Did you know that mammal watching is now a thing in the world? Not the safari kind we’re so privileged to have as part of growing up in South Africa, but the cousin of bird watching with lists and databases and counts and tours.
I love birds, but I’m not technically a twitcher that’s accumulating species on my life list. I haven’t seen even 1000 of the 11 000 bird species that we have on the globe. Maybe one day.
But, this mammal watching thing is another exciting discovery for me. There are around 6 000 mammal species on earth. Lots of them are hundreds of different rodents and bats, but many of the big ones are more well-known.
I’ve always loved our trips to game reserves. It’s the one thing I sorely missed when we lived in South Korea for a few years. Aside from the magpies that supposedly eat children’s teeth (apparently, the tooth mouse doesn’t know where Korea is), there wasn’t much going on in the way of wildlife in South Korea. Very few birds. One dead snake. And a lot fewer insects than I’m used to seeing at home, too. It felt a little sterile at times, and not in a good way.
When we came home to South Africa, it was like a warm hug, filled with hadeda and trumpeter hornbill cries, screeching francolins, twittering prinias, and the boo-boo-boop of the beautiful bou bous that like to wake up my babies in the late afternoon.
I missed our butterflies and our funny-looking grasshoppers. I missed the duikers that graze on the pavements in the cities, and the knobly warthogs that zip around with their tails up through the farms. There’s so much life here.
Investigating the mammal watching thing has also made it even more exciting to realise how many animals are right here. South Africa has a ubiquitous striped weasel.
It’s everywhere but nobody sees them much because they’re shy. Just imagine what we could find in our slice of the gorge here with some heat sensors and very large camera zooms.
Aside from more large and venomous creatures than we might care to admit, there may just be hundreds of mammals all around us, hiding in plain sight. I’ll try to open my eyes a little more while I’m running or out with the dogs at the waterfall.
I’ll listen for the rustling and look up when the puff backs chirp their alarm calls. That’s how they told us about a boomslang the other day.
I could see 6 000 species of mammals and 11 000 species of birds in my lifetime. How amazing.
All I need is free time, a boatload of money for travel and equipment, and a bit of luck. But maybe I’ll start with a subscription to National Geographic or something. And some more walks down into the gorge forests below my house.
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