The tough guys living the life!
The toughest animal of the Big 5, that is acknowledged by almost every single story-teller, hunter, writer and wildlife lover, is the African Cape buffalo. These have had an amazing come back from 150 years ago after the rinderpest decimated the herds by the tens of thousands to a mere 50 individuals in South Africa. […]
Hyena Alert!
Kruger park has these culverts that go under the road and hyena clans with young ones use them for resting at night and they also leave the young ones there while they go out hunting. So we came up to one of these culverts and found about 10-12 hyenas there. Mostly youngsters and actually one […]
Too much to eat!
Animals are all about conserving energy, all animals. Energy comes from food and food is not always plentiful and especially for predators the whole energy conservation is a very big deal. They are just an injury away from starving especially the lone cats. Lions are social and so there is always someone else who can […]
The silent predator no one sees!
We had an amazing experience one day in Kruger. We were heading to the dam to do some birding and its kinda out of the way a little. So we were a little surprised to see a few cars parked by the road about 800m before the lake. Wondering what was happening when we could […]
The wild dogs at Nsemani.
We were parked next to the Nsemani waterhole in Kruger and hoping for some actionall of a sudden a wild dog ran across the road ahead. Now they are not usually alone and we waited for a minute and saw about 25 wild dogs cross the road and head for the waterhole. We had just […]
The little lost fella.
We came across a rare sight one day on our game drive in the Kruger park. There was a lion cub all alone sniffing around beside the road. We had just seen the pride a few km away and we wondered about this little guy. He was about 10 months old, walking around and sniffing […]
The UGLY 5!
Everyone comes to Africa for the Big 5. Who are the Big 5 and how did they come to be?? This is not readily known to people outside the guiding community in Africa. So back in the day in 1909, Teddy Roosevelt came to Africa, in the pell mell of Colonisation and the looting of […]
A leopard adventure.
I have written before on my fascination with leopards since a young age and that story was told in a different place. http://birdwalkin.blogspot.co.za/2011/03/amazing-sightings-of-leopards-in-gir.html My sightings of leopards have been many in Kruger yet they have all been memorable just the same. It is not often that I get to use a camera effectively while juggling talking […]
One angry female cheetah!
One afternoon in the Kgalagadi driving down the Nossob road just past Grootbardskolk we saw a cheetah approaching the road from the west. Barely 50 yards ahead of us she kept looking back and walked rather angrily it seemed. When we came up to her, I got a couple of photos and sure, she was […]
The three stooges of the Kgalagadi.
In all my times in the Kgalagadi, there are 3 players that always stand out and always get my attention. The pale chanting goshawk, the ubiquitous jackal and the star of the show, the honey badger. I have taken to calling them the 3 stooges of the Kgalagadi. these inseparables, or so it seems, are […]
