The Land Of Mythical Creatures

On a journey to a far-flung corner of Zambia, Horatio Clare goes in search of the shoebill—an enormous, enigmatic bird that has become a symbol of the fight to protect Africa’s least-known and most vulnerable ecosystems.

“We’ll need to do some wading in order to locate the shoebill.,” read the e-mail. The sender, a naturalist named Rod Tether who was to be my guide in Zambia, added: “You may want to bring along a pair of shoes that you don’t mind getting wet.”

Bangweulu is a miraculous, 5,9oo-square-kilometre expanse of marsh in northern Zambia. It is also one of the last homes of the iconic, elusive shoebill—a prehistoric-looking bird with an eight-foot wingspan found only in the remotest swamps of Africa. Few people have seen one. Rod has, though.

Having travelled with Rod on other adventures—a hippo bit our canoe in half on an earlier trip in western Zambia—I suspected that “some wading” would involve us plunging up to our necks through swamps like the ghosts of explorers David Livingstone and Henry Morton Stanley.

The reality wasn’t far off. In Bangweulu, you seem to paddle through the sky, so brightly are its endless blues reflected in the water. We crossed lily ponds that would have made an Impressionist painter swoon, their white, mauve, and blue flowers floating amid clumps of phragmites and papyrus. As we waded, dragging our canoes, using distant trees as way-finders and jumping between broken dikes in pursuit of a mysterious beast, it felt as if we were on a quest from an antique time.

I had come to Zambia, a landlocked country in the heart of southern Africa, to experience two very different ecosystems—and two equally distinct models of conservation. We began in Big Five territory, at South Luangwa Natural Park, where the family-run Shenton Safaris operates two long-established camps. One of the oldest national parks in Zambia, South Luangwa is an outstanding model of the traditional relationship between tourism, community, and wildlife.