Sausage Tree Safari Camp by night...
Find out the things that go bump, or otherwise, when the lights go off...
Make no mistake about it, the human guests at Sausage Tree Safari Camp - or any lodge for that matter - are not the only visitors! Under cover of darkness a whole new guestlist is revealed as a variety of nocturnal creatures move through and around camp, going about their nightly business.
The beauty of staying in a tented camp like ours is that come nightfall you get to hear the incredible cacophany of sounds that make the African bush so mesmerising. There's nothing to beat hearing lion and leopard calling, or the eerie "whoop" of the spotted hyena and the high pitched bark of the jackal while laying in your bed.
So what's out there, in the darkness, moving around while you are asleep? Sausage Tree Safari Camp manager Eswe Ras asked himself this question when he kept finding evidence of night-time guests at his house close to camp, and no small amount of damage to his garden. So he put up a camera trap to find out who the culprits were and the images have shown him that once the lights are out, there's a veritable party going on outside!
"There's been a camera trap at our waterhole in front of the camp for many years," says Eswe. "We've seen amazing things on the waterhole camera, from African wild cat with kittens to hippo and everything in between, but I wondered what was going on at my house and guide Matthew Sussens' house which is immediately next to mine," he adds.
The camera's roll of honour includes the usual suspects like civet, genet and porcupine, and has also captured elephant and honey badgers inside and around the outskirts of the camp. While the results may not be too surprising, the regularity of the visitors and what they get up to has been a revelation.
"Every morning if you walk around camp before the guests are awake you will find the tracks of civet, genet and porcupine," says guide Matthew. "Now we have honey badgers making regular visits to camp," he says, adding that one miscreant badger even bumped into the glass door of a guest's outside shower door while said guest was in the bathroom!
The camera trap shots are shared each day with guests at the camp, a lot of whom have no idea about these amazing little creatures of the night.
"Because we hardly ever see these animals out on a game drives, a lot of guests have no idea what they are or how fascinating these nocturnal animals can be," says Matthew. "So showing them who's in camp while they are dreaming is very exciting for them, and makes them appreciate the wilderness that much more and understand that it's about more than just the Big Five," he adds.
Eswe guessed that the honey badgers were doing most of the digging and causing the majority of the damage to his garden, but the camera has shown him that the holes he is finding every morning are, in fact, being made by porcupines. "They are steadily eating their way through my plants," he sighs.
While honey badgers are renowned for being extraordinarily difficult to manage in some safari camps and lodges, going to enormous lengths to get access to kitchens and rubbish bins or waste sites, the badgers at Sausage Tree Safari Camp seem to be a bit more low key and have not yet tried to chew or claw their way through the kitchen door.
"They seem a lot more skittish here in camp," says Eswe. "They'll take advantage of an open door or window, for sure, but so far are still wary of the human presence here," he says, adding that it's a huge relief for staff in camp that the badgers are not, well, badgering them. Given their penchant for being very grumpy and tenacious beyond belief, Eswe and his team are happy the badgers are thus far behaving themselves. "They're just incredible little creatures, and we love them dearly, from a distance!"
