Sandibe overlooks the permanent Santantadibe River from within this watery side, on the reserve’s northwestern corner. Around it there are plenty of open-water areas and floodplains, fringed by belts of riverine vegetation with a high proportion of real fan palms, Hyphaene petersiana. The islands here can be large and continuous, and on the larger of these you will find occasional baobab trees growing – an indication that they’ve been dry islands for a long time.
The northeastern side of the reserve, around the location of the airstrip, is a spit of dry land where the habitats seem to occur in belts. There are belts of thick mopane forest interspersed with belts of dry ‘acacia thornveld’, where you’ll find mixed stands of camelthorn trees, Acacia erioloba, umbrella thorns, Acacia tortillis, and the very similar, but thorn-less, sickle bush, Dichrostachys cinerea africana. Also buffalo thorn, Ziziphus mucronata, with its two types of thorn, which snag on any passing animal (especially on clothing), and have earned it the name ‘wag-’n-bietjie’ in Afrikaans, meaning ‘wait-a-bit.’
There are also bands of lower, more ‘scrubby’ vegetation, including classic species of deep Kalahari sand like the silver cluster-leaf, Terminalia sericea, and some very striking areas forested with large numbers of dead leadwood trees, Combretum imberbe. These trees, with their hard, termite-resistant, wood were killed by flooding when the water levels in the area changed – but will probably stand for many years, like a river of dead trees from the air.
Moving to the south side of the reserve, nearer to where Chitabe stands, you will find a lot of mixed forest areas with classic riverine species of trees lie the large fever-berry, Croton megalobotrys, sausage tree, Kigelia africana, and jackalberry, Diospyros mespiliformis.
Around here there are some smaller islands surrounded by shallow floodplains covered with hippo grass, Vossia cuspida. The deeper channels are mostly lined by phragmites reeds, Phragmites australis, and miscanthus grass, Miscanthus junceus. These are permanent channels which don’t dry up, and seem to have relatively little seasonal variation; they simply spread out onto wider floodplains when the flood finally arrives here (around May or June usually).
At the southern end of the reserve is a belt of soil with a high clay content, providing the perfect substrate for large stands of mopane trees, Colophospermum mopane – which sometimes seem so uniform that it almost appears to be a monoculture.