As you may have read in my previous post, during my time in Africa I visited a fair few game reserves/national parks and during that time, as you might expect, I took a few photos.
About 41 thousand of them, to be (slightly less than) exact.
Some of them have made their way onto these pages and if you’ve been following my posts, I hope they haven’t bored you all to tears. This post is my attempt to pick out those encounters (not all of which resulted in usable photos) which stick in my memory as the ‘best’, for some reason or another.
Hopefully this selection gives an indication of what Africa has to offer although of course its impossible to cover the vast diversity of wildlife the continent has in just one post. If nothing else, it hopefully shows that there is more to Africa than ‘the big 5’.
25 – Cheeky monkeys & exhibitionist baboons
Oh sure, they look cute, I give you that. Or at least, they do when they’re sitting around, playing with their siblings, riding on their parent’s back or grooming each other.
However they are less ‘cute’ when you’re trying to eat lunch ; take your eyes (or hands) off your food for a split second and the little sh*ts are in like a shot to steal it.
Now its funny the first time it happens, particularly so if it happens to someone else and you can laugh about it at their expense. After a while it gets a bit annoying and at one point I actually had a tug of war with one of these little devils as it tried to steal a samosa from my hands as I was eating! It won, I am ashamed to say, but it was getting quite agressive so I figured the samosa wasn’t worth getting scratched/bitten and potentially having to submit myself for a rabies shot.
In the cafe in Durban Botanic Gardens they had a member of staff who’s role in life seemed to be to walk around the tree-covered area with a large water ‘gun’ (think Nerf soakers/blasters) to try and discourage the monkeys from dropping down onto tables and stealing food. Most of the time the monkeys just targetted the tables that hadn’t been cleaned yet, which makes you wonder why customers didn’t take that small step to help out and take their trays back to the counter, but hey…
The locals in Durban said that the local vervet monkeys were a nightmare – you couldn’t leave any windows open as they would come into your house looking for food. If they got in, they would eat what they could, and usually defecate indoors as well (how rude!).
Apparently they are not classified as ‘vermin’ so its illegal to shoot or otherwise kill them – something which the locals I spoke to about it didn’t seem to agree with.
Still, they are definitely quite entertaining to watch. I remember watching a young baboon sitting in the middle of a pile of leaves in one campsite, scooping up the leaves around itself and throwing them up in the air – just a few minutes after the campsite groundskeeper had raked them into that pile. I can imagine a few kids doing that…
The one above was hanging under its mother just before this photo was taken, but clearly couldn’t hold on and face-planted right in front of me, and yes, I laughed.
The next day, one of its relatives stole a bit of chicken I’d just finished cooking on the gas burner.
Karma is a bitch, as they say.
Nothing really to say about this!
24 – The elusive caracal
When you’re in Africa on ‘safari’ trips (did you know that ‘safari’ is actually the Swahili word for ‘journey’ and doesn’t have anything to do as such with game viewing?) you’ll probably see lions. You’ll probably see cheetahs and if you’re lucky, you might see leopards.
What you are fairly unlikely to see (based on my experience anyway) is a caracal.
I saw a couple of them in the Tenikwa Wildlife Awareness Centre near Plettenberg, South Africa, but it wasn’t until a crack-of-dawn game drive into the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania that I finally caught sight of one in the wild (they are predominantly nocturnal).
My first caracal sighting (in the wild anyway)
As always, seeing animals in the wild trumps seeing them in captivity any day of the week, even if the captivity is for their protection due to them being ill or endangered somehow.
23 – Cycling with elands
Elands, the largest of the antelopes you’ll encounter in Africa, are (again, based on my experience) relatively unusual to see on game drives. I saw more impala and Thomson’s gazelles than you could shake a stick at, loads of kudu, but sightings of elands were few and far between.
Whilst taking a break from the heat of Lake Malawi by spending some time in the hills of Nyika, I took a mountain bike out for a few hours and was fortunate to see some (equally uncommon) roan antelope and a few rather large eland.
Antelopes usually scarper before you can get close to them, and the eland were no different except these ones, rather than running away from me as such, trotted alongside me as I cycled along the track. It then decided to cross the track directly in front of me by leaping across in one stride, clearing what must have been a good 7-8 ft gap. Which was pretty impressive.
As I was cycling at the time, I didn’t have any opportunity to take a photo of this nor was I wearing a GoPro or something. But it was cool and you’ll just have to take my word on this 🙂
To give you an idea of what an eland looks like (and how big they are) here are a couple I snapped in Amboseli NP, Kenya (to give a sense of scale, this road is easily wide enough for 2 vehicles to pass each other).
Eland with some tinsel on its antler 🙂
22 – Dodging jaywalking tortoises
From the largest of the antelopes we now move on to one of the smaller (and definitely slower!) critters – tortoises. Leopard tortoises, to be exact.
This particular encounter rammed home to me the importance of keeping your eyes on the road and not just the bush to either side of it whilst driving through game reserves – whilst it looks quite obvious in this photo I assure you it was a ‘last minute, corner of the eye, hit the brakes’ moment .
Leopard