Hi folks,

Below is an account of an interesting hunt I had this fall with Muchinga Adventures in Zambia. This trip was my 3rd to Africa and my 40th birthday present to myself (how the hell did I end up being 40?). Maybe because I left a new daughter at home, I found this trip to be very raw and intense. I was going to be emotionally drained by the experience even before I wounded and lost a buffalo and spent parts of the last 3 days of the hunt rooting around in the grass for it. The days were crammed full with more than just hunting and even as long as this report is, I didn’t even mention many of the high points.

Dates: Sept.11 to Oct.4 2008
Company: Muchinga Adventures (John & Laura DuPlooy).
Agent: Mark Young
Country: Zambia
Areas Hunted: Tondwa (10days) in the far north and Chanjuzi (7days) in the Luangwa Valley. Air charters are an expensive fact of life in Zambia, especially if hunting more than one area. I had a bit of extra time and was willing to be flexible with my schedule. This let Muchinga work my flights in with other hunters and supply runs which cut the costs dramatically. They were able to save me the equivalent of the trophy fee on a sitatunga or roan when compared to the original estimate.

Animals Hunted:
Tondwa: sitatunga, sable, roan, duiker, reedbuck, warthog, Lichenstein’s hartebeest, puku.
Chanjuzi: buffalo, Cookson’s wildebeest, waterbuck, impala, bushbuck Sharpe’s grysbok.
We saw mature males of every species I had a license for. Some didn’t offer a shot, and some weren’t what I was looking for.

PH: Terry Van Rooyen is a lot of fun to be around. He is young, enthusiastic and talented. He is also in the business for the right reasons. Not from a hunting family, Terry decided to become a PH because he loves the bush and the beasties that live there. He is an intense person and spending his hunting season’s splashing around in central African swamps hasn’t done his health any good. Terry hunts hard, but it hurts him. I hope he can keep it up long enough for me to hunt with him again.

Tondwa

Tondwa was classified as depleted when ZAWA re-assigned the concessions a few years ago. Since then, Muchinga has done a great job working with ZAWA to rebuild the game through AGGRESSIVE anti-poaching activities, community involvement and conservative quotas. Poaching is still an issue, with a large percentage of the poachers coming from the Congo just 20-30 kms to the north. There is a strong element of tribal warfare to ZAWA’s anti-poaching efforts, at least when it comes to the Congolese. ZAWA doesn’t give poachers from the Congo an opportunity to become repeat offenders. Before booking this hunt, I tried to do my homework carefully, getting a good picture of what to expect. From talking with hunters who’d been to Tondwa over the last few years, I got the impression that game populations were good and improving yearly. I saw more and better game than I had expected to. As evidence of the returning game, while I was there the trackers found the first leopard sign since Muchinga took the concession and lion were heard in the hills behind camp for the first time the week before I arrived.

At present, Tondwa is a fairly specialised hunting area. Most people go to Tondwa for sitatunga which weren’t badly impacted by the rampant poaching during the hunting closure period. I saw a lot of mature bulls in the brief time I hunted them and later when we were spotting roan from old sitatunga machans. Tondwa is a great place for roan, they were the second most common antelope after puku when I was there. Sable are there, and despite what you’ll occasionally see in print, the mature bulls are black. From my experience and from what Terry and other hunters said, I figure you have even odds of getting a good sable bull in Tondwa. With the return of the cats and buffalo, Tondwa will likely be a general bag area again before Muchinga’s 15 year term is up (in about 2017 I think).

If you are going to Tondwa, think hard about what you really want and let Muchinga know well in advance. Remember, quotas are tight. Be sure to ask about bushbuck which may be on quota next year for the first time since Muchinga took over. We ran into dozens of them including some really old rams. This really surprised Terry, who has been working in Tondwa for 5 or 6 seasons and hadn’t seen very many. The bushbuck in Tondwa had a beautiful brilliant orange coat, much brighter than the bushbuck in the Luangwa. Maybe we saw more bushbuck because of the drought and having taken my sitatunga and roan early on, we spent a lot of time in parts of the concession not regularly hunted.

Anyway, on to the hunting.

We bumped into this reedbuck 10 mins out of the camp on the first morning and set the pattern for the entire trip, a lot of crawling and some marginal shooting. Until the buffalo, my first shot generally secured the animal but half the time another shot or 2 would be needed to tidy things up.



