Kings and Rollers
Cat walk…
Lion Walk
I’ve just spent a week as the resident photographer for Imvelo Safaris at Bomani Tented Lodge near Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. I didn’t have any dramatic encounters and mostly saw lions and birds—which was a little disappointing as I’d heard that Hwange was a good place to see the Big Five. However, it was still very enjoyable—especially as I got free accommodation as part of the deal!
The Camp
The main area of Bomani Tented Lodge
Imvelo Safaris was founded by a Zimbabwean businessman called Mark Butcher, and he still runs the company—although he’s now taken on a few other investors. It’s a local business, though, and that’s a bit of a rarity in a market dominated by multinationals like andBeyond and Wilderness Safaris. Imvelo means ‘Nature’ in one of the tribal languages, and its tagline is ‘Connecting People and Nature’.
Bomani Tented Lodge lay beside a waterhole just outside Hwange National Park (see above). It consisted of a main area and 11 chalets (including a family room) able to sleep a total of 24 guests. It was fairly typical for an African safari camp, with a swimming pool, a campfire pit, a dining area, a bathroom block and, most importantly, a bar!
My room
At most other lodges, I end up in the room that’s the furthest from the main area, but it was only a two-minute walk down a path through the trees this time. There was also just about enough light for me to go to the main area on my own in the mornings, which was convenient.
The room was reasonably spacious and comfortable with an en-suite bathroom and a few nice touches, including two expertly-tied towel elephants (see above)! In addition, Imvelo had managed to get all the basics right: hot and cold running water, power outlets with three-pin and USB sockets, a reliable electricity supply and a Wi-Fi connection that never went down—although it was a bit dodgy sometimes…!
Daily Routine
Imvelo guests on safari
The daily routine was pretty much the same as in most African lodges:
0515 Wake up
0540 Juice in the main area
0545-1030 Morning game drive with Tuso
1030 Coke in the main area (instead of lunch)
1540 Juice in the main area
1545-1830 Afternoon game drive with Tuso (including sundowners)
1930-2015 Dinner in the main area
2115-0515 Sleep—very badly…!
In between game drives, I sat at the corner of the bar to rate my photos, recharge my camera batteries and surf the internet, and I even had time to do my daily social media blast. After dinner, I went back to my room to work on my laptop and maybe watch a TV show if I had time.
The only interruption to the normal routine came when a venomous eastern bark snake appeared in the doorway of the main area—but Tusa managed to get rid of it with the aid of a broom!
Food and Drink
Dessert…!
I don’t go to Africa for the food and drink—which is just as well! Dinner at Bomani felt like a race against time, with each course following hard on the heels of the last—and it sometimes reminded me of 1970s school dinners!
The less said, the better…
Staff
Tuso, my safari guide and driver
I spent most of my time at Bomani with my driver, a local lad called Tuso. He’d only just moved to Bomani, but he was very helpful with identifying all the different species of birds, and we got on pretty well.
I didn’t spend much time with any of the other staff. The deputy manager, Big Boy, went on holiday on my second day, and the only other person I regularly talked to was Lovemore, the steward.
Having said that, the staff were always friendly and efficient. When I arrived in camp, the pump-action body lotion dispenser in my bathroom wasn’t working, so I asked Lovemore to have a look at it. When I went back to my room, it had already been replaced.
On another occasion, I asked Tuso if we could go somewhere else to try and find a few other predators apart from lions. When I asked the stand-in manager, Peter, he told me that Tuso had already mentioned it to him. Score one for Imvelo customer service!
Guests
Hayley’s family and friends
I shared a 3.5-hour transfer with a few other guests after the local airstrip was flooded, but they stayed at Camelthorn Lodge, and I was the only guest at Bomani when I arrived. In fact, the only other guests to arrive during my stay were the friends and family of Hayley, who was one of the Imvelo staff I dealt with prior to my stay.
There were half a dozen adults and a couple of kids, and we had a laugh together—although they were only there for a couple of days. You don’t normally get communal dining at Bomani, but we managed to get round that rule on our first night together, and I spent most of dinner showing my photos to a young boy called Eli.
