Earth-Touch in-house

Touching the Earth Aug 29 2007

By Tara Turkington, editorial team

It’s winter and the sun is bathing the bush in an early-morning wash of light. We’re bumping along slowly in our Volkswagen Combi on a dirt road near Berg-en-Dal in the Kruger National Park, when we see a long-legged dog running briskly towards us.

We slam on brakes – it’s an endangered African wild dog. There are only about 300 of these in Kruger (one of the world’s great wildlife parks and roughly the size of England), and probably only a couple of thousand left all together in the wild.

The dog runs past us – it all happens so quickly we’ve hardly had time to focus our cameras. She’s an alpha-female, leader of a pack of six others, which all canter past purposefully, back down the road we’’ve just driven up. We turn around amidst exclamations at our good fortune, me telling our children, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime sighting! One day you will be able to tell your grandchildren you saw these dogs in the wild I’m not sure if they will be able to do that!”

We follow the dogs closely for about 45 minutes and several kilometres, as they alternate moving along the road at a lickety-split pace (though they make covering ground like this look like a casual outing) and lying down in the long grass beside the road and playing with one another.

All the while though, the female is out in front, setting the pace, looking back over her shoulder to hurry the others along.

Though their distinctive brown, white and black markings are striking (each one, like fingerprints, has their own distinctive pattern), they melt into the bush in seconds once they leave the bare dirt road. They trip on and off it, heading south as the sun climbs higher.

Then, without warning, three dogs chase a steenbok across the road right in front of us, almost upon it. It is bleating plaintively, heralding its own imminent death, to which it had been oblivious just seconds before. Into the bush prey and predators disappear, and seconds later, cross the road again in a single blur – into the jaws of the rest of the pack, which we know is waiting.

Silence replaces the intermittent yipping. The dogs have merged again with the bush; our sighting is over.

On the way home, our daughter, Emily, who is 9, writes a haiku poem:

Yip yap yip yap yip

Painted wolves hunting steenbok

Working as a team

For my family, the joy of viewing wildlife – something my parents introduced to us as children but which has been neglected in the hurly-burly of urban life in Johannesburg, South Africa in the past too many years – has been rekindled by Earth-Touch.

For a few months now, we’ve been watching Earth-Touch clips almost every evening in our home – footage of great white sharks eyeballing divers, air-breathing sea slugs inching their way across rocks, eel-snakes slithering in the sandy bottom of the ocean, long-beaked African skimmers laying eggs in tiny indents in a sandbank in the Okavango Delta, the scales of a puffadder captured in microscopic detail, dragonflies, cheetahs, crabs, buffalo, rays, lionfish, monkeys … the big and the small, the graceful and the unexpected, all compellingly beautiful in their own way.

And the more we see and learn, the more we want to see and learn. Which is why next year’s trip to the Kruger is already booked ...