Page 66 - Discover Botswana 2021

during a summers day while plunging to -12°C degrees during a cold winter’s night.
One certain uniformity that blesses the Kalahari Basin is sand, lots of it, so much in fact that some areas are blanketed in up to 60 meters or more of powdery Kalahari sand.
The North has beautiful summer storms between November and March, which amount to more than the desert defining limit of 250mm of annual rainfall. Rapid drainage through the sand layer, however, results in a lack of surface water, thereby creating a dry environment devoid of moisture. As a result, this part does not have the appearance of a desert at all, but is characterised by thorny bushes and forests of evergreens. Further south the lower rainfall results in short grasses with a few scattered trees. This arid environment keeps human settlements to a minimum, but nature adapts, and the Kalahari basin is a flourishing wildlife sanctuary. Large grazing herds such as zebra and buffalo concentrate in the North, but desert-adapted animals such as springbok, wildebeest, hartebeest, oryx, and eland remain throughout the southern Kalahari for long periods of the year, despite the absence of surface water. Predators continually follow the wildlife movements, and interestingly, the Kalahari lions are widely considered the largest in the world.
Scattered throughout the whole Kalahari basin, are ancient depressions in the ground through which primeval waters used to flow, carrying fine silt particles, minerals and
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