Ballooning over the Maasai Mara!
It was 3 am in the morning and the alarm’s jarring notes got me up and out of bed. What an unearthly hour to wake up! But it was the most exciting day with a totally new experience for us all. We were going to go ballooning over the Maasai Mara! 24 of us piled […]
The serval takes on a baboon troop!
We were driving in the Maasai Mara, hoping to find cheetahs on the hunt. That is truly spectacular to watch and though we had already seen one that morning I really was hoping to find another hunting cheetah. No such luck but movement in the tall grass caught my attention and we turned that way. […]
The self made waterhole!
Everybody knows that elephants need a lot of water daily. The real issue is how to get at these when there is no rain. This is of course true for all other animals as well. Sometimes the river runs dry or there are just little pools covered in algae in the dry season. The waterholes […]
Penguins under the car….. Seriously??
Africa is always full of surprises and this is surely one of them? Did you know that 4-5 different penguin species are seen here at different times and there is a penguin tht is actually called the African Penguin? No? Well there is the surprise. Cape town and surrounds have rookeries (places where penguins congregate) […]
The fight for dominance!
The Kgalagadi provides a vast panorama where all sorts of interactions play out across the desert. The most exciting is a hunt of course and it undeniably not a common sight. That makes it all the more exciting. However, there are other interactions some more dynamic than others and those are dominance fights. These are […]
Tiny, smart and simply gorgeous – Dik-diks
The Maasai Mara. The name conjures up images of the Great migration. The greatest spectacle on earth. 1 million wildebeest and zebra crossing the plains for food and water and encountering lions, leopards and rivers full of crocodiles. It is all that for sure and more as well. I had just dropped off our guests […]
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 […]
