LIONESS KILLS WART HOG, WE DISRUPT KILL
By Bob Van Leer

  (MBARARA, UGANDA, EAST AFRICA, Oct. 29,1993) - Today was spent observing what Africa is famous for - wildlife. There is an incredible diversity here. We started the morning at 6:30 a.m. from the Mweya Lodge for an early morning game drive through the Queen Elizabeth National Park. Just away from the lodge we saw our first hippopotamus. We had always associated these large animals with water. But here it was on top of a ridge several hundred feet high and a mile or two from Lake Edward. Our guide, James Bakeine from Nile Safaris, said hippos can travel 60 miles from water. The park was created in 1952 and covers an area of nearly 200 square miles. It stretches from the foothills of the Rwenzori Range, Ptolemy's legendary Mountains of the Moon, about 80 kilometers southwards to the Ishasha River. 

  The land was available for a park because it became uninhabitable for humans for a series of reasons starting a century ago. According to a brochure from Uganda National Parks, "About one hundred years ago, this area was inhabited by cattle keepers, the lake shores by fishermen and farmers. "In 1891, the deadly plague of rinderpest swept over this country. Most of the cattle and many wild ungulates died. Presumably this was the time when the giraffe was wiped out of this area. 'With both cattle and game reduced in numbers, hungry lions took to man eating. This tended to drive people away from their former cattle areas.

  "Where previously the grasslands had been well grazed by both cattle and wild ungulates, bush and thicket moved in. Tsetse fly, the carrier of the dreadful sleeping sickness and of 'nagana', a killer disease of cattle, spread over the country. "By 1912 the area was totally infested, and thousands of people and cattle died. The only solution was to remove the population from the infected area. These depopulated areas or 'restricted areas' became between 1925 and 1947 'game reserves' and were eventually combined to form in 1952 the Queen Elizabeth National Park." During political upheavals, poaching on a big scale started and reached its peak during the 1979 liberation war.

   The big game has been reduced to a fraction of its former number - but this is still a large amount. In our morning drive we saw buffalo, water buck, Uganda kob, wart hogs and a variety of birds, large and small. Uganda kob, an antelope about the size of a deer, is the most numerous wild game we have seen. In a 24 hour period we have seen, literally, thousands of them. We have also seen hundreds of buffalo, a huge animal larger than a cow, and some have nasty dispositions. The stars of the morning drive were finding four lions, a lioness and three cubs, who had killed a warthog for breakfast.

  We returned to the lodge for breakfast and then went on a boat tour of the Kazinga Channel, which connects Lake Edward and the smaller Lake George. The boat ride was an event which exceeded expectations. This has to be bird watcher's heaven. There are birds in and around the channel by the countless thousands. These ranged from the very large yellow-billed stork and saddlebilled storks down to the pigmy kingfisher. Other birds we were able to identify included fish eagles, frankolin partridge and guinea hens. A flock of terns lives with our boat. Our guide said the terns follow the boat because it stirs up the water bringing food for the terns to the surface.

  But the largest wildlife in the channel is hippopotami. We saw these huge beasts in numbers at least in the hundreds, perhaps more. We were told they eat 50 kilograms, over 100 pounds, of grass per day and a big male can weigh 2.5 - 3 tons. Monitors live along the banks of the channel. These are lizards we saw up to three feet long. At store selling drums we visited yesterday we noticed some of them had drumheads of monitor lizard leather. After the morning of wildlife watching, we left the reserve and drove to Kasese in the Rwenzori Mountains for lunch. We had, for the third time, an uncommonly good fish called tilipia caught from the lakes. It is not a large fish, about the size of a large surf perch, but is excellent eating.

  We stopped at the market in Kasese after lunch and bought a few things. The city is about the size of Brookings, but only the main highway through it is paved. The side streets do not have even a gravel surface. At each end of the towns we passed through on the main highway, there are speed bumps. You would speed over them only once. When we drove back to Mbarara in the early evening the main road was alive with people. The highway is excellent, built by the Chinese after Hungarians failed at the job. Tomorrow will be the last full day of our stay in Uganda and will be a big one. We will have audiences with both the president and vice president of Uganda.