(INTRODUCTION: Adrian Warren describes a memorable close encounter with black mambas in Akagera National Park, Rwanda. After first visiting Akagera in 1987 while filming for the BBC series "The Great Rift", it became a favourite haunt while based in Rwanda working on two subsequent film projects on Mountain Gorillas in the Virunga Volcanoes. )

In what appears to be an elegant dance, two male Black Mambas (Dendroaspis polylepis) engage in a wrestling match. The loser will flee while the winner may mate with a female, probably waiting nearby.

It was one of those pearly grey African dawns, the sky was slightly overcast and a heavy dew had settled. Further down the valley hippos were sloshing about along the edge of a shallow lake, and a dove was calling, a song that I always connect with Africa. A pride of lions had been close-by for most of the night but now they were quiet, and the impala, moving with dainty elegance down the slope to my left, were calm. It was cool, the sun would not be up for another ten minutes or so, everything poised in anticipation for that transition from night to day. I was sitting in front of a simple house of whitewashed mud bricks, occupied by a Belgian zoologist who was studying roan and eland, as well as being part of a team working on a management plan for the Akagera Park. It's 965 square miles, plus an additional 123 square miles of Mutara game reserve, in the north-eastern corner of Rwanda in Central Mrica, account for some ten per cent of the total surface area of the country. Although a small park by African standards, it is surprisingly large for a tiny country like Rwanda, straining at the seams with people desperate for a tiny fragment of land to grow something to eat.

Stanley came here in 1876 on one of his journeys seeking for the truth about the source of the Nile. He had come up the Akagera river and had climbed a hill to take in the view of the broad valley of the Akagera, which he called the Alexandra Nile, filled with lakes and papyrus swamps. Beyond the valley he could see " ridge after ridge, separated from each other by deep parallel basins, or valleys, and behind these, receding into dim and vague outlines, towered loftier ridges. About sixty miles off, to the north-west, rose a colossal Sugar-loaf clump of enormous altitude, which I was told was the U{llmbiro mountains." The distant peaks were actually the Virunga Volcanoes, home of Mountain Gorillas which would remain unseen by Europeans until 1902. The broad valley with its lakes and papyrus swamps are home for sitatunga (aquatic antelopes) and the rare shoebill stork. In 1987 we discovered lions on the floating islands of papyrus where they preyed on the sitatunga, presumably swimming from island to island where walking is a wet experience and rather like moving around on a giant water bed.

The Akagera landscape is rich and varied, the steep hills with their neat parallel ridges form an almost complete savannah ecosystem intersected by strips of forest; huge areas to wander in for days without seeing another human being -so different to the traffic jams of the Kenyan Parks. Akagera was the site for successful re-introductions of giraffe and elephant, and there was an ambitious plan to do the same for wild dogs but momentum for that project died with the war in Rwanda that sadly resulted in mines being senselessly laid in the Park and countless animals being shot to feed soldiers.