
Madala's canoe was fiberglass. He explained that the new synthetic canoes are
more stable than the traditional wooden ones. More sustainable too, as trees
suitable for mokoro-making are a limited resource in the delta.
Poling is a hypnotically beautiful way to travel. Each
thrust of the wooden pole moved the mokoro through beds of reed and sedge that
rustled against the hull. Grasshoppers jumped into the canoe and then jumped
back out again. I trailed my fingers in the warm water and studied the
microcosmos of water striders, backswimmers, whirligig beetles, and frogs no
bigger than a fingernail. Birds called jacanas, or lily-trotters, picked their
way across fields of water lilies, dipping the floating pads beneath the
surface with each long-toed step. The foghorn snort of a hippo warned us to
avoid its channel. A herd of red lechwe, a species of antelope with long hooves
adapted for swamp travel, splashed away at full gallop when we came into view.
As we poked along, stopping here and there at wooded
islands, Fish would point to various plants and describe their properties. The
root of the star apple makes an excellent toothbrush; the bark of the rain tree
can be ground up and thrown into the water to paralyze fish; chewed sickle bush
leaves are good for treating snakebite. Madala cut a tall papyrus stem and
pounded the fleshy white base against his palm to soften it before handing it
to me to eat. It was sweet, fibrous, and refreshing, reminiscent of fresh
coconut. He gave me the rubbery pith of bulrush to try -- Okavango chewing gum,
it's called -- and pulled up water lily fruits for cooking later.
We made camp under the boughs of a sycamore fig. While
Madala set his net in a lagoon thick with water lilies, Fish waded into the
floodplain to spear small fish with a porcupine quill. It's a technique small
boys learn, along with such tricks as sticking a thorn into a poison apple to
make a spinning top. I climbed a baobab tree to collect its maraca-shaped
fruits containing a white pulp that substitutes well for cream of tartar.
Madala mixed it with water to make a tangy sauce.
That night we rolled balls of cornmeal porridge with our
fingers and dipped them in a casserole of freshly caught bream, water lily
fruit, and heart of palm. In the firelight Madala told stories about the Bayei
people: How, for example, they won't eat crocodile meat because crocodiles eat
people. To keep the mosquitoes at bay, Fish lit a football-size lump of
elephant dung, which smoked aromatically for hours.
We heard lions in the distance, and I thought of Laurens van
der Post's observation that the lion's roar "is to silence what the
shooting star is to the dark of the night" The frog chorus rose and fell
(though the effect was spoiled somewhat by a group of French tourists on a
neighboring island singing "Frére Jacques" at the tops of their
voices).
Other than the presence of a few tourists -- and a carton of
long-life milk for our tea -- I suspected that little in this scene had changed
since the first European explorers visited the Okavango over 150 years ago.
One thing that has changed -- and continues to change -- is
the path the water takes through the delta. When David Livingstone made his
first journey to the region, in 1849, much of the flow was down the western
channel system and into Lake Ngami -- a "fine-looking sheet of
water," according to Livingstone. In the 1880s the water flow, responding
to a range of subtle landscape cues, began to favor the eastern channels. The
sluggish western channel became choked with vegetation, and Lake Ngami dried up.
The Batawana people, Botswana's dominant tribe, followed the water, shifting
their main settlement to a lush site on the delta's southern edge. They called
the place Maun, "place of reeds." Today Maun is a town of 45,000,
with barely a reed to be found. Water flow seems to be moving westward once
more, and floods, which follow a natural cycle of higher and lower volumes,
have diminished in size. The result is that Maun -- commercial gateway to the
delta -- has a water shortage. The place of reeds has become a place of dust.
