Page 64 - Discover Botswana 24th Edition 2024

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KA L A H A R I
Slowly, over hundreds of thousands of years, tectonic processes
reorganised the river systems, progressively depriving the lake of its
inflows including the Kafue, the Kwando and the Upper Zambezi. The
lake shrank in size, returning only temporarily for a few thousand years
at a time, when huge climate swings pushed enough water into the system
to sustain it from one year to the next. Peppering the pan floor are bizarre
circular islands, the formation of which has been the source of squabbling
between geomorphologists for more than 50 years. Variously ascribed as
barchan dunes, spring mounds and remnant shorelines, the consensus
currently rests with something akin to nebka dunes, windblown sand that
accumulated a few thousand years ago, colonised by saline tolerant grasses
and moulded and remoulded by the currents of shallow floodwaters and
dry season winds. Whatever their origin, their existence has perfectly
preserved a stone age record of ancient humans in the muds that lie
below them. Scattered debris from the shaping of silcrete stone tools
painstakingly pieced back together by a team of archaeologists offer a
passing window into our own past as we sat down here on a dry lakebed
for a few brief moments more than 70,000 years ago.
Today, this landscape of fossil rivers and glaring salt pans is again
experiencing one of the driest few centuries of its very long history. Bat-
eared foxes, brown hyena and meerkats make it through the dry season
with remarkable resilience but for those creatures that need to drink, the
Kalahari is inhospitably challenging, and the dry season’s most salient
attraction becomes the ethereal beauty of its salt and silence. Nevertheless,
the seasonal pulse of rainwater that remodels the fossilised terrain into a
collection of shallow pools of water, brings with it a predictable plethora
of life, as old and impressive as the landscape itself.
Above: The Makgadikgadi Pans in the rainy season produces extraordinary patterns
made by the movement of wildlife like zebras and wildebeest.
Facing page: Spotted eagle owls are frequently seen further into the Kalahari. This
beautiful owl was seen in Deception Valley in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve.