Every animal fact in this book has been verified against current field literature and fifty-five years of direct field observation in Southern Africa.
Primary references: Sasol Birds of Southern Africa (Sinclair and Hockey); Roberts’ Birds of Southern Africa; Newman’s Birds of Southern Africa; Kingdon’s Field Guide to African Mammals; the Skukuza field reference library; and the relevant peer-reviewed literature for ecological and behavioural claims, including documented research on vulture stomach acid, termite ventilation, fig wasp mutualism, zebra stripe function, and dung beetle navigation.
The Colonel’s interpretation of these facts is not always accurate. This distinction is the book.
Every location in this book has been visited by the author.
The Southern African landscape in these pages is not imagined — it is remembered. Gareth Parkes has walked the Kruger National Park from its northern reaches to its southern boundary, and has observed wildlife at Addo Elephant National Park, the iSimangaliso Wetland Park, Hluhluwe-iMfolozi, Mountain Zebra National Park near Cradock, the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Park, the Little Karoo near Oudtshoorn, and throughout all nine provinces of South Africa. His field experience extends to Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.
The Colonel’s camp is in all of these places simultaneously. That is one of the advantages of fiction.
Southern Africa holds some of the most extraordinary wildlife on earth. It also holds some of the most urgent conservation challenges. The pangolin is the world’s most trafficked mammal. The white-backed vulture has declined by more than seventy percent since the 1980s. The African wild dog numbers fewer than six thousand six hundred individuals worldwide. The African penguin has lost ninety-seven percent of its historic population in a century.
These are not abstract statistics. They are the characters in this book.
Wildlife matters because we share this planet with creatures that were here long before us and will, if given the chance, be here long after. It matters because ecosystems are not collections of individual animals but systems of relationship — remove one and the others change in ways that cannot be anticipated. It matters because the dung beetle navigates by the Milky Way, the baobab depends on the bat, the vulture prevents disease from crossing the landscape, and every one of these connections is the product of time we cannot imagine and cannot replace.
The Colonel crosses things out when he is wrong. He is wrong often. He keeps learning.
This is the only model available to any of us.
For wildlife conservation in Southern Africa: