From Skukuza to the Serengeti, and back to Selati
Updated: 7 days ago
We have just completed a trio of trips. The first was a walking safari at Rhino Post and Plains Camp in the Kruger National Park; from there it was on to the Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti, and finally to Selati and the northern section of Balule. I am going to write this for the reader in reverse, because we have been back-to-back on safari and the freshest experience is the easiest to put to ink.
That said, it is Sunday and I am looking out at our beautiful Klein Drakensberg from the terrace in Zandspruit. I have just dropped the guests at Hoedspruit Airport, and I am cleaning equipment and packing away so that the next three days can go to the things I need to do before we are off again. These small windows of my own time have become rare, and it makes me admire people who operate at the high end: politicians, business people, sportsmen and sportswomen. When you live on the run, never slowing down enough to get to the things you need to, or want to, and never getting the chance to detox your thoughts because you are surrounded by people all the time, it takes a special kind of person, or a special kind of adaptation. Or maybe this is just my experience. I think of a dear friend who is forever writing, guiding and training people, with a family and so much more on top. It makes me think about balance, and how some people hold it all together.
Selati And Balule
I believe the guests were happy with their six days and five nights split between the Selati Game Reserve and the Balule Nature Reserve. The last five days blessed us with amazing sightings on foot, among them an Ayres's Hawk-Eagle and a giraffe giving birth. The mighty Olifants River meanders through the northern section of Balule and makes that stretch very productive at this time of year. At Selati, two agents from Paarl joined us, and we were able to find plenty of white rhino, which was the highlight. This trip was a first in more than one way: a first-time client for Tsala Trails from Amazing Africa, young German guests, and the first time we have co-hosted agents, so that they could experience the product first-hand.
The Serengeti
The trip before that started with a flight into Nairobi in Kenya and on to Kilimanjaro International Airport in Tanzania, then a long drive to the Ngorongoro Crater with Benson, our guide from Wayo Africa, in his extended Land Cruiser. His camp sits on the eastern rim of the crater, and it was here that we met the clients and Katharina's family. Super excited to see each other. One evening of catching up, a new place, and a long day of travel behind us.
The next morning: a private airplane, and Serengeti here we come. All of this is a kind of special, but at that stage I will admit to being overwhelmed by the tension of private aircraft and African customs. Once we had landed and got into the swing of things, we headed for Wayo's Green Camp. We had landed in the north and the camp is in the north-east, so the transfer was already a game drive.
On arrival one of the guests became very ill, but we commenced with safari and the day's activities. The best way I can describe the landscape is the 1966 film Born Free: flat, rolling terrain with kopjes scattered here and there, beautiful rounded granite boulders with a few bushes and trees clinging to them. Across the grassland stand scattered trees, mostly umbrella thorns, and where the surface cracks open, meandering streams run with palms and sedge-rich margins that lend an almost tropical feel in between the very definite savanna. We spent four days and three nights here, with the last proper safari day taking everyone to the Mara River itself.
Being here in September, one cannot help but think about the migration, and it is worth setting down what the science actually says, because it is more interesting than the documentaries let on. The seasonal movement of the wildebeest across the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem is one of the most thoroughly studied phenomena in large-herbivore ecology, and the picture that has emerged is that rain is the trigger, but food is the reason. The southern plains sit on volcanic ash soils, and when the rains arrive, they push up short grass exceptionally rich in calcium, phosphorus and protein. The wildebeest would stay there all year if they could, and the calving season of January to March is timed precisely to that flush, because a lactating cow needs enormous amounts of calcium and energy to raise a calf. But the Southern plains dry out fast. The north, stretching into the Masai Mara, sits on an old granite shield with leached, nutrient-poor soils. It gets far more rain and holds permanent water in the Mara River, but the grass grows tall and coarse and its nutritional value is diluted. So, the herds retreat north in the dry season to survive on abundant but poor forage, and turn South the moment the rains bring the nutrient-rich plains back to life. Holdo and colleagues framed it as opposing gradients of rainfall and plant nutrition; Boone, Thirgood and Hopcraft modelled the movement and found it roughly a quarter driven directly by rainfall and three quarters by the vegetation growth that follows it.
There is a layered order to the movement too. Zebra, the larger and less selective grazers, tend to move slightly ahead because their digestion can handle the coarse grass tops; in doing so they expose the lower, nutrient-dense shoots the wildebeest need, and the Thomson's gazelles come last for the short dicots left behind. Ecologists call it green-wave surfing, the herds tracking the greening of the vegetation in step with the rain.
