Stacey McKenna
July 6, 2018
After decades of poaching and human-wildlife conflict, it seems Malawi’s Liwonde National Park is on the up. With cheetahs and lions back on its land, could this really be the country’s next Big Five destination?
Sat in my canoe, I watch hundreds of white-faced ducks lift from the floodplains along Malawi’s Shire River. They swoop in anxious circles and whistle warnings to their avian brethren.
“What are they so upset about?” I ask my guide Gabriel, who sits behind me in the shoulder-wide, three-person vessel. He assures me we’ll find out soon since we were headed that way.
The Shire River, Malawi’s largest, runs for 250 miles (402 kilometers) from Lake Malawi to Mozambique’s Zambezi River. Sprawling along its eastern shore is Liwonde National Park—home to a handful of game lodges such as Bushman’s Baobabs that operate walking, driving, and water-based safaris. And now, it seems the park is ready to be the country’s next Big Five (elephant, rhino, buffalo, lion, leopard) safari spot.
But the consequences to the wildlife were not. Snare traps and fishing nets, common poaching tools, killed and maimed indiscriminately. “They are placed on the game paths that many species use, as it is a simple highway through the bush to and from waterholes and feeding areas. So all manner of species were affected,” said Chris Badger of Central African Wilderness Safaris. “Cats and padded animals who tend to use the paths to avoid thorns were hammered. Sable antelope were particularly affected.”
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By 2015, wildlife throughout the country had gone into what African Parks’ Fran Read called a “terminal decline.” While Liwonde once had eight lion prides, all but one cat had since died or fled. “Wildlife was seen as a free resource to be exploited for commercial gain, and also for survival,” Read told me.
By August 2017, when I found myself wondering what had Liwonde’s ducks so riled up, the situation was turning around. Two years earlier, African Parks took over management of the park, launching a slew of anti-poaching, community development, and wildlife reintroduction programs. They removed more than 31,000 snares, developed rigorous training and selection criteria for law enforcement, and added drones, helicopters and an informant network. And only last year, they reintroduced cheetahs to Liwonde and completed the historic translocation of 500 elephants to balance populations between parks. Earlier this year, lions returned too.
As the Malawian fishermen neared, I realized they were frightened. Gabriel hollers questions in the Bantu language, Chichewa, and they respond, pointing toward the shoreline over their shoulders, the one we were slowly angling toward. But their paddling never slows, and soon the space for our encounter dissolved. We take a hard right and belly the canoe up on a sandbar.
“Stand up carefully and take these,” Gabriel tells me, passing his binoculars forward. I rise awkwardly, feet touching either side of the canoe, thankful our perch seems stable, and lift the binoculars to my eyes. One-hundred feet ahead of us, basking in the muck and the sunshine, is a 500-pound Nile crocodile. I settle back on the bench, pulling my arms and legs tightly toward the center of the canoe.
As we paddle and push through the shallow channel, Gabriel points out camouflaged waterbuck, leggy egrets, water-walking jacana—commonly referred to as a Jesus bird—and a white-headed fish eagle, Malawi’s national bird. “It looks a lot like the bald eagle, the national bird in the United States!” I tell him. He smiles politely. It’s clearly not the first time an eager visitor has made the comparison.
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Gabriel’s expert eye also spies illegal nets strung across the canal. He tsk’s and shakes his head, pulling one up to show me the fish tangled in its webbing. “People are not supposed to do this anymore, but they still do,” he says, a hint of resignation in his voice.
Guides are advocates for the wildlife, but they also understand the villagers’ dilemma. They see women sleep beside their crops at night to fend off roving hippos, and they know men who return to fishing just days after a crocodile killed their friend.
That evening, back at Bushman’s Baobabs, as I type up my notes from the day, I hear a violent rustling. In the inky, pre-star night, I catch the silhouette of an elephant family grazing through the camp, not 10 feet from the porch of my chalet. I listen as the gentle giants tear at the baobabs and scratch against the thatch roofs of the huts, and I wonder: If this were my garden being eaten, my home threatened, mightn’t I rightfully fear, even despise, the wildlife that so many rightfully revere?
Fortunately, African Parks’ mission includes supporting the people who live near their parks, providing education, water provision, micro-irrigation, and jobs. “There has been a dramatic drop in illegal activities now that communities can benefit from the legal opportunities that come from a well-managed park,” Read says.
African Parks’ management strategies are also setting Malawi up as a safari hotspot. Going into 2018, Liwonde is the country’s second Big Five destination. And between the ease of independent travel, the knowledgeable guides, and the ample opportunities for close encounters with wildlife, it just might be the perfect place for an adventure with perspective.
