To See A Pels Fishing Owl

It always amazes me how serendipitous sightings are, how very easy it is to miss – or catch - the most dramatic wildlife action by the merest chance. The most dramatic example of this I have experienced was watching eight lionesses, under cover of 10pm darkness, stalk, kill and eat a reedbuck ram not 50 yards from where 30 revellers were celebrating a birthday. Although they passéd within a few feet of us before the kill the entire episode, which we watched by spotlight, would have gone entirely unnoticed had someone not seen a movement next to her and had a torch to hand with which to pick up a lioness moving rapidly through the grass. The reedbuck was so totally consumed and the evidence of the incident so slight that even the following morning we would have had no idea whatsoever what had transpired.

I was reminded of this a few evenings ago as I sat with Darcie Carr, a tour operator from Colorado, in the Delta Camp sitting room. She was talking about her new-found interest in birds and her hopes of seeing a Pels Fishing Owl before she left the Okavango. As she was talking her eyes rose above my shoulder and popped – in silent majesty her Pels had alighted on a branch not 15 feet behind me. Ten seconds later, and equally silently, it was gone. Had we been looking at a picture of one in a book during those few seconds, neither of us would have seen it.