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Arc Earth We organise and host tailor-make wildlife, bird and conservation safaris across wildest Africa.

11/10/2026

You don’t normally walk up to an aardvark.

If you’re lucky, you glimpse one disappearing into the darkness.

We found this one at twilight in the Kalahari, just as the light was beginning to leave the landscape.

And we were on foot.

That changes everything.

An aardvark has enormous ears and an exceptional sense of hearing. Out here, where there is very little background noise, every footstep matters.

So we slowed down.

No talking. Careful with where we placed our feet. Watching the wind and trying to move quietly enough to get a view without disturbing the animal in front of us.

Then, finally, there it was.

An aardvark moving through the fading light, completely unaware of the excitement happening a short distance behind it.

For anyone who spends time in the African bush, this is a very special animal to see.

Aardvarks are predominantly nocturnal and often remarkably difficult to find. You can spend years seeing their tracks, their diggings and the enormous burrows they leave behind without ever seeing the animal responsible.

But those holes tell another story.

Aardvarks are ecosystem engineers. Their powerful claws excavate burrows that can later provide shelter for a remarkable variety of other species. In an environment where escaping extreme temperatures can mean the difference between life and death, an abandoned aardvark burrow can become valuable real estate.

All of that ecological importance wrapped up in an animal that most visitors will never see.

Which is perhaps why this encounter felt so special.

No vehicle.

No engine.

No rush to get closer.

Just a handful of careful footsteps through the Kalahari and one of Africa’s most elusive mammals appearing in the twilight.

Sometimes the sightings you have to whisper for are the ones you remember most.

Look at where the foal’s belly sits.Almost level with its mother’s.A zebra foal may be tiny compared with an adult, but ...
10/10/2026

Look at where the foal’s belly sits.

Almost level with its mother’s.

A zebra foal may be tiny compared with an adult, but it arrives in the world on extraordinarily long legs.

There is a very good reason for that.

For an animal born into a landscape full of predators, there isn’t much time to spend helpless on the ground. Zebra foals can stand remarkably soon after birth and begin moving with their mothers shortly afterwards.

Those long legs put the foal’s body surprisingly high off the ground from day one.

Stand a newborn beside its mother and you see it immediately. Belly almost level with belly, with four impossibly thin legs underneath.

It is one of those proportions that makes perfect sense when you consider the life it has been born into.

There is something else happening during those first days that is just as important.

Around the time she gives birth, a zebra mare will often separate herself from the rest of the herd. Afterwards, mother and foal spend valuable time together before fully mixing back into the group.

That period helps the youngster learn exactly who Mum is.

Every zebra carries an individual stripe pattern, but recognition is more than visual. The foal becomes familiar with its mother’s stripes, scent, voice and behaviour, building the recognition it will need when surrounded by a herd of apparently similar black-and-white bodies.

Within a very short time, this little animal needs to know two things extremely well.

How to stay on those enormous legs.

And exactly which pair of striped legs to follow.

Watching them together, the proportions are almost comical.

Tiny body.

Huge ears.

An enormous amount of leg.

And a belly already remarkably close to the height of Mum’s.

When survival depends on keeping up, it makes sense to arrive ready to run.

09/10/2026

The splashing reached us before anything else, that heavy slap of a trunk hitting water over and over, and when we came round the reeds this calf was flat in the wallow, throwing mud over his own back with the abandon of a child who has forgotten anyone is watching.

Watch how deliberately he works it up over his shoulders and behind his ears. This is not simply play, though it is certainly that too. Elephant skin is up to two and a half centimetres thick yet riddled with folds and wrinkles, and every one of those creases holds a film of moisture far longer than smooth skin ever could. A good mud coat can drop his skin temperature and keep him cool for hours after the water is gone.

There is a hidden lesson happening here as well. Calves are not born knowing how to wallow properly. They learn the technique by watching older family members, copying where and how the mud is applied, which is why he keeps glancing back toward the adult behind him. Those wrinkles also act as a sunscreen and a barrier against biting insects, the mud baking into a crust that parasites cannot easily reach.