What I find most remarkable is how the animals actually find the rain. They can pick up localised storms from over fifty kilometers away, through the low-frequency rumble of thunder, the flash of lightning, and the smell. That smell is geosmin, a compound produced by soil bacteria, chiefly Streptomyces, that gets thrown into the air as tiny aerosols when raindrops hit dry ground. It is the main ingredient of petrichor, the scent after rain on dry earth, and it also gives beetroot its earthy taste. Humans can detect geosmin at a few parts per trillion, and the thinking is that this sensitivity once helped our ancestors find water and fertile ground across dry country. Standing on those plains, it is not hard to believe that a wildebeest, whose whole life depends on that scent, reads it far better than we ever will.
We saw fire on the horizon most days, and that too is part of the system rather than a disaster. The vast majority of fires in the Serengeti-Mara is lit by people: prescribed burns by TANAPA early in the dry season, from June to September, to clear dead grass and create firebreaks against the hotter late-season fires, and burns by pastoralists on the borders to bring on fresh forage, kill ticks and knock back thorn scrub. Lightning plays a part, but a smaller one. Without fire the open grassland would close into thicket, and the migratory herds depend on the protein-rich young shoots that sprout after a burn. There is a feedback loop at work as well: a run of wet years builds grass and therefore fuel, while the herds themselves graze that fuel down and limit how far and how hot a fire can run. The concern among researchers now is actually too little fire. A study led by James Probert found fires in the ecosystem declined by around forty percent between 2001 and 2014, largely because livestock on the borders are overgrazing the fuel away and stalling the fire cycle.
The termites (the key Savanna engineers), whose mounds dot the plains, are quietly holding all of this together. Fire changes soil: a cool burn gives a short flush of potassium, magnesium and phosphorus, while a hot one burns off organic matter, drives off nitrogen and can leave the surface water-repellent. Yet soil is a poor conductor of heat, and just five centimeters down the temperature rarely passes ninety degrees while the flames above run past eight hundred. Termites live well below that. They eat the dead wood and litter that would otherwise fuel the fire, their thick clay mounds insulate the colony, and their tunnels, reaching as deep as ten meters, bring up minerals and let water infiltrate, so the ground recovers faster after a burn. Long-term burning experiments in South Africa and Australia show termite diversity barely responds to fire frequency at all; rainfall and woody cover matter far more.
And then the kopjes, which hold their own surprise for a South African guide. The klipspringer here has a trick I had to look twice at: in East Africa and Ethiopia the ewes carry horns as well as the rams, whereas at home only the males do. The species sits at an estimated forty thousand or so animals and is considered of least concern, largely because its rocky habitat keeps it out of reach of poaching and livestock, but its distribution is patchy for exactly the same reason. The explanation offered for the horned females is competition: rocky islands in the east are more heavily contested, and a monogamous pair defending its kopje for life needs both partners to fight, so the ewe grows the weapon to do it. Southern females settle disputes by biting and pulling fur. It is a useful reminder that a species one knows well at home is not necessarily the same animal two thousand kilometers north.
On our last morning, we slowly and sad to leave, got into the vehicle and left, on a game drive towards the airstrip, where everyone flew off in their own directions: some to Kilimanjaro, some to Arusha, and Katharina and I to Lake Manyara. There we spent two nights and three days, time to gather up everything that had happened, do some serious birding, and take in the Rift Valley and the lake itself. Then it was back to South Africa via Nairobi.
Rhino Post And Plains Camp
Before all of this we completed a very special walking safari for old friends from Paarl, at Rhino Post and Plains Camp, in a very special concession of the Kruger National Park. This was the third time they have joined and supported me, this time with Katharina alongside. The guides at Rhino Post took us to special places and shared the rich biodiversity of Kruger with us. We had only one elephant on foot as far as big game goes, and no rhino or leopard, but plenty of other impressive animals. For me the standout was a morning walk from Plains Camp in an almost mist-like dawn, with Southern Ground Hornbills lifting off from a nearby stream towards some large Apple-leaf trees, where I assume they roost or once had a nest. We did not see them again.
The first days were very windy and the last brought mist to cool the park down, so it was tricky going for game viewing, but one evening we were blessed with wild dog and spotted hyena on the march, one after the other. Blue-eared starlings serenaded us by day, and by night there were African Scops Owls, Pearl-spotted Owlets, African Barred Owlets and, most special of all to hear, a Verreaux's Eagle-Owl.
The Gravity Of It
The real weight of this trio lies in how it started. This was my first walking safari in the Kruger National Park with Tsala Trails, and not on the edge of it either: slap bang in the middle, right alongside Mala Mala and the Sabi Sands, just north of Skukuza, in what is leopard and predator heaven. In my mind this is where the history of the park runs deepest, where so many walked and worked before us.
