Highlight of the trip?

It would be hard to pick a single highlight of the Africa trip this past summer, but this might come close. While traveling around in Botswana we say a couple impala watching the brush very carefully and ignoring us--a good sign. A little down the road we found this guy. For close to 11 minutes we were able to follow him around as he marked his territory one last time before sleeping for the day. It was only 8:30 AM, but still, leopards are not usually up at that time and the most that you usually get to see is the flip of a tail hanging out of a tree. We were very luck to say the least!!! If you look closely in the 2nd picture you an see him marking the tree :)

Not just in America!

Fish eagles were one of the more prevalent or the large birds we saw in Africa--though not usually this well! This guy was hanging out on a branch we think drying himself off. We were able to get actually very close to him--this is no where near maximum telephoto for me. Many of our guides were also photographers and we could always tell when we found a good sighting when the guide, who does this all the time, brought out his own camera! Needless to say the guide snapped quite a few pictures of this Fish Eagle

Pulchritudinous Plants

A sampling of the pretties from Africa:

A sample of clawfoot grass in its dried out summer state:

These next two pictures are of the dada plant--it is the local version of pot! We had one of the more politic guides try to convince us that no one smoked it, but a couple other guides were very up front about the fact that it is indeed smokable! The first picture is of the dried seed pod and the second of the still green slowing plant. The pod beneath the flowers will expand to become like the top picture. The plant is interesting as each stalk can have several (4 or 5?) of these pods along its height.


Thorny acacia. Only tasty to giraffe's. Somehow they manage to wrap their almost prehensile tongues around the branch and remove the leaves without getting skewered!

One of the many water lilies seen in Namibia. There are actually two kinds--a night lily and a day lily. Both evidently are white until pollinated at which point hey turn light purple!

Major Cuteness!

Ok, thought I'd do a collection today...here are some of the way to cute animal babies we ran into while traveling. They are from a variety of parks--enjoy!


Hippolet from Hwange National Park in Zimbabwae

Baby elephant and mom also from Hwange. I love how the baby kept his tail in the air the whole time he walked across the watering hole with his mom--I guess he really didn't want to get it wet!

This is one of the lion cubs that we walked with in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwae--the female this time.

Botswana Baboons! When they are younger they rude under mom and when older (or depending on how fast she is traveling, they will sit on her back as well.

I love the ears! (Also Botswana)

Chobe park In Botswana seems to have been a heaven for the little ones--the baboons above as well as this giraffe and the elephants at the bottom of the post! We ran into this family grouping a couple of times and took pictures of the cuteness every chance we got!

Two different elephant babies from Chobe in Botswana. the first was on his/her way down to the river around dusk to get a last drink and the second cam down for a mud bath :)

Clear as a Bell

Back to Africa and Botswana for today's post. We had been traveling for a couple of weeks and one of the constants throughout the different countries we visited was that at night you could hear a very distinctive frog call that sounded just like the ringing of a bell. The sound was actually very loud and evidentially traveled long distances easily. Turns out all that loud noise was made by some pretty tiny frogs! The African reed frog, or bell frog was the culprit and when were exploring the Okavango delta by canoe (mokoro) we finally found some. The first picture os of a female and then next two are males. For a sense of scale, they are ounly a couple inches long.

Where the Deer and Antalope ROAN

Oh give me a home where the deer and the antelope Roan (Groan!). As mentioned in previous posts, there are many an antelope throughout Africa of many different types and by the end of the trip they were all kind of blurring together :) The Roan antelope is not the most common, but is a truly beautiful animal and it was very nice of this male to pose in both portrait and profile. He was actually quite a distance away so these were taken with my telephoto on max. We saw a few of these throughout the trip--not nearly as plenty as impala! I find the markings on his face to be very striking and I love the line of his body as he starts to take a step in the profile picture. The sweeping antlers are a favorite.
The Sable is another beautiful antelope with somewhat similar facial markings and is also very striking. Unfortunately the Sables seemed to be particularly camera shy for me though others in our group got to see them well. Here are the best shots I was able to get and a link to Wikipedia to show you what it is supposed to look like :)

Another Purty Sunset

I think that the title says it all. Another purty sunset!!! This was taken in Chobe National Park from the dinning platform in our camp. The sun was actually setting across the Chobe river and there was a fisherman on a traditional Mokoru passing in front of the sunset for this even more incredible shot:

It was very nice of the fishermen to pose like that for us! :) I love how the light of the sunset is reflected in the slow wake of the Mokoro. If you click on the second shot you will see it even better :)

Plethora of Pretty Flowers

On our Africa trip we went through Victoria Falls several times as a central hub to the other countries. On one of those layovers we stopped by the Ilala Lodge to drop off some luggage and have lunch before heading out to Hwange National Park. The lodge had a great view of the Smoke that Thunders (the smoke part) and many a pretty flower. We were actually visiting in the middle of their winter so there was not much in bloom on the trip, but we did find a few pretty flowers along the way. And if there are flowers then I must take pictures!!!! Enjoy!! And don't miss the cool African bee in Picture 5 :)

10 Little Bee Eaters All In A Row

It can be cold on those African mornings! Or, at least cold for them :) The mornings were around 45 degrees and many of the locals were huddling together for warmth including some of the birds and animals. These are Little Bee-Eaters and every morning these guys lined up on a branch just under the dining area and huddled together for warmth. It was actually fairly dark and they were hard to see...yea for the new camera and image stabilization. The next day they were lined up again, but not all in the same direction.
As a bonus, here is why they are called Bee-eaters...