The most effective air conditioner in the Okavango doesn’t have a switch.It is a wet kikoi.Africa has a habit of testing...
08/10/2026

The most effective air conditioner in the Okavango doesn’t have a switch.

It is a wet kikoi.

Africa has a habit of testing both ends of your wardrobe. Winter mornings can be brutally cold, while a hot summer day in the Delta can have you searching for any possible way to cool down.

On this particular day, it was hot.

Very hot.

So out came one of the simplest pieces of bush equipment I travel with.

A kikoi, soaked in water and wrapped around your head and neck.

It works through one of the oldest cooling systems there is: evaporation.

As water evaporates from the fabric, it absorbs heat from the surface beneath it. Add a little airflow from a boat moving through the channels and you have a remarkably effective, completely electricity-free African air conditioner.

It might not win any awards for style.

But somewhere around the middle of a hot day in the Okavango, you stop caring.

And there are certainly worse places to test it.

We spent the day cruising through the channels of the Delta, surrounded by papyrus, reedbeds and water in the middle of the Kalahari.

That contrast is part of what makes the Okavango so extraordinary.

Water travelling south from the Angolan highlands eventually spreads across the sands of Botswana, creating this enormous wetland in a landscape that, by all logic, feels as though it should be dry.

For us, it meant a day on the water, wildlife along the channels, a little breeze from the boat and one thoroughly soaked kikoi keeping things surprisingly civilised.

Luxury safari travel isn’t always about thread counts and plunge pools.

Sometimes luxury is a piece of wet cotton and a moving boat.

The African air conditioner.

Never leave home without one.

07/10/2026

Before the first chest beat, listen to the breath.

There is a moment when the silverback rises, draws himself up and the forest seems to go quiet. Then comes that extraordinary burst of sound. A rapid series of hollow, percussive beats that seems far too deep to be produced by a pair of hands.

But that is exactly what it is.

A gorilla chest beat is not a vocalisation. The silverback strikes his chest rapidly with cupped hands, turning his enormous torso into a biological drum.

And the sound carries information.

Research on wild mountain gorillas has found that larger males produce chest beats with lower peak frequencies than smaller males. In other words, another gorilla listening somewhere beyond the bamboo may be able to learn something about the size of the male without ever seeing him.

That matters in a forest where visibility can disappear within metres.

A chest beat can travel for more than a kilometre, allowing a silverback to announce himself through vegetation that would otherwise conceal him completely. It may help rival males assess one another without the enormous risk of physical confrontation, while also communicating with females and other members of the group.

Listen closely to the sequence in this video and there is another layer to it.

The inhalation. The hooting and growling that can accompany the display. The resonance surrounding those explosive beats.

Gorillas possess large laryngeal air sacs connected to the vocal tract, structures thought to act as resonators in acoustic communication. Scientists are still working to understand their exact role, but they may help shape and enhance the sounds accompanying a display.

So what looks like a simple expression of strength is actually something far more sophisticated.

Sight, sound, body size, rhythm and resonance combined into a signal built for communication through dense mountain forest.

And perhaps that is what makes standing this close to a silverback chest beat so extraordinary...

06/10/2026

The wet snap of stems came first, that soft methodical tearing of a gorilla working through a patch of nettles, and only then did we spot the young one settled in the greenery a few metres off. Our guest slowly lowered himself onto his back in the tangle, phone lifted overhead, and the youngster carried on feeding as if the whole scene were entirely ordinary.

Watch how relaxed that gorilla is. This is the product of years of daily habituation work, where the same group is visited every morning until they read a line of people as harmless furniture in the forest. It takes the trackers here two to three years of patient, gentle contact before a family will tolerate a stranger lying down beside them like this.

What that youngster is eating tells its own story. Mountain gorillas are almost entirely folivores, chewing through more than a hundred plant species and pushing thirty kilograms of leaves, shoots and stems through their gut every day. Those stinging nettles our guest was lying in are a genuine favourite, folded and stripped with a dexterity that leaves the sting behind.

There are only around a thousand mountain gorillas left on Earth, split between the Virungas and Bwindi, and they exist nowhere in captivity at all. Every one you meet is a wild animal, and the permit that let this guest lie in the nettles beside a young one pays the rangers who keep the snares out of these hills.

