When Jeff and I were planning our trip to Africa in 2008, we searched hundreds of safari Web sites, and corresponded with perhaps 100 tour operators, some in person here in Vancouver, and began to suspect what I wrote above about tours. All of them advertised the “Big 5”. In Ernest Hemingway's day, when he wrote ”The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, these were the 5 most dangerous game animals to the hunter: lions, cape buffalo, white rhinoceros (black is more dangerous, but were nearly extinct by then), leopard, and elephant.
When non-hunting tourism began to take hold, the tour operators co-opted this phrase, implying that if you saw these 5 wildlife species, you had seen Africa.
Preamble
After some time with our guide, Lucky Garenamotse (www.luckyafricasafaris.com), and cook, Moses, on our private safari (which actually cost less than the all-inclusive tours), we discovered that the guides and other tour staff uniformly deride this “Big 5” notion. Our guide, when he understood that Jeff and I felt likewise, played a game: he began to show us the “Little 5” (one was a mouse) and the “Ugly 5” (for example, the Jaribou Stork).
The Story
After I’d been in Africa about 4 ½ weeks (3 with Hannah) and Jeff 1 ½ weeks, and had seen 24 species just in the family Bovidae (the antelopes and buffalo), 2 species of zebra, 2 of giraffe, 2 of rhinoceros, hundreds of hippopotamus including one that ran through our camp between our tents, plus nearly every other big game animal in southern Africa, not to mention almost all of the medium-sizes and large carnivores (bat-eared fox, 6 species of mongoose, 2 kinds of civets, spotted hyena--had actually looked up from my sleeping bag on the ground into the eyes of a hyena looking down at me--hunting dogs, leopards, and lions), and counted 344 species of bird; and had leapt aside as hyenas actually chased impalas between our tents, we came to the resort down of Kasane on the Zambezi River. This is just above Victoria Falls in Zambia, where tourists fly in on 3- or 5-day tours, see the falls, and then take a day’s detour so they can say they were in Botswana. Jeff and I went into the biggest resort for coffee while Lucky and Moses tinkered with the Land Rover and refilled our fuel and food supplies. On the verandah overlooking the Zambezi River, I put up my ‘scope and found an African Finfoot, a rare grebe-like bird with no relatives on Earth (except for the Asian Finfoot) and that that only occurs in Botswana at this one spot. Jeff and I were thrilled, as we wouldn’t get another chance. As we were turning to re-join Lucky and Moses, we encountered a young woman in safari tour-leader garb, with “Naturalist” on her name patch, who asked us if we had “got lucky” that morning. Not knowing what she meant, Jeff mentioned the Finfoot as being quite a prize. Then it was her turn to look perplexed. She had no idea what a Finfoot was. Finally we understood that she had been enquiring whether we had been lucky enough to see a hippopotamus on the morning’s boat ride!
The Epilogue
For the rest of the trip, when Jeff or I saw a new species, the other would say, “Got lucky there!”
The Sequel
Jeff and I are thinking about a trip to Borneo. Reading the tour operators' and lodge literature, it seems that people only go there to see orang-utans, which Jeff and I have labeled "The Big One." Worth seeing, to be sure, but Jeff and I agreed that we could be happy not seeing captive orang-utans being fed bananahs in rehabilitation centres. We've seen them in zoos, after all. If I (a primatologist, partly) miss them in the wild, but see a reasonable diversity of gibbons, leaf monkeys and perhaps a tarsier or two, and if Jeff adds 200 or 300 birds to his life list, we can live without seeing The Big One.
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