He was pretty good at recognising the species—although I had to teach him the difference between a leopard and a cheetah!
It was also Malcolm’s birthday, so there was a cake, and we all sang ‘Happy Birthday’. However, he was also the butt of a few jokes as it turned out the name on his birth certificate was actually ‘Malcom’. Apparently, his father had forgotten to write the second ‘l’!
Wildlife
Golden Horn
I knew I was going to Hwange in the off-season, but I was cautiously optimistic that I’d at least see the Big Five—if not the so-called Magnificent Seven (including cheetahs and wild dogs). That didn’t quite happen, sadly, but there was still plenty to photograph…
Predators
When I go on safari, it’s usually all about the big cats. I love cheetah kills, playful lion cubs and almost any sighting of leopards. If I see any kind of cats, I’m happy to stay with them until the action happens—rather than taking a few record shots and moving on as most people do.
There were around 18 lions in the local Ngamo pride, including a male called Lobhengula, three or four females and a dozen cubs of various ages. I did see them a few times, including a great sighting on the railway tracks just after sunrise (see above), but they were mostly in the Wilderness concession—and that was off-limits.
On the last two days of my stay, I also saw a female cheetah near the waterhole back at camp. She managed to kill an impala, and I took a few stills and video clips as she lay on the grass and fed on the carcase. However, when she finally moved on, there wasn’t enough room in the clearing to get many decent shots, so we had to abandon her in the woods…
We didn’t see any leopards or wild dogs, which was a shame. I always feel as if a safari is somehow incomplete unless I see at least one leopard, and African wild dogs are always good value. However, we didn’t even get a sniff…
Rhinos
One of the reasons I visited Bomani was to see the white rhinos. There were two pairs of males in two adjoining sanctuaries: Ngamo and Mlevu. It was a pilot programme with the eventual goal of reintroducing rhinos into Hwange National Park.
One afternoon, I went to the Ngamo Wildlife Sanctuary to see Thuza and Kusasa. They were the only animals in the entire sanctuary, so I could go in on foot, but it was hard to get clear sightings as the grass was so high, and the guards were very fussy!
In the end, I did get a few decent stills and video clips, but it was such a struggle that I decided not to visit the other sanctuary the following day.
Birds
One good thing about Zimbabwe is that there are plenty of birds. I saw even more lilac-breasted rollers than I would in Botswana, and there were several other species that I’d never seen in my life, including the pale spotted owlet, red-crested korhaan and the swallow-tailed bee-eater (see Species list below).
My favourite African birds are raptors, rollers, bee-eaters and kingfishers, and there were plenty of all those—apart from kingfishers for some reason. It was probably because there was no river or major body of water nearby, but I don’t know for sure. The same is true of Kicheche, but I saw dozens of grey-headed kingfishers when I went there in December 2024…
Like most people, I prefer action shots to portraits, so my usual approach to bird photography is to take a few quick portraits in Raw using my Z8 and 600mm lens before increasing my frame rate to 30 fps—which automatically switches on Pre-Release Capture in JPEG format.
Pre-Release Capture is a game-changer for bird photography. Essentially, it means that the camera ‘secretly’ takes pictures and buffers them as soon as you activate the autofocus system. When you finally press the shutter, those buffered images are written to the memory card.
You can play around with the settings, but I dial in the maximum time permitted, so I get a full second’s worth of photos before I press the shutter. That makes it easy to capture the crucial moments when the bird takes off. In fact, it’s virtually impossible to miss!
The only problem with this approach is that you often have to spend up to 10, 15 or even 20 minutes waiting for the bird to take off. That comes at the expense of looking for better subjects, such as the big cats or African wild dogs, so I do occasionally worry about that.
It reminds me of a concept I recently came across called the exploration-exploitation trade-off. This is a decision-making concept that involves choosing between exploring new options or exploiting known options. It's a fundamental idea in fields such as computer science, psychology, and machine learning, but it also applies to wildlife photography.
You might think a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, but you never know what the opportunity cost might be. Are you missing out on a cheetah hunt because you’re so obsessed with lilac-breasted rollers…?!
I don’t quite know the answer to that one, but I suppose you can judge for yourself based on the images in this article.
