KAFUE NATIONAL PARK, Zambia — “Hippos ahead.” The warning comes from the lead canoe. Hippos are dangerous — highly territorial and fiercely protective of their young. They are capable of capsizing boats and inflicting serious injuries. The line of five canoes hugs the riverbank to avoid a group midstream, but suddenly a mother hippo (Hippopotamus amphibius) and her calf charge down from the bank where they’d been grazing unseen. The animals barrel toward the river and the flotilla, the mother braking at the last second. Changing course, she and her calf plunge into the water just behind the last canoe. It’s only the second close encounter of the 34-day expedition, says Mike Ross, leader of The Wilderness Project (TWP) team. “You can’t really blame them — the water is their safe place.” And this particular stretch of the Kafue River, in central Zambia, is especially so. Hippos wallowing on the sunny, muddy shallows beside the Kafue River. Image by Ryan Truscott for Mongabay. Over 82 days in 2024, Ross and a TWP team journeyed along the entire length of the Kafue, tracing its path from the river’s source near the Democratic Republic of Congo border, through the Copperbelt’s industrial zones, across the papyrus-lined dambo wetlands of the Kafue Flats and down to the steep Kafue Gorge — a topographical bottleneck that prevents some species, like African tigerfish (Hydrocynus vittatus), from moving upstream from the Zambezi. “An ever-changing river,” is how Ross describes the Kafue — slouching across open floodplains in…This article was originally published on Mongabay