Night Safari: What Comes Out After Dark

Every safari operates on the same unspoken assumption, and a night safari is the one thing it leaves out. You go out at dawn, you come back for the heat of the day, you go out again in the late afternoon, and once the sun is down you are at camp with a drink. It is a good rhythm and it works.

It also means that most travellers spend a week in one of the richest wildlife environments on earth and never see it at the time when most of it is actually awake.

The bush runs on a different clock

The animals you photograph in daylight are, for the most part, the ones that have adapted to being visible. A great deal of the ecosystem has not.

Leopards do most of their hunting at night. Lions, which spend the day flat on their sides doing an impressive impression of enormous cats, become entirely different animals after dark, moving with purpose, calling, hunting. Hyena, which daylight makes look like scavengers loitering at the edges, are revealed as the formidable and highly organized predators they actually are.

And then there is the entire cast that daylight never shows you at all. Genets, moving along branches like something drawn by someone who had a cat described to them. Civets. Bush babies, whose eyes reflect from thirty meters and who leap distances that seem physically implausible. Porcupines, aardvarks if you are extremely lucky, honey badgers about their business. Owls of several kinds, and nightjars sitting in the road until the last moment.

Most travelers go home having never seen any of them.

What a night drive is actually like

You go out after dinner, or in the last of the light, in an open vehicle with a spotter working a filtered red or amber lamp across the bush on either side.

The first thing that strikes people is how different the same road feels. Landmarks you drove past twice a day have gone, and the world has shrunk to the width of the beam. Your other senses take over, and you notice that the night is astonishingly loud: insects, frogs, the whoop of a hyena somewhere off to the left, and occasionally a lion, whose call at close range is felt in the chest rather than heard.

The spotting technique is eye shine. Different species reflect differently and a good spotter reads colour, height above ground, spacing between the eyes and how they move. They will identify an animal from a pair of reflections before you can see any part of it.

Sightings come suddenly and close, and there is a particular quality to them because you have no peripheral context. A leopard picked out of the dark at fifteen meters, with nothing else visible in any direction, is a considerably more intense experience than the same animal in daylight.

Where you can do it

This is the practical constraint, and it determines your whole itinerary if night drives matter to you.

Most national parks prohibit driving after dark. In Kenya, night drives are generally available in the private conservancies rather than in the national reserves, which is one of several reasons the conservancy model is worth understanding when planning a Mara trip. In Tanzania, the position varies, with some private concessions and reserves permitting it while the major national parks do not. Uganda allows night drives in certain parks, and they are one of the better ways to find leopard and other nocturnal species there.

The consequence is simple. If you want this, it needs to be designed into the trip at the planning stage, because it dictates where you stay rather than being something you request on arrival. It is one of the specific things we check when building a Kenyan or Tanzanian itinerary.

The ethics, plainly

Any activity involving artificial light and nocturnal animals deserves an honest word.

Done properly, night drives use filtered lamps that reduce glare, avoid shining directly into animals’ eyes, keep the light off hunting predators at the critical moment, and do not pursue animals that move away. Guides working to professional standards know this and follow it, and reputable conservancies enforce it.

Done badly, with a white spotlight held on a hunting cat, it interferes with the animal for the sake of a photograph. It is worth asking an operator what their practice is, and it is worth noticing what your guide actually does. A guide who kills the lamp when a leopard begins stalking is telling you something about the whole operation. Research bodies working on nocturnal ecology, including those documenting the region’s smaller carnivores through the IUCN specialist groups, have long noted how much of Africa’s mammal diversity is nocturnal and consequently under-observed by visitors.

Sundowners, and the hour that gets wasted

There is a smaller version of this worth mentioning, because it costs nothing and almost everyone gets it wrong.

The hour after sunset, when most vehicles are heading back for dinner, is one of the most active periods of the day. Predators are stirring. Nocturnal animals are emerging. The light is gone for photography, which is exactly why so many people leave, and exactly why staying is rewarded.

If your camp allows a late return, take it. The half hour between the last of the light and full dark is consistently the most productive underused window on a safari.

The half of the day you paid for

You have spent a considerable amount of money to be in this place. You have flown a long way, given up a week or more of your life, and arranged everything around a small number of days in the bush.

And then, by default, you spend half of every one of those days indoors, because that is how safaris have always been scheduled, and because the animals that are awake in the dark are not the ones on the front of the brochure.

The correction is not complicated. Two or three nights somewhere that permits night drives, built in deliberately at the planning stage, and you will see a completely different set of species and a completely different version of the ones you have already met.

Most people come home having seen the day shift. The night shift was there the entire time, working, twenty meters from the tent, and nobody ever mentioned it.

If you want the other half, say so before we book the camps, because by then it is already too late to add.