Other
On my very first game drive, I told Tusa that I was looking for predators and birds and wasn’t really interested in anything else. In fact, I told him not to stop for elephants, giraffes or any of the antelopes. That’s because I had plenty of shots of those species already, and it would’ve been wasting time to try and find them.
I did feel a little guilty about that considering that I was supposed to be taking shots for Imvelo as well as for myself, but I made up for it during my last couple of game drives by photographing all the major animal species.
In fact, we were lucky enough to see an elephant with new-born twins, which was a very rare sight (see video below). One of them lay down, so it was impossible to take any decent photos, but it was still cool to see them both.
Overall, I took 30,224 photos and 78 videos in 13 game drives over seven days. (It should’ve been 14, but I missed one due to the long transfer.) I didn’t take any five-star shots, but I managed to come up with 50 four-star versions that fulfilled my contractual obligation to Imvelo. However, I'll also send them my three-star shots—just to make sure most of the major species are covered.
From my perspective, the 50 photos I agreed to are a legal maximum but a professional minimum…!
Verdict
My trip to Bomani left me with somewhat mixed feelings. It was very enjoyable for all the usual reasons, but it didn’t offer me any really exciting moments, such as a cheetah kill or a fight between lions. For better or worse, I’m only really happy if I take great photos, and that didn’t quite happen this time.
However, I’m very grateful to Imvelo for the opportunity to visit Hwange, and I hope they appreciate the stills and videos I sent them. Who knows? Perhaps it will be the start of a beautiful friendship…
Species
I saw quite a few species that I’d never seen before. These are shown in bold.
Animals (24)
African bush elephant
Banded mongoose
Black-backed jackal
Blue wildebeest
Cape buffalo
Chacma baboon
Cheetah
Common eland
Common slender mongoose
Common waterbuck
Donkey
Greater kudu
Hippopotamus
Impala
Leopard tortoise
Lion
Plains zebra
Rock monitor
Sable antelope
Serrated hinged terrapin
Smith's bush squirrel (tree squirrel)
Southern giraffe
Vervet monkey
White rhino
Birds (84)
African jacana
African openbill
African pipit
African spoonbill
Arrow-marked babbler
Bateleur
Bearded woodpecker
Black kite
Black-backed puffback
Black-headed heron
Blacksmith lapwing
Bradfield’s hornbill
Brown snake-eagle
Brown-crowned tchagra
Cape starling (Cape glossy starling)
Carmine bee-eater
Cattle egret
Common ostrich
Crested francolin
Crimson-breasted shrike
Crowned lapwing
Dickinson’s kestrel
Egyptian goose
Emerald-spotted wood-dove
European bee-eater
Fork-tailed drongo
Gabar goshawk
Great egret
Green wood-hoopoe
Grey crowned crane
Grey go-away-bird
Grey heron
Grey-headed kingfisher
Groundscraper thrush
Helmeted guineafowl
Hooded vulture
Jacobin cuckoo
Knob-billed duck (African comb duck)
Lappet-faced vulture
Lesser grey shrike (grey-backed fiscal)
Lilac-breasted roller
Little bee-eater
Magpie shrike
Marabou stork
Marico flycatcher
Martial eagle
Meves’s starling
Pale spotted owlet
Pied babbler
Pied crow
Pin-tailed whydah
Purple roller
Red-backed shrike
Red-billed oxpecker
Red-billed spurfowl
Red-billed teal
Red-crested korhaan
Red-eyed dove
Red-faced mousebird
Ring-necked dove
Rufous-naped lark
Sacred ibis
Saddle-billed stork
Secretary bird
Shaft-tailed whydah
Southern ground hornbill
Southern red-billed hornbill
Southern white-crowned shrike
Southern yellow-billed hornbill
Spotted thick-knee
Spur-winged goose
Swallow-tailed bee-eater
Tawny eagle
Three-banded plover
Whiskered tern
White stork
White-backed vulture
White-browed sparrow-weaver
White-faced whistling-duck
White-headed vulture
Wood sandpiper
Woolly-necked stork
Yellow-billed kite
Yellow-billed oxpecker
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