Straight after that we left for a place I never expected to see with my own eyes, let alone feel underfoot: the Serengeti, which for me had only ever existed in Born Free, The Ghost and the Darkness, Out of Africa, and an endless stream of wildlife documentaries and social media clips. It is a place with roughly seven thousand safari operators, against about nine hundred in South Africa according to the SafariBookings website, which gives some idea of the density of the industry there. Then home, and off to Selati and Balule to complete a first for Tsala Trails in every sense. Three trips, three firsts, and a Sunday on the terrace to think about what it all means.
References
Bear, I.J. and Thomas, R.G., 1964. Nature of argillaceous odour. Nature, 201(4923), pp.993-995.
Bell, R.H.V., 1971. A grazing ecosystem in the Serengeti. Scientific American, 225(1), pp.86-93.
Boone, R.B., Thirgood, S.J. and Hopcraft, J.G.C., 2006. Serengeti wildebeest migratory patterns modeled from rainfall and new vegetation growth. Ecology, 87(8), pp.1987-1994.
Davies, A.B., Eggleton, P., van Rensburg, B.J. and Parr, C.L., 2012. The pyrodiversity-biodiversity hypothesis: a test with savanna termite assemblages. Journal of Applied Ecology, 49(2), pp.422-430.
DeBano, L.F., Neary, D.G. and Ffolliott, P.F., 1998. Fire's effects on ecosystems. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Gerber, N.N. and Lechevalier, H.A., 1965. Geosmin, an earthy-smelling substance isolated from actinomycetes. Applied Microbiology, 13(6), pp.935-938.
Holdo, R.M., Holt, R.D. and Fryxell, J.M., 2009. Opposing rainfall and plant nutritional gradients best explain the wildebeest migration in the Serengeti. The American Naturalist, 173(4), pp.431-445.
Hopcraft, J.G.C., Holdo, R.M., Mwangomo, E., Mduma, S.A.R., Thirgood, S.J., Borner, M., Fryxell, J.M., Olff, H. and Sinclair, A.R.E., 2015. Why are wildebeest the most abundant herbivore in the Serengeti ecosystem? In: A.R.E. Sinclair, K.L. Metzger, S.A.R. Mduma and J.M. Fryxell, eds. Serengeti IV: Sustaining biodiversity in a coupled human-natural system. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.125-174.
IUCN SSC Antelope Specialist Group, 2016. Oreotragus oreotragus. The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species 2016: e.T15485A50191264. Gland: IUCN. Available at: IUCN Red List [Accessed 19 September 2026].
Joung, Y.S. and Buie, C.R., 2015. Aerosol generation by raindrop impact on soil. Nature Communications, 6, 6083.
Kingdon, J., 2015. The Kingdon field guide to African mammals. 2nd ed. London: Bloomsbury.
Merkle, J.A., Monteith, K.L., Aikens, E.O., Hayes, M.M., Hersey, K.R., Middleton, A.D., Oates, B.A., Sawyer, H., Scurlock, B.M. and Kauffman, M.J., 2016. Large herbivores surf waves of green-up during spring. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 283(1833), 20160456.
Probert, J.R., Parr, C.L., Holdo, R.M., Anderson, T.M., Archibald, S., Courtney Mustaphi, C.J., Dobson, A.P., Donaldson, J.E., Hopcraft, G.C., Hempson, G.P., Morrison, T.A. and Beale, C.M., 2019. Anthropogenic modifications to fire regimes in the wider Serengeti-Mara ecosystem. Global Change Biology, 25(10), pp.3406-3423.
SafariBookings, 2026. Tour operators: Tanzania and South Africa. Available at: SafariBookings [Accessed 19 September 2026].
Sinclair, A.R.E., 1979. The Serengeti environment. In: A.R.E. Sinclair and M. Norton-Griffiths, eds. Serengeti: Dynamics of an ecosystem. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.31-45.
Skinner, J.D. and Chimimba, C.T., 2005. The mammals of the southern African subregion. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Research And Editorial Note
This article was developed with research and editorial assistance from Anthropic's Claude. The ecological information on the Serengeti-Mara migration, fire regimes, soil and termite dynamics, and klipspringer biology was reviewed against published academic research, IUCN Red List documentation and recognised mammal and ecological reference works.
The drivers of the wildebeest migration, the changing fire regime of the ecosystem and the regional variation in klipspringer horn growth remain subjects of ongoing research. Where the evidence does not support a definitive conclusion, this uncertainty has been acknowledged in the text. Figures quoted for safari operator numbers are drawn from a commercial booking platform rather than an official register and should be read as indicative only.
The final selection, wording, observations and interpretation of the material remain the responsibility of the author, Koenraad Pretorius.
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