I wasn’t really enthused about hunt sitatunga until I found out you didn’t have to use a machan. The Tondwa GMA is based around 2 lakes, a marsh or two and the surrounding flood plains and hills. While much of Zambia was experiencing floods this year, the north went through a severe drought. Lake Tondwa and the marshes dried up enough that the hippo abandoned them for Kako, the second, spring fed, lake. We had planned to hunt from a canoe, but with the low water, we were able to spot and stalk sitatunga with only the odd dunking. I was always hoping the hippo weren’t really as close as they sounded. On the first evening of the first day of the hunt, I decided not to try an awkward running shot on a huge old sitatunga. I did take the 2nd sitatunga we stalked the next morning. I almost passed him up in favour of taking another crack at the big boy from the night before. I’m glad I didn’t.



Puku were around in the thousands for the first week or so.


Poaching is still an issue. Terry shot this sow because she was struggling and to make a point with ZAWA.


Roan were abundant. This outcaste bull was all by himself on the edge of nearly dry marsh late one morning.



He was the 3rd or 4th bull we’d been in shooting position on and we’d glassed and passed another 4 or 5. The day before we got this one, we’d seen over 100 roan, including a herd of over 60, the result of a harem take over during the night. During the previous couple of days, we had stalked and passed both bulls involved. The winner was a broken horned bull with one spectacular flaring horn. The loser hung around an open plain for a few days looking lost and confused. There had been showers to the south of the concession and some herds started to move towards the rain. After we got our bull, we didn’t see more than a dozen roan for the rest of our stay.

This duiker was roasted whole on a spit. The basting brush was a vulture feather.


The second animal Terry had ever shot for himself was part of his tip.



The results of a bit of spear fishing on duiker roasting day.



After Terry reported to ZAWA that poachers were operating in the area, a couple of patrols were sent out. We later learned that 10 mins after this photo was taken, this bike patrol heard a shot from an AK. The chase was on and the scouts were disappointed to say that while they were able to fire on the poachers, all of them made it to thick bush unharmed. Like I said, anti-poaching efforts are aggressive in the area.



Warthog were everywhere and traveled in large groups, kicking up dust like herds of mini buffalo. Big old males with 2 tusks were tough to come by though.



Chanjuzi

Muchinga will hunt the buffalo herds or dugga boys depending on what the client wants and what is working. I’d hunted the herds in the Selous and wanted to try the dugga boys this time. While we were in Tondwa, we’d heard over the radio that the buffalo in Chanjuzi had bunched up into one huge herd of about 1600 animals and that the dugga boys had disappeared from their normal haunts. The super herd had broken into groups of 300-400 by the time we got there, but there were still no dugga boys about. We looked daily (as did the other hunting party in camp) with absolutely no luck.

Still, we were in the grass with the buffalo morning and night with from the first day to last. There were some spectacular youngish bulls in the herds that we didn’t bother. If some SCI record book types don’t get impatient, there is a good stock of future trophies in the mid 40’s in Chanjuzi. As it is, a 7 day hunt will give you a reasonable chance to get a hard 40” bull. You will be sharing the grass with lion and elephant.





Between the elephant in Chanjuzi and potential poachers in Tondwa, I became familiar with the sound of AK-47s being cocked.

Terry and I both picked up a stomach bug at a guest house in Kasama when we changed camps. Terry got sick first and was almost out on his feet by the end of the morning hunt. After lunch, while Terry camped out in the latrine, I walked out of camp with a tracker and a scout. We came back 45 mins later with this bushbuck.



I can’t say who was happier, me or Boniface the tracker, who really enjoyed the chance to take the role of PH. I got sick that evening and had a long night. Thanks to the wonders of medicine, Terry and I were both on our feet the next morning and no hunting time was lost.

On day 5 I fluffed a frontal shot on a buff. What can I say? It was entirely my fault and as a result everyone had to work hard in the sun, never mind the potential danger. We never found the buff again. He is the second animal I’ve wounded and lost and has started showing up in my dreams. Tracking in the heat of October (high 30’s, low 40’s) with diarrhoea seems a fair punishment for the bad shot. Strangely, the fear soon wore off and while my concern about maybe being responsible for getting some one hurt remained, I mostly just wanted it to end. I love hunting buffalo. They excite me, which I guess is what caused the problem in the first place.

On the second day of tracking, my buff went into the park. Terry insisted it was time to get an impala, I assume mostly to see how I was shooting. Not too well as it turned out, the impala needed a second shot.



I apparently wasn’t taking the loss of the buff real well. Terry, trying to make me feel better, started in on some BS story about odd sounding ammunition. I cut that crap off hard enough that I later apologised. When we got back to camp, I apologised to the hunting crew about the whole affair, told them to let it go and that we’d start enjoying ourselves again on the afternoon hunt. Later, when we started seeing bushbuck instead of the waterbuck we were after, I suggested Terry take the opportunity to use his resident’s bushbuck license. He decided on this old boy.



The last hunting day saw us unsuccessfully searching for a good Cookson’s wildebeest or waterbuck. Along the way, we bumped into the herd of buff my bull had been with. Back to buffalo tracking. After we decided my bull wasn’t with the herd, we cut a lone set of bull tracks just before noon.



An hour or so later, we concluded that these tracks belonged to the only dugga boy we came across in Chanjuzi.

The last afternoon of hunting in Chanjuzi wonderful. We went looking for waterbuck and found nothing but bull elephant. The biggest bull we saw (60+ lbs), gave us one look and slipped into the bush while his askari stood for pictures. Later we saw something from the time before the Luangwa got hammered by poachers in the 70’s and 80’s. We ran into a heard of 5 bulls, 3 of them with ivory in the 40 60 lbs range. The rhino are long gone, but the elephant are coming back strong. The guys at the regional ZAWA office expect a bit of elephant hunting in the Luangwa in the next few years.

Terry and I had shared a charter flight into the valley with 2 other hunters who would also be hunting with Muchinga. One was after cats with PH Alister Norton and we shared the camp and concession. Chanjuzi is more than big enough for this, with our differing priorities, we never had to worry about running into each other. The third hunter was giving a new meaning to the term mini safari in Muchinga’s adjacent concession with PH Abie DuPlooy. A sudden business problem left him with only 3 hunting days, but he got his croc, hippo and buff. There must have been some bad ju-ju on that plane, because we all ended up wounding dangerous animals. The hunter in the other camp wounded a buff with a bad frontal shot then short stroked his WR made .425 WR. The bolt caught on the case, but did not engage the rebated rim causing a jam and some tense moments while Abie sorted out the buff. The next day I messed up and 2 days later, the cat hunter shot a leopard in the foot.

At this point, my hunt was over and Terry was scheduled to shuttle some supplies between camps. With nothing better to do until the flight out in the late afternoon, I volunteered to drive the supply truck so Terry could help out with the wounded cat, just as Alister had helped out with my buff. By the time I got back from the supply run, the leopard was in the salt and the beer was out. It hadn’t ended in a real charge, but Alister had ended up having to shoot a moving, growling cat while crawling through bush too thick to even sit upright in. Two wounded buff and one wounded leopard in 5 days, but nobody got hurt. Maybe the ju-ju on the plane wasn’t so bad after all.

Cheers,
Dean

Great report!

Thanks for sharing.

Maki, great report and Pics. Sorry to hear about your buffalo but well done overall .

Thank you for sharing your story with us! Sorry to hear about the buff, but that is hunting.

Even though the buffs eluded you, you certainly came home with a wonderful bag of trophies! Congrats. I like that sitatunga! Perfect horns.. And roan! Wow!

Maki. The only people who haven't screwed up a shot on safari are those who haven't been there much. I don't think that any writer has come close to describing how awful you feel after you do it and you're on the followup.

I don't like frontal shots on buffalo. Having said that, I think about 1/3 of the buffalo I have shot have been frontal (they've detected something and are looking, trying to figure out what it is). The problem with frontal shots is if you miss to either side, you take out only one lung. If you're a bit high, then you're in more trouble. Also, for this reason I don't like solids for first shot on buffalo, especially in .375. A buffalo shot through the upper lung with a small solid can go a long, long way. What gun were you using and what bullet?

Excellent hunt, buff or no buff. I wouldn't kick my ass over the shot too much, the only way to ensure you never miss is to never shoot.

Congrats on a wonderful hunt! Tondwa sounds like an interesting area.

Brett

Thanks, great report sounds like a wonderful hunt. I think Zambia will be next on my list.

