Episode summary:
I spent a magical evening on a sand dune at Sossusvlei in the Namib-Naukluft National Park, listening to a very tuneful gecko singing at sunset to attract a mate. The park – in Namibia in southwest Africa – occupies almost 50,000 sq km (more than 19,000 sq miles) and has a remarkable variety of wildlife considering it is in one of the driest deserts on the planet.
If you wondering ‘what is the Namib-Naukluft National Park’, ‘what is Namibia famous for’ or ‘what is special about Sossusvlei’, this podcast episode might help.
Listen to a podcast about a singing gecko on a Namibian sand dune.
Transcript – S4 E10: In Namibia’s magical desert dunes
This week we’re lying on a sand dune in Africa listening to a loveable and rather comical reptile.
I’m feeling rather deflated having spent a very hot day sitting in a stifling, sandy-coloured hide, binoculars fixed to my eyes, looking for bat-eared foxes… and seeing not one. Not even the tip of an oversized ear moving behind a rock.
I did see a scorpion which was, according to my patient guide, one of the Hairy Thick-tailed variety. It was a little too close for comfort and needed a gentle shooing out of the way before it crawled up my boot. We saw white-backed vultures too, wheeling ominously over the valley, looking for lunch. But the bat-eared foxes must have been having a sick day, laying low in a shady den.
The beauty of the desert
Africa is the continent I have explored the least, which is why I only have a few tales to tell you from here. There’s no real reason for this… it’s just the way things happened. But the bits I have visited I have loved, possibly none more than here in the Namib-Naukluft National Park in Namibia, in the continent’s arid southwest.
The park occupies almost 50,000 sq km (more than 19,000 sq miles) and is – I believe – still the largest game park in Africa. It lies between the Atlantic coast and the Great Escarpment, the mighty rock ridge that runs south from Namibia, loops through South Africa and heads north again along the border of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The park encompasses part of the Namib Desert, one of the driest in the world and, I think, also the oldest.
I am in the Sossusvlei region today, which is most famous for two salt pans – one carries the same name while the other is called, rather spookily, Deadvlei. This is because of the presence of jet-black skeletons of camelthorn trees that – despite having died more than 600 years ago when an old oasis dried up – still stand, scorched daily by the unforgiving sun and silhouetted against orange sand dunes.
By late afternoon, my guide and I reluctantly pack up the gear – finding another scorpion in the process – and bump down a rocky, sandy track in our LandRover to these orange dunes for sunset.
The sun is low now, fizzing away out over the Atlantic and has left the dunes comfortingly warm as we flop down, spread out a blanket and devour some equally warm sandwiches. I’ve got nothing against Hairy Thick-tailed scorpions or white-backed vultures but my wildlife notebook page for today is looking a bit pathetic with just those two names scrawled in it.
I am especially disappointed as the fauna in the Sossusvlei area is meant to be surprisingly varied. There are jackals here. Springbok too. Even gemsbok, with their black-and-white faces and crazy spiralled horns. But not today. At least, not for us.
A tuneful wildlife surprise
Just as we are giving up hope for the day we hear something. It’s a series of chirps. It sounds like a bird but the only birds out here are our friends the vultures and they are miles away now, probably with their heads stuck in a bloody carcass.
A smile finally cracks my guide’s face. “Barking gecko,” he says and starts thumbing through his flora and fauna book to show me a photo. So the day has not been in vain after all. We are being serenaded by the Namib Chirping Gecko, also known as Carp’s Barking Gecko, a species endemic to Namibia. Actually the gecko is not serenading us but any female geckos that might be in hearing range.
It’s tiny – barely 5cm, or 2.3 inches – from snout to tail, and it must have just ventured out from its daytime burrow to start a night of courting. The one we are listening to chirps in a run of seven or eight evenly spaced beats but then he must get a fly stuck in his throat because he hiccups and has to start all over again.
The late afternoon breeze has died away so this is the only noise out here.
As we crawl on our hands and knees towards where we think the gecko is chirping, we reach the ridge of a low dune. The sun has just set and the western sky is majestically colour-graded… a deep midnight blue higher up, merging into pale blue, off-white, egg-yolk yellow and – nearest the horizon – a burnt ochre. Dazzling against this backdrop is a single bright, white dot: Venus, following the sun down to its resting place.
The gecko’s chirps are a bit louder. He’s definitely here somewhere. But then, as suddenly as he began his serenade, he stops.
“Maybe he see us,” my guide says. We slither back down the dune towards our blanket and our reptilian chansonnier picks up the mike once more and we lie there listening to him and hoping a female is also listening somewhere close by.
I may not have seen the little reptile but hearing it is just as good – better perhaps – and it means I can scrawl a third name on my Sossusvlei wildlife safari page.
© copyright Matthew Brace
