My Zambian safari–with an outfitter called The Bushcamp Company, and my first such trip, anywhere–started on November 11, 2023. Before going, I’d been told by a few unrelated people that a safari can be “emotional” and “life-changing.” I was dismissive of these sentiments. I expected that safari would be memorable, but “emotional” seemed a bit… grand.
So, it wasn’t without some mild dissonance that, on day one, while standing in a golden-red river valley awash in reddish rainbow light, I felt kind of sad.
If my paternal grandmother (Anne, nicknamed Andy) had still been alive, November 11, 2023, would have been her 94th birthday. I think about her often, but especially so on every November 11. She and I were close. I was her first grandchild; eventually, she’d have six. Her work earlier in life had been in early childhood education, and she, sometimes to my own mother’s chagrin, applied this role to her grandmothering. She had strong opinions on how things should be and what her grandkids should learn, and the thing that stands out in my memory, foremost, was her love (and then my love) of nature. She emphasized a curiosity around it, and this was especially true of birds. She nurtured this shared interest, and she protected it.
She died over a decade ago, but even so, out there on the rift, as blush-pink birds called carmines dove to catch bees in the twilight, all I could think about was the two of us taking a golf cart down to the pond by her Florida house to look for herons and egrets and geese.
I told this backstory to Suzyo Zimba, my host for the trip and a senior guide for The Bushcamp Company, which is the leading operator in this part of Zambia. The area we were in is part of South Luangwa National Park, a 3,500-square-mile zone founded in 1972 that’s known for having some of the most concentrated game in all of Africa. The Bushcamp Company is one of the only groups with permission to function deep within the park itself. Which means, on days like my day one, you’re pretty much alone in the savannah—an isolation that’s conducive, all the more, to kicking up the emotions I’d rebuffed.
“Okay,” said Suzyo, mild-mannered. He stayed quiet for an extended pause, then: “We’ll look for birds, in honor of her. We’ll get to 94 species. We might even do it tomorrow. There are hundreds of bird species here.”
And so, the mission started. The entire trip became framed around birdwatching—birds in complement to the big game, which I appreciated seeing but that somehow took on a lesser urgency with this new purpose, and birds in complement to the wonderful, warm people of the Company. I put something about it on my Instagram feed, and it struck a chord—I received dozens of DMs asking after the progress of the 94, and how, for the people who knew my grandmother, “this felt very right.”
It’s difficult to convey the breadth and beauty and specialness of these birds in writing, but I’ll try with some, across the order in which they were spotted:
1: We saw a Pennant-Winged Nightjar, dashing between low scrub with long trails from both its wings, making the animal look like a stunt kite. Suzyo said it was a somewhat rare bird to begin with. We were off to an auspicious beginning.
12 and 13: We saw a Bateleur and an African Fish Eagle, both perched high on branches scanning for prey. Both are striking raptors; the latter bird is depicted on Zambia’s flag.
23: We saw Ground Hornbills, which bounced along the mud, cooing eerily in the sunlight.
38: We saw a tawny-hued Pell’s Fishing Owl, blinking off disorientation as the noise of our Defender disrupted its calm. Suzyo told me it was highly unusual to see one in broad daylight in this setting. The most unusual of all the birds we’d see. The pseudo-spiritual side of me can’t help but think that this was my grandmother paying a visit and checking in as the search progressed. I know that can’t be true, but I like the thought.
70: We saw Marabou Storks standing grimly, way up in the trees, leaving no mystery as to their reputation for being nature’s undertakers (they have a gloomy, rattling, no-fuss way about them).
And number 94, three days in, arrived in the form of a nondescript bird called a Village Weaver.
I’d been worrying about what 94 would be, hoping originally that it would alight as something dramatic and endangered, a sign, maybe, that the momentousness of the search was valid. Yet the Village Weaver is plain—yellow and cute, but not super interesting. But, very quickly, it made sense: it reminded me of looking at finches, brown and boring, in their birdbath with my grandmother at her other home, on Long Island. She was just as happy to see them as any other animal that stopped by.
In writing this now, a few months later, it’s almost harder to recall spotting the lions or listening to the hippos at night than it is the fleeting, searing, peripheral instances otherwise: bright red beetles on the ground, their wings fuzzy with a velvet-like coat; 200-year-old African Ebony trees warping and wiggling in a pond-fed thicket; butterflies flitting with the wind through a firescape, like momentary ghosts in a field of singed bones.
I’d like to think my grandmother instilled this love of it all, not just the postcard stuff.
Back in Mfuwe, a town at the edge of South Luangwa, I visited a local school that The Bushcamp Company sometimes tours if guests are interested. There, they have a gallery of student artwork. The pieces are for sale.
Most of the artworks showed various illustrations of the game people travel great lengths to see. Only one, just one, featured a bird. It was a collage of melted beads and rather subdued–wine red and chestnut and black, by a student named Charles. I brought it back to my apartment in Miami, and it’s now in my kitchen. The species? The same that stood out in our goal, the unlikeliest of the 94: a Pell’s Fishing Owl.
Maybe my grandmother really was watching.