Southern Africa is suffering through a vicious drought .. how will this affect the coming season?

I note there has been some heavy rain in N Namibia but not sure if the drought has broken elsewhere.

Normally during times of drought the carnivores do well, at least for a while.

I have been on 2 horrible safaris. Both in drought years.

Natal was amazingly dry when I was there this year. I watched a small river that had a steady flow literally dry up in 7 days.

Mark

Was just in Pafuri a couple weeks ago and the Limpopo was looking pathetic. Very sad looking hippos and crocs resting in pools not much larger than themselves.

I hunted in Kwazulu Natal in October 2015. Very hot and dry. Hunting was good, but you could see some of the animals were getting stressed badly.

It is dry and hot here at the moment which is most unseasonal. Zambia has vast and lengthy waterways so game always has access to water. The grazing will be a problem.

Most African animals are pretty drought proof but domestic cattle, not so much. Farms have the added benefit of borehole wells, but supplemental feed is getting more and more expensive as grasses disappear. Rain is coming back but remains to be seen how much and if it will be enough to break the drought in KZN and Namibia.

I have just driven from the eastern Cape to where I live in the Kruger National Park. Very dry all the way. The Caledon river on the Lesotho/SA border was bone dry and you could jump across the Orange River at Aliwal North without getting your feet wet!
In the KNP it is seriously dry. All the impalas have lambed and some of the younger ewes are now not looking great. The wildebeest have also calved but surprisingly they still look OK as do the zebra. Saw 4 dagga boys at our local waterhole yesterday evening and they still look OK for what there is to eat which is very little. The big worry is water - may on the KNP's dams are dry and all around what water remains is bare earth. A big die-off of hippo's is expected as there is nothing for them to eat along the Olifants river. The worrying news is that the next rains are expected only in March. So what the 2016 hunting season will be like will, I'm sure depend on whether there are good late-season raid or not. Too early to tell this now. And it has been unbelievably hot. I was in the north of the KNP a few weeks ago (near Shingwedzi) and my temp gauge on the dashboard of my Toyota showed 48 degrees C and it was 6:00 pm in the evening! Saw some wonderfully big elephants though which was great. Got some nice pics of them to show off at the elephant seminar I'm giving at DSC on Saturday. In fact I'm at OR Tambo now waiting for my flight to Dallas! See some of you there.