The guides were describing a behavior of these birds that I wish I had seen. When they catch the bees they slam them against the branches on either side of them to kill the bugs before eating. We did see that and it is quite something to watch. However, if the birds eat the bee and it isn't quite dead, the bee-eaters will fly themselves into branches slamming their tummies into the branch to kill the bee inside them!!!!!! I guess it is a learned behavior and the parents will pass it on to their offspring. Weird!

Just can't quite reach that one spot.....

Can you scratch just a....little...bit....lower????

This has to be one of the funniest grooming potions I have ever seen! There baboons were part of a very large troop--around 70-100--that we saw near sunset one night in Chobe National Park in Botswana along the Chobe river. There were several male-female pairs grooming but This guy bending head over heals to get that right spot is my favorite.

The most dangerous animal in africa

Believe it or not, this guy is considered the most dangerous animal in all of Africa! Much of their problem is their temper. The males are out on their own (not part of the heard) and as they get older they get more and more irascible. They will charge pretty much anything and don't do mock charges like elephants. If they come running they mean business. And that horn, or boss, on the top of their heads?!? I goes all the way across the skull and can stop a bullet! Wowzers. Needless to say I wasn't petting one of these!

Why did the elephant cross the road....

...because he could! At a couple of tons you don't argue! Actually, I think it was just so that she could show off her baby to the tourists and look really cute. Baby elephants really are charming and we had the opportunity to see several on our travels. Most cute!!!

Too Cute Not to Post

Back to the lion walk in Victoria Falls and a few more that are just too darned cute!


I'm Ready for my Closeup:

Greco Roman Lion Wrestling:

Ummm...Tourists are Tasty!

I'm Cute and I Know It!

See the Birdie

Giant Kingfisher:
African Darter:
Here are a couple of pictures taken of birds in flight that I was impressed with. Once again, yea for the new camera that can focus on the fly :) The first, the Giant Kingfisher is larger than some of his other kindred like the Pied Kingfisher but this is still a smaller bird--say a little larger than a large robin. The second picture is of an African Darter. They have the most incredible necks that look for all the world like minnows. In fact, here is another picture so you can see the neck:

Ceratotherium simum simum

WOW!!!!! A (Southern)White Rhino. One of the big 5 that I knew I would like to see but just didn't expect to. It is the more common of they types of rhino, but there are still only ~10,000 estimated left in the world.
On June 11 we were heading out to visit a local school and village just outside of Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe. About 10-15 minutes out of camp a call came over the radio in the jeep that a white rhino had been spotted just outside of camp and was wandering around in a large field. Our driver told us to hold on tight and we took off across the rough dirt tracks of the bush at ridiculous speed. (Actually, the drive was a lot of fun--very like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland!) We got back to camp in a few minutes and lo and behold, there in the distance was rhino number 25! Hwange had LOTS of problems with poaching and they didn't have the security to protect the rhinos so they shipped them all over to a smaller park where they could protect them and work on a breeding program. Well, it seems the program worked as they have so many that the smaller park had too many and they have started re-introducing them into Hwange (where they have better security now). They will not say how many they have re-introduced to protect them (a few have been poached--mostly to use their horns for knife handles) but this guy was number 25 (as determined by his ear notches--The code is here).
We stopped a good way away form him and though he saw us (and the 2 other trucks) he really didn't seem to care that we were there and just keep grazing his way across the field. He actually ended up coming within about 20 meters of our truck, passing just behind us. Needless to say I took quite a few pictures. Here are just a couple of my favorites.
Every wonder why they are called White and Black rhinos? Here is what Wikipedia has to say about it:

A popular theory of the origins of the name White Rhinoceros is a mistranslation from Dutch into Afrikaans and English. The Afrikaans word "wit", meaning "white" in English is said to have been derived by mistranslation of the Dutch word "wijd", which means "wide" in English and is spelt "wyd" in Afrikaans. The word "wide" refers to the width of the Rhinoceros mouth. So early European settlers in South Africa misinterpreted the "wyd" for "white" and the rhino with the wide mouth ended up being called the White Rhino and the other one, with the narrow pointed mouth, was called the Black Rhinoceros. A review of Dutch and Afrikaans literature about the rhinoceros has also failed to produce any evidence that the word wyd was ever used to describe the rhino.^[2] Other popular theories suggest the name comes from its wide appearance throughout Africa, its colour due to wallowing in calcerous soil or bird droppings or because of the lighter colour of its horn. An alternative common name for the white rhinoceros, more accurate but rarely used, is the square-lipped rhinoceros. The White Rhinoceros' generic name, Ceratotherium, given by the zoologist John Edward Gray in 1868,^[3] is derived from the Greek terms keras "horn" and therion "beast". Simum, is derived from the Greek term simus, meaning "flat nosed".

As common as an....

...Impala! When we first landed in Kruger National park in South Africa there was a short drive from the airstrip (OK, some mowed grass) to the camp. On the way we say some impala, baboons, and kudu. Our guide assured us that we would see MANY more impala (impalae?!?!) on our trip and wow was he correct. As common as an impala is a phrase used down there for good reason. These grazers are everywhere and we saw them in all of the parks that we visited. They are the main course for many a predator but don't usually care about the Land Rovers so we often got very close to them. Being unconcerned with the jeeps did make them easy to picture (see below) but one of the most impressive things about them is to see them run and jump whch is a little harder to get on film if they don't run away from you :) A couple of times something else spooked them (in fact, that is how we spotted the lionesses in Hwange but more on that in a later post) and my new camera made itself useful--it is almost instantly on and there is only a fraction of a second delay to focus usually so I was able to get this shot. In truth, they are capable of jumping 4 meters int he air--clean over the land Rover if they wanted though we did not get to see that. They are really beautiful while running and their leaps are incredibly graceful. I have added another jumping shot below as well as a group shot. These were taken in Chobe National Park in Botswana: