Safari Guide of the Year 2022: Cameron Pearce

Posted by Lauren Dold on 19 May 2023

Named 2022’s Safari Guide of the Year, Cameron Pearce is just as happy spending a day twitching as he is out walking, behind a lens or sitting around a campfire. His motivation is simple: to be the best in the business, and to see as much of this magnificent continent as he can.

I might not be a rocket scientist, or somebody who’s very scientifically inclined or sales driven to make the most money, but I still want to be the best at what I do. Being a ranger is not just a holiday job, or something to do after university. I’m going to be doing this till I’m old and grey and too rickety to walk. That’s why I’ve taken the time to do all the additional courses, the extra qualifications. You can absolutely get a job with just a level one FGASA (Field Guides Association South Africa) qualification, but this is my career, it’s a lifelong passion. 

I started off working in the Sabi Sands, and then I worked at Tswalu in the Kalahari for three years. I’ve tried not to get too caught up in a bubble, but instead, I’ve tried to see as much as I possibly can, to experience as many different environments as I can. Your exposure affects your style of guiding; the more you’ve experienced, the greater your understanding of how everything pieces together. 

I’ve done a lot of field guide training over the years, and I learn from the students all the time. It’s so important to spend time with other guides. Even if you think you might not know as much as the next guy, use that time to ask questions. Spend time with people who are experts in whatever field, as many experts as you can, because no one can be an expert in everything. 

The goal of this competition is to give recognition to guides; it’s a pat on the back for long hours spent in the field in a profession that honestly doesn’t pay particularly well. It was a week of rigorous testing across nine categories, and to win you need to be a jack of all trades. You’ve got to be good at birding, photography, track and sign, game drives, bushwalks and storytelling, and everything else in between. 

One of my pet peeves in guiding is putting too much pressure on animals. In certain parts of the Greater Kruger, guides tend to drive too close to animals because they can, because the animals are habituated. They’ll park two metres away from a leopard, but it doesn’t have to be like that. I was guilty of that when I was younger, and one day I was sitting with my best friend at a leopard sighting. The leopard had an impala carcass on the ground and her two little cubs were feeding on it. She was literally two metres away from the passenger door. ‘This is epic,’ I thought. ‘You don’t get to see leopard cubs this close, in the open. I hope he realises how lucky he is.’ He turned to me and said: ‘Your leopards here are kind of tame, right?’ And I had this devastating realisation that I’d stolen that leopard’s mystique from him. Just because you can get within two metres, doesn’t mean that you have to. 

Obviously, you should improve your position photographically for your guests – you don’t want to have too many branches in the way – but often it’s better to be a bit further away for photographs. So I think that I’d like to see guides having a little bit more sensitivity, building up a sighting from a distance instead of just zooming right in there.

Then of course there are the corny jokes – it would be nice to hear fewer of them. Unfortunately, it becomes a style of guiding. You can forgive the odd joke here and there but when you’ve heard about the flying banana (yellow-billed hornbill) and the McDonald’s of the bush (impala) a hundred times, it becomes tiresome. It’s important to know who your guests are and to adapt your guidance accordingly. 

At Tswalu one late afternoon, in an area known for aardvark, aardwolf and pangolin sightings, I saw something I know I’ll never see again. We’d already seen three or four aardvarks that afternoon. Just as the sun was about to set, we saw this aardvark walking along, and I positioned us to approach on foot. They’re a little bit like rhinos in that they have very poor eyesight, but very good hearing and sense of smell. So if you use the wind the same way that you would use it when approaching rhinos, often you can get within several metres of them on foot. We were about to do that when we noticed a second aardvark, on course to collide with the first. So we hung back a little bit, and sure enough, they bumped right into each other. 

They both reared up on their hind legs and started to pat each other’s faces and chests. It was bizarre. We weren’t sure whether it was going to be an aggressive interaction, but it seemed to be more on the friendly side, a kind of greeting. I couldn’t believe I was able to capture that.

Once, we came across a leopard that had taken its kill up into a tree, stashed it and gone to fetch its cub. While it was away, there were two hyenas that had been lying under the tree, and one of the two started to sniff around, looking up at the tree like it was calculating something. It was a jacket plum, and because of the way it was shaped the hyena figured it could use this to climb the way you would climb up a chimney, with your back up against one side, using your arms and legs to shimmy up. 

The hyena got about 5m up, grabbed this wildebeest and fell back down. The leopardess returned with its cub, pleased with their waiting breakfast. It followed the cub up the tree but couldn’t believe its kill was gone, knowing that hyenas don’t climb trees. The leopard became very aggressive towards us; I think it genuinely thought we were responsible for the stolen kill so we left immediately. 

I think, in the safari industry, we’re beginning to see the end of the multi-pronged safari. This formula of a morning game drive, breakfast, a half-hearted bushwalk and an evening drive with a bit of photography has become so common. Those general, gentle bush walks are going to die away. The level of skill that’s required is becoming uneconomical, the amount of money and time that it takes to become a trails guide isn’t worth most guides’ time. So I see specialised trips becoming more popular. If guests are looking for a walking experience, they’ll book a trail, photographers will be looking to be guided by a specialist photographer, and birders will look for birding safaris instead of going to a lodge that does a little bit of everything. 

Cameron’s pick of emerging African reserves

1 Zakouma National Park, Chad

It’s incredible, it’s untouched. It’s 300 000ha, but it receives just 150 visitors a year. That’s almost five times the size of the Sabi Sands, with a tiny fraction of the visitors.

africanparks.org/the-parks/zakouma

2 Odzala-Kokoua, Republic of the Congo

It’s definitely right up there as an up-and-coming destination. I don’t think it’s ever going to take off, but that’s the beauty of it. It’s always going to remain a frontier.

africanparks.org/the-parks/odzala-kokoua

3 Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve, Central African Republic

This is one of the only places in the world where you can see habituated western lowland gorillas and forest elephants.

dzanga-sangha.org

4 Ennedi Natural and Cultural Reserve, Chad

Although it’s not necessarily a traditional safari destination, at 500 000ha it’s going to be the kind of place people start searching for in the next five or 10 years as the traditional places become more and more commercialised. 

africanparks.org/the-parks/ennedi

5 Loango National Park, Gabon

It’s pricey but that will help to keep these kinds of places precious. You might spend what you’d spend on a small car, but this isn’t somewhere you go on a long weekend; it’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

gabonwildlifecamps.com

 

This article originally appeared in the October 2022 print issue of Getaway

 

Photography: Armadillo Media






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