TRAVEL | Zambia
It's early, long before sunrise, and the morning is chilly. Our tent on Shoebill Island, a tiny island in the Bangweulu wetlands, is nestled in a grove of quinine trees, and our bed is so cosy and warm that I'm reluctant to get out into the cold. We've woken early to paddle the narrow, reed-lined channels from our camp to the floodplains, to see the endemic black lechwe, who call this unique wetland home. Bangweulu means ‘where the water meets the sky’, and that's a perfect description of this extraordinary wetland in north-eastern Zambia.
We reach the floodplains just as the sun starts to peek over the horizon, turning the sky from grey to a delicate shade of pink. Standing on the causeway that runs through the middle of the floodplains, and shivering in the cold morning air, we are surrounded by thousands of black lechwe, barely visible through the thick morning mist Having come into the water overnight for safety, the lechwe, hindquarters characteristically higher than their shoulders, and their elongated, splayed hooves preventing them from sinking into the swampy ground, are now slowly splashing their way, sometimes shoulder deep, back towards the tree line, grazing as they go.
Black lechwe are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List, and their numbers have declined drastically. Numbering more than 250 000 in the ‘30s, by the ‘70s their numbers had plummeted to around 16 000. Fortunately,