Not surprisingly, when the annual flood does reach Maun
(though there is no guarantee that it will), the whole town celebrates. On a
breathless July day -- the sky the eggshell blue of the Botswana flag, the air
full of the smell of wild sage -- I watched as the flood crept down the broad,
dry bed of the river that runs through town. Children dug furiously with sticks
in the sand to encourage the trickle to run faster. Some leaped back and forth
across the steadily widening stream, laughing for joy. Others just let it run
over their bare feet, looking at it as if it was the first time they had seen
water. "The water is coming" I heard a father explain to his
daughter. "The fish are coming. The water lilies are coming. Life is coming"
On a bank of the river, behind a twig fence that didn't look
as if it could keep out a goat, let alone a cow or a hippo, a man who told me
his name was Flay Million Dube walked around his vegetable plot. With a smile
as broad as the straw hat that shaded his eyes, he told me, "I'm not
working today because I'm so happy." He had just been down to the river to
wash his face and hands in the new water, he said. Tomorrow he would put fresh,
cool mud around his beds of spinach, broccoli, and kings onion. Maybe he would win
a prize in the horticultural show. The water was late, he said, but it had
come, and that was all that mattered.
In a thatch-roofed bar a few hundred yards upstream,
Maunites who had driven out from town sipped sundowners and toasted the flood's
arrival. "The English discuss the weather; we discuss the water," one
told me. "Before it comes, we drink beer and talk about when it will
arrive. When it's here, we drink beer and talk about how much has come. When
it's gone, we just drink beer and feel sad"
~~~~~~~~
By October the time of sadness has come. The flood has
vanished, ten billion tons of water sucked up into the atmosphere whence it
came. People cast thirsty glances at the sky, where glowering thunderclouds
build in the afternoons, but the summer rains are still two months away. The
floodplains dry out, and water levels in the channels and lagoons drop to their
lowest levels.
As the delta shrinks, life retreats. Small fish born in the
floodplains when the water was high withdraw to the permanent channels, and
this influx of flesh triggers an Okavango phenomenon: the catfish run.
Sharp-toothed catfish, locally called barbels, rampage up the channels in a
noisy, pre-breeding snack fest. They thwack the papyrus stalks with their
tails--probably to flush prey fish out of hiding -- and gulp air from the
surface with an explosive popping sound. Their sinuous bodies churn the water
into a thick brown soup.
Maun broils in temperatures of 100 plus. Hot winds sandblast
the town, and the sky becomes white with dust. The tambourine symphony of
cicadas is deafening. Maunites call October suicide month. Even the jaywalking
donkeys look more weary of living than usual.
This is the flip side of the flood: the Okavango in ebb. The
Thamalakane River, where I had witnessed the arrival of the new water three
months earlier, was again bone-dry. Flay Million Dube's garden was bare soil,
not a plant to be seen. No children played in the riverbed. Only a few dust
devils whirled in the heat haze.
Not since the 1960s has the Thamalakane flowed all year
round, delivering water to the delta's outlet, the once mighty Boteti River.
Fifty miles southeast of Mann, at a camp called Meno A Kwena -- "tooth of
the crocodile" -- I climbed a hundred feet down the Boteti's crumbling banks
to its broad, cracked bed. It was like visiting Ezekiel's valley of dry bones.
Strewn about were carcasses of zebras and wildebeest, their sun-blackened skin
stretched tight over bone, jaws frozen in a last gasp. These animals, following
a genetically imprinted map, had come to this place expecting to drink, but had
found a dry riverbed instead. Today all that remains of the Boteti at Meno A
Kwena is groundwater, the legacy of floods past. Larger animals can dig for it,
but with each successive year of low flood volumes the water table drops a
little farther out of reach.
David Dugmore, who runs the camp, has made it a personal
mission to provide water for at least some of the thirsty animals -- which he
does by pumping groundwater to fill a small water hole. But he can't afford to
keep the pump running continuously, and his is only one small relief station in
a vast arid landscape, so animals continue to die. Maintaining the supply line
is also a problem, he told me, pointing to lion tooth marks in the black
plastic pipe that runs from pump to pool. "The lions are so desperate for
water they bite into the pipe, working their way along until they reach the
water hole"
An hour's drive down sandy tracks brought us to another
poignant sight: a pod of hippopotamuses stranded in a syrupy pond. There was no
water for miles upriver or down, so the hippos were marooned. There was little
grazing to be had in this place of thorn trees and sand, and it was with relief
that we saw a wildlife ranger drive up and unload half a dozen hay bales, which
he cut open and spread beside the pool. The hippos trotted out of the water and
began to munch. Were it not for their daily handout, they would starve.