Would you lie flat in a bed of nettles for a moment like this?

The w**e had barely been poured when the first francolin called somewhere out in the grass, that sharp rasping alarm tha...
05/10/2026

The w**e had barely been poured when the first francolin called somewhere out in the grass, that sharp rasping alarm that runs ahead of anything moving through cover. We settled into the chairs, backs to the acacias, faces to the fire, and let the plain do what it does at this hour.

There is a reason every camp on the Serengeti still gathers around a fire, and it is older than any of us. Long before it was a ritual with a glass of red in hand, that ring of flame marked the edge of the safe world. Lions, hyenas and leopards read firelight as a boundary, and even now most large predators will hold their distance from it out of learned caution rather than fear.

Those flat topped trees behind us are Vachellia tortilis, the umbrella thorn, and they are quietly doing the ecosystem's heavy lifting. Their roots fix nitrogen into some of the poorest soils on the plains, and their seed pods, spat out half digested by passing herds, seed the next generation of shade in a grassland that would otherwise be entirely open. Half the reason a camp like this can exist here at all is because these trees create the only cover for miles.

The Serengeti holds one of the last great intact migrations on Earth, close to 1.3 million wildebeest still moving across it every year, and camps that pack up and leave no trace are part of why that space stays wild. Nothing you see here is permanent. The tents follow the herds, and when they move, the plain forgets we were ever sitting by this fire.

When was the last time you sat by a fire with nothing but wild country behind you?

05/10/2026

At first, all we could really see was the mother.

Then a tiny elephant appeared beneath her.

The calf was small enough to walk almost completely underneath her belly, keeping its mother between itself and our vehicle as the pair moved past.

It was curious, but cautious.

Mum was neither.

She walked by completely unperturbed, chewing on a branch as she went. At one point she stopped beside us for a few moments, and the calf suddenly became visible beneath her, almost as though she were giving us a better look.

Of course, she wasn’t showing it off.

What we were really seeing was a very young elephant using one of the safest places it knows.

For a calf this small, its mother’s body is protection. When something feels unfamiliar, staying close to her legs and keeping her between itself and the unknown allows the calf to investigate the world without having to face it alone.

And there is another layer to moments like this.

The calf is watching her.

Elephants learn constantly from the older animals around them, and the mother’s behaviour provides information. She wasn’t alarmed by the vehicle. She didn’t stop feeding, move away or place herself defensively between us and the calf.

She simply carried on with her day.

For the calf, still learning what in its world deserves caution, that calmness matters.

This is one of the reasons I love spending time with elephants.

Stay still, give them space and allow them to make every decision, and eventually the sighting stops being about your presence.

You get to watch a mother feeding.

A calf finding courage beneath her belly.

And a very young elephant quietly learning how to read the world from the animal it trusts most.

For a few seconds, she stopped right beside us.

Then, branch still in her mouth and calf still tucked close, she carried on.

Exactly as she had before we arrived.

You hear a crossing before you see it. That low, rolling groan of thousands of wildebeest, the drum of hooves on the far...
04/10/2026

You hear a crossing before you see it. That low, rolling groan of thousands of wildebeest, the drum of hooves on the far bank, and then the first animal commits and the whole line tips into the water behind it.

Watch how they cross in a single narrow file rather than spreading out. That is not indecision. Wildebeest crossings almost always funnel through the same handful of entry points year after year, worn into the bank by generations before them, and the animals at the back are following the scent trail and the bodies ahead more than any view of the water.

What drives the whole thing is not the river at all. These are western white-bearded wildebeest, and the herd's movement is triggered by rainfall on the far horizon, sensed through changes in grass growth they can smell from tens of kilometres away. A migration of over a million animals is essentially a giant collective response to weather they have not yet reached.

The Mara River crossings are the pinch point of the entire system. Thousands drown or are taken here each year, yet those deaths feed the crocodiles, the vultures and the river itself, seeding it with nutrients that ripple through the whole ecosystem downstream. The migration is not just a spectacle. It is the engine that keeps this grassland alive.

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