One of the questions in yesterday’s Guardian quiz prompted a family discussion about the Kasanka National Park in Zambia and its enormous colony of bats. Admins 1 and 2 paid a visit there in 2010, which involved getting up in the middle of the night, trekking through a swampy jungle with some armed guards and climbing rickety wooden towers to view the bats flying around. It was spectacular. Here’s another shot we took:
Anyway, in a weird coincidence the Park turned up in today’s Guardian. Apparently some company wants to open a huge commercial farm which would have a catastrophic effect on the wildlife. The paper also has a nice photo essay on the Park’s bats.
Admin1 is reading The Special Dead by Lin Anderson. Admin2 is rereading The Second Sleep by Robert Harris.
Absolutely lovely photos. Must have been an amazing experience
Bashing through the forest in the dark, trying to avoid the pythons hunting the bats and the leopards hunting the pythons, I fell into some quicksand and had to be pulled out by the soldiers, minus my shoes and half my stick. That was an experience all right.
OMG I would have been terrified of most of that, but it’s a shame theres no photo