I wondered how long it would take for this pool to go the
way of the catfish graveyard P. J. Bestelink had shown me. And what does it say
about the delta that once healthy rivers are drying up? Is climate change
casting its long shadow over the miracle delta?
Apparently not, according to hydrologists and climate
researchers, who have detected an 18-year oscillation in rainfall in the region
and an 80-year cycle of high and low flood volumes. We're reaching the end of
the 40-year low part of the cycle, they say, and should see larger floods in
the future, peaking in mid-century. Rainfall should also increase over the next
few years.
River and rain contribute in roughly equal measure to the
deltas water budget. The summer rains have the function of recharging the
groundwater aquifer -- of priming the system in anticipation of the flood. If
the rains are good, little floodwater is needed to bring the water table to the
surface, and the bulk of the inflowing water then spills into the seasonal
floodplains, Creating a large flooded area. If the rains are poor, much of the
floodwater soaks into the ground, filling the gap left by lack of rain, and the
area of inundation is reduced.
The waxing and waning of water volumes in the Okavango is an
expression of natural variability in the system -- as organic as breathing.
Indeed, Terence McCarthy, a professor in the School of Geosciences at the University
of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg, speaks of the delta as a living
organism, with a circulatory system in which the water channels function as
arteries and capillaries.
McCarthy and his colleagues, who have been studying the
delta since 1985, have discovered that one of the largest contributions to the
life of the delta is made by one of its smallest inhabitants: termites.
Termites are a lot more than pasty white bugs that gnaw on dead plants and
manage subterranean fungus farms. Their colonies are giant construction
companies that have transformed the Okavango Delta from a piece of fiat real
estate into a mosaic of an estimated 150,000 islands.
It all stems from the termites' need for air-conditioning.
Some species build above-ground air vents to control the temperature in their
networks of galleries and tunnels. These turrets, sometimes ten feet high, and
their surrounding earthworks are above flood level, providing dry, fertile
sites on which trees can become established.
Trees can be thought of as kidneys of the delta, cleansing
the system by removing its salts. They do this by sucking water out of the
ground and pumping it into the atmosphere by transpiration. In the process,
soluble salts are deposited around the tree roots -- a "toxic waste
storage system" McCarthy calls it. Without the delta's millions of tree
pumps (enabled courtesy of Termites Inc.), the 400,000 tons of salts carried in
yearly by the Okavango River would be precipitated across the surface of the
land, poisoning the delta. By concentrating salts in the soil and groundwater
beneath them, trees not only keep the water in the delta fresh but also expand
the size of their island platforms. Thus what the termites start, the trees
continue, engineering not just a landscape but an entire ecosystem.
Just as termite mounds are nuclei around which islands form,
hippo paths are the precursors of water channels. Most channels in the delta
have a life expectancy of about a hundred years. During that time sandy
sediment gradually raises the height of the channel bed, slowing the current
and allowing the fringing stands of papyrus (which are not rooted in soil but
linked together in floating mats) to spread into the channel. Clumps of papyrus
eventually break off and jam the channel until, like a clogged artery, it
becomes completely blocked.
At this point the hippos come to the aid of the deltas
circulatory system, breaking through papyrus jams and forming new channel
connections. It is only because the delta is so flat (a gradient of about a
hundredth of a degree) that water follows such randomly created corridors. The
path of least resistance turns out to be the path the hippos have trod.
Termites, hippos, and papyrus -- these three biological
influences are part of a system as intricate and responsive as any on Earth.
Yet the delta is not immune to human disturbance, even to eventual destruction.
The chief threats lie upstream, in the two countries with which Botswana shares
the inflowing water. Angola and Namibia both experienced long, brutal wars in
the latter part of the 20th century and now look to rivers to help build their
economies. Two aspects of development, the increased use of agricultural
fertilizers on riverine land and the production of hydroelectricity, could have
disastrous downstream effects on the delta. While neither threat is imminent,
their potential impact on so finely balanced an ecosystem has many people
worried.
"Fertilizer!" Map Ives, environmental manager for
a large Okavango tourism company, spat out the word distastefully. "It's a
word I dislike more than any other. Fertilizers have a horrible habit of
leaching into waterways. If a lot of phosphate gets into the Okavango River,
the papyrus is going to go wild."