Great report and fantastic pictures. Zambia with Muchinga is on my to do list.

Thanks all.

Tondwa is an interesting place. When not hunting, there was some geology, archeology, sociology or biology to amuse us. Terry amused himself in a bit more direct way than most. If he thought things are getting a bit slow, he'd be off in the weeds catching some sort of critter. Mostly lizards, but snakes and a baboon too. Actually the baboon was a communal effort capped off with an incredible bit of running by the game scout.

JohnDL, I was using my CZ .375 H&H with hand loaded 300gr A-Frames. When I'm shooting regularily, I figure I could use the .375 for everything. I took it instead of a relatively new .404 J because I wasn't completely comfortable with the Jeffery (still not actually, haven't shot it enough).

Cheers,
Dean

Thanks for the African report and pictures.

Dean,

I've been waiting for this. Great report and pix. If I had not already taken a good sitatunga in 2000 in Bangweulu I would already have hunted Tondwa. It is a very good hunt for some special animals. Muchinga has some discounted sitatunga left for '09 and I'll post an ad.

Mark

Beautiful animals and a nice report. Thanks.

Nice report. Sorry about the buff but the roan and sitatunga were solid! I would like to try the Tondwa hunt... maybe 2011. Had a good visit with Johnny, Laura and Terry in Reno and they said good odds on sitatunga and better than even on roan and sable. Did you see many eland and/or buff in Tondwa?

bwanamrm,

What you heard at the convention fits with what I saw and heard. There are many sitatunga. I shot mine because, looking through the scope at 30 yds, I could see his left horn was frayed. Because of this, I thought he was getting very old. Once he was on the ground, we found the backs of his horns notched, likely by a snare that would also have caused the fraying. So my bull is interesting, but average (and I'm very happy with him), but I know there are much bigger in the marshes in Tondwa. Inches don't really interest me (I actually only know the measurements of 2 animals I've ever taken and then only because of special circumstance) but I was very tempted to pass this one and try for the bull we saw on the first evening.

I think Laura et al were maybe under stating the odds on roan. I left with the impression that most people wanting roan got one, or at least had a chance at a mautre bull. We were seeing 50-60 a day and no one seemed to think that was very special, but when we saw >100 one day, a few comments were made. Of course, the next day and for the rest of the trip, we probably didn't see more than 15 total. Then again, once I had one down we stopped looking.

Sable I think would be less of a sure thing. My impression from Terry, previous hunters and my own eyes would be that you'd had even odds of getting a good sable. I could have shot 2 black sable bulls, but they weren't what I was looking for in what would have maybe been the only sable I'll every shoot. The sable below is obviously too young to be a trophy, but maybe by 2011. He was hanging around the edges of large herd, wishing he was old enough to beat up the herd bull who had no where near the horn length.



We didn't see any buffalo, but we weren't looking and we did cross the tracks of lone bulls on 2 occasions. As I'm sure you know, they only had 1 buff on quota in Tondwa in 2008 and that was just in case they had a problem with one. Having said that, the skulls I saw were promising. Terry picked up a spectacular 43" skull that now sits at the ZAWA post outside Tondwa along with another equally impressive skull. Below is the skull of a young bull we found in the bush that I think showed some good genes.



As for eland, well we saw some, but didn't go looking as there unfortunately none left on quota. Hunters from previous years have been impressed with what they saw, but I didn't get close enough to form an opinion.

All the best with your trip planning,
Dean

yup tondwa is a unique place. we also did very well there in 07.



i have to agree with you the roan we saw several herds. we did see a buff or 2, but just passing through. the crashays waterbuck we got on the last minute of the last day after looking for them the whole hunt. i guess it was only the 3rd one they have taken there and were taking them off quota. saw a herd or 2 of sable including a couple of 40" class bulls, but i don't believe they come into the crater until the water is exhausted in the hills

Maki,
Thanks for the follow-up. I hunted with Muchinga and Terry back in '06 in Chanjuzi and Nyaminga and had a great hunt. The sitatunga trip is intrigueing and I think I may see about tying one up in '11. Thanks again.
Cheers,
Russell

Dean...awesome report. I too hunted with the DuPlooys...Johnny...in Chanjuzi in late August thru mid Sept. Wonderful place. Met Terry while there....a go getter for sure.
Thanks for the report....brings back great memories.

Gary
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