PhilHydePhotos: Sura ya Kumi na Nne - Paka na Mbwa wa Serengeti

Chapter Fourteen - The Cats and Dogs of the Serengeti

We spent much of our week in the Serengeti dodging storms. Ian, our guide, was immensely proud of his grasp of the English language and proved his fluency by frequently pointing out where it was raining 'cats and dogs'. Well, that certainly doesn't translate well into French, but in Swahili it's 'paka na mbwa' ... hang on, less of the language lessons Hyde, back to the animals...

In the Serengeti of course, it only rains cats. Cats are everywhere. One thing we saw a lot of was cats. Cats of all shapes and sizes. I've already given up five chapters to 'em. And there's more to come...

The cat we really wanted to see is called the Caracal, a kind of lynx. In this we failed miserably. The weather was not on ours side.

As recompense, between dodging storms, we spotted three of these solitary creatures:

The Serval Cat

We managed to spend some time with them, something I haven't managed to do before. They conveniently stayed by the road, as by the time we saw them, off-loading was tantamount to drowning.

They are small cats, but still twice the size of the domestic moggy. Except, maybe, ours...

They are constantly on the hunt for rodents, insects etc, hunting both day and night, unlike our cat (smÖke) that seems to prefer sleeping, although does sometimes proudly bring us the occasional gift.

Their legs are long compared to their bodies, the longest (proportionally) of any cat.

To catch their prey, they tend to leap up high, often to two metres. SmÖke only does that when leaping on me at siesta time.

Their markings are beautiful.

They hunt by sense of sound, a bit like smÖke when he hears the cat biscuits.

They seem to wear a constant frown, unlike smÖke who sports a constant 'I'm God' expression.

Dogs? On the dog side of things we did not do too well.

I would have loved to have seen the Painted Wolves again, as we did last year. (See the blog here.) In that blog I mentioned that one of the two packs of painted wolves (African wild dogs) that lived in the Serengeti had been killed by the Masai. All of them poisoned. They have now killed the only other pack. There are now no painted wolves in the Serengeti.

Us humans have a lot to answer for, even these so called 'idyllic' tribes...

And so, instead of dogs, we'll have to make do with something similar.

The Hyena.

This is, in actual fact, another fail. The hyena is genetically closer to the cat than the dog!!

Never mind, I'll carry on regardless...

Although generally accepted as being ugly when compared to our hounds, I have to say that, in my long career, I've seen plenty of much-loved dogs that looked a lot worse than this guy.

When they are youngsters, they do look kinda cute...

Not bad huh? A hair style similar to my very own.

As adults, they are known as one of the major scavengers in nature. Does that ring any bells?

They even eat bones. Not bad, but my dog can also eat underwear...

They wait by the diner table waiting for scraps to fall.

In this case, the scrap is rather big. Even then he has to guard it against the vultures.

However, they are not just scavengers. Packs of them can be quite large, we saw packs of over twenty. They hunt as a coordinated group and can bring down fully grown wildebeest.