It feels as though I’m on another planet. I can see fields of grey mounds and craters surrounding a primeval forest. A blazing red sun fades on one side while a white fluorescent moon rises on the other. Sprouting up from the lush canopy are misshapen trees with what look like giant brown seed pods hanging all over the snaggle-toothed branches.
There’s almost a deathly calm as dusk descends until, closer to the trees, an incessant cheeping becomes audible. Suddenly the pods start wriggling to life. The noise intensifies into a resonating drone like a chopper whirring, the trees explode with life and the air shunts around us. For the next 20 minutes the sky is filled with a chaotic moving blackness.
Bats are everywhere, swirling and silhouetted against the sky like a huge tornado. I feel a rush of adrenalin as though I’m standing in the middle of a sci-fi fantasy. But this apocalyptic wilderness is actually in Zambia, 20 miles or so from the border with the Congo. It’s one of the most untouched forests on earth and this extraordinary phenomenon is the largest animal migration in the world as close to ten million straw-coloured bats come to feed in the Kasanka National Park.
Max, the High Life photographer, and I are on the world’s first bat safari. Lasting just over a week, we’ll spend four days with the bats at Kasanka and a further three days unwinding on a game reserve at Nkwali, where we’ll hopefully be seeing the Big Five as well. We reach Kasanka after an hour’s flight to Mfuwe from Zambia’s capital Lusaka, and a further hour in a Cessna aircraft. Our camp is on the shores of Lake Wasa and surrounded by bush. My accommodation is a decent, basic hut with a comfortable bed under a large mosquito net and an adjoining bathroom for which you order hot water to be brought for a shower. The food is imaginative, considering the remote limitations, and just outside the dining hut are views of hippos and crocs in the lake and hundreds of species of birds in the trees. But the highlight of the trip is half an hour’s drive away into the bush. And it’s not just us who have come to see the bats. Such is their new-found popularity that we are joined by a BBC and Italian television crew. The Beeb is here to film the migration for its series Life, to be screened in two years. And it’s no wonder. It’s a magnificent sight.
The fruit bats hail from deep in the forest of the Congo, but mystery surrounds their life-cycle and migration habits. They are often labelled as disease-carrying mammals, seemingly spewed out in their millions from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. But the bad press appears to be unfair – these genial nocturnal creatures are not the bloodsuckers of horror stories. With faces like miniature chihuahuas, the colouring of golden retrievers and emitting squeaks like Sweep from The Sooty Show, their only bad habit is a destructive weakness for waterberries and loquats (a curious taste, like a cross between a nectarine and custard apple). One of the few facts known is that every November they come to Kasanka to feast on the abundance of these fruits, and at 6pm every night for a month, they take to the skies to start gorging.
With Changwe, our local guide who has been working in the park for 11 years and knows the bats better than anyone, we creep past termite mounds, through long grass and matted tangled vegetation, careful to remain downwind from the bats, who are very sensitive to smell. We pass a wattled crane and a mischievous-looking banded mongoose, while a family of puku antelope scamper away in the distance. I brush off red ants, which have scurried up my legs in a split second and are painfully biting me, their pincers pricking like small needles. As I curb my yelping, we hear a thunderous noise in the trees. There are wild elephants close by, shrouded by the forest, so we head for one of the five forest hides.