Papyrus can thrive in nutrient-poor conditions. Enrichment
of the delta through fertilizer runoff from irrigated farmland upstream could
cause rampant growth of papyrus and lead to wholesale channel blockage.
"If the Panhandle becomes blocked," said Ives, "it's good night
Okavango Delta."
Damming the rivers that supply the delta would be equally
catastrophic. Namibia's national power utility, NamPower, is studying the
feasibility of generating electricity at Popa Falls, just 30 miles upstream of
the Panhandle. The scheme is opposed by scientists such as Terence McCarthy,
who points out that dams deprive rivers of sediment and that sediment is vital
to the functioning of the delta. More than 200,000 tons of it is deposited in
the deltas upper reaches each year, raising the channel beds and starting the
process of channel switching by which the Okavango renews itself. Without an
annual injection of sand, channels would be scoured out instead of built up,
becoming ever deeper and swifter. Sandbars, which are breeding sites for
threatened birds such as the African skimmer, would disappear. Channel
switching would cease. Like limbs that have lost their blood supply, whole
sections of the delta would be lost.
In 1996, in recognition of its value as one of the last
pristine river systems in Africa -- and in the world -- Botswana registered the
Okavango Delta as a wetland of international importance under the Ramsar
Convention, an intergovernmental treaty binding signatories to the conservation
and wise use of wetlands. But most of the Okavango River lies in Angola and
Namibia, where it enjoys no special protection. Safeguarding a wetland but not
its water supply is like protecting an endangered species but not its food
source.
Botswana has strong economic as well as political reasons
for wanting to keep the delta pristine: Okavango tourism is second only to
diamond mining as a foreign-exchange earner. The delta is a golden egg, but
Botswana neither feeds nor owns the goose.
A decade ago the three governments formed a commission to
oversee the management of the Okavango basin, but how the pursuit of disparate
national interests will play out is anybody's guess. Some observers have
suggested that Botswana could compensate Angola and Namibia for limiting, or
even abandoning, projects such as hydro schemes that would have a negative
impact on the delta. However, such a level of cooperation would be rare in
global politics.
When David Livingstone asked the Bayei people to explain the
phenomenon of the Okavango flood, they told him that every year a chief who
lived to the north -- Mazzekiva by name -- killed a man and threw his body into
the river, after which the water would flow. Livingstone never investigated the
claim, but a century and a half after he posed his question to the Bayei, I
stood on a bullet-pocked concrete bridge in the Angolan highlands and watched
boys fishing in the headwaters of the Rio Cubango, one of the two main
tributaries that feed the Okavango River. I wondered how many bodies --
sacrifices not to water but to battle -- had been thrown into this river during
Angola's 27-year civil war, which had only recently ended.
I was near the town of Sambo, in the verdant grazing country
of the Bie Plateau. It was November, and the summer rains were starting. The
landowner, Celestino Jolomba, pointed to two military vehicles rusting under a
eucalyptus tree. They had belonged to Jonas Savimbi, he said. Savimbi had been
the head of UNITA, the antigovernment faction in the bloodshed.
Driving here, I had passed gangs of workmen daubing white
and red paint on stones along the roadside to warn of land mines. Millions of
mines remain in Angola, reaping their bitter harvest of limbs and lives. In
this place of death it was strange to think that the water flowing beneath me
was bringing life to a distant delta. But it was: In a few weeks the flood
would start to rise in the Panhandle. Relief would come to the Okavango's
parched plains. The miracle would begin again.
ADRENALINE RUSH Give yourself a eye view of the delta's
deadly dangers and stunning beauty in Sights & Sounds. Then find out what
the assignment was like for the author photographer at
nationalgeographic.com/magazine/0412.
MAP: FED BY LOCAL RAINS in the southern summer, the Okavango
River swells in winter with a huge pulse of water from Angola, flooding one of
the largest inland deltas on Earth -- an alluvial fan of more than 10,000
square miles. The flooded area varies widely year to year and season to season,
creating a shifting landscape of channels and islands that sustain a rich
diversity of life.
MAP: SUMMER, January average, 1985-2000
MAP: WINTER, August average, 1985-2000
PHOTO (COLOR): SUSPENDED IN AN ETHEREAL REALM of lilies,
water, and light, a river Bushman, pole in hand, peers into the emerald forest
of Botswana's Okavango River. As if by magic it ebbs and flows with seasonal
floods before vanishing in the Kalahari Desert. The result: an oasis for wild
things above and below the surface.
PHOTO (COLOR): IN THE FISH - EAT - FISH WORLD of the
Okavango's deeper channels lurks the toothy tigerfish, a distant cousin of the
piranha. An aggressive predator, the tigerfish will even eat small mammals and
birds
PHOTO (COLOR): AFRICAN BUFFALO wade through the shallows of
the Okavago Delta, a wetland that spreads across northern Botswana.
PHOTO (COLOR): From its source in the highlands, the
Okavango River snakes through the Panhandle, lined by dense thickets of
permanent papyrus swamp.
PHOTO (COLOR): FOLLOWING THE WATER, hundreds of African
buffalo graze in the lower delta during the flood. Herds here reach into the
thousands, their numbers regulated more by grass than predators.
PHOTO (COLOR): NIGHTTIME IN THE LILY GARDEN brings a host of
species to life, including the quicksilver streaks of juvenile silver robbers
(opposite) swirling beneath the pads.
PHOTO (COLOR): A catfish hides in lily detritus along the
bottom by day. At night, some catfish species swim inverted on the surface
hunting for insects to munch. Spangled with bubbles of air, a day water lily
sinks underwater, perhaps pulled by a bit of flotsam flowing in the current or
by its own stem, which begins to contract after pollination.
PHOTO (COLOR): HEFT DISSOLVES into near weightlessness as an
eight-year-old female elephant, known as Kitimetse II, strolls, digs, kneels,
and rests in a deep watering hole in the Okavango. She is part of a small herd
of elephants that take tourists on luxury safaris through the delta. "It's
tantamount to watching kids play," her trainer, Randall J. Moore, sags of
their pool time. "They roughhouse with each other. It's a way to work out
aggression." Kitimetse's wild counterparts are a big draw. More than
30,000 elephants roam the Okavango, where they can sometimes be seen jamming
their tusks into the sandy ground. It's a way to let off steam which also
scrubs dirty tusks.
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PHOTO (COLOR): SHARP SPINES AND POISONOUS MUCUS are the
first lines of defense for silver catfish, which at times are so thick in the
channels that local people can catch them in the traditional manner with
baskets.
PHOTO (COLOR): A young jacana flees by diving under the lily
pads with only its beak protruding for air. The bird's splaying feet, with
their greatly elongated toes and claws, enable it to walk where others can't
easily tread, earning it the nickname "lily-trotter."
PHOTO (COLOR): IN THE CROCODILE'S LAIR, photographer
Jennifer Hayes explores caverns formed by floating mats of papyrus in the deep
waters of the Ncamasere channel in the Panhandle.
PHOTO (COLOR): Croc tracks were everywhere, says guide Brad
Bestelink (below), examining the remains of a big male sitatunga. Bestelink
pioneered diving in the Okavango's clear, croc-infested waters, counting on
cool winter temperatures to keep the reptiles lethargic. "Any other
time," he says, "we'd be lunch."
PHOTO (COLOR): WARY OF STRANGERS, a young Nile crocodile
makes for the cover of darkness in the Ncamasere channel -- the element of
surprise belonging for once to the diver.
PHOTO (COLOR): WAITING TO POUNCE, a predaceous diving beetle
shines green in the aqueous light. A voracious hunter of tadpoles and small
fish, the silver-dollar-size beetle is part of the Okavango's aquatic tapestry
of insects.
PHOTO (COLOR): Encased in a silvery skin of air, the female
damselfly is equally at home underwater, using her sharp ovipositor to inject
eggs into a lily stem. Like the legendary first Bushman, her young will be born
on a water lily plant.
PHOTO (COLOR): REFLECTION OF AFRICA, an elephant trumpets
above Okavango's looking-glass waters.
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By Kennedy Warne
Photographs by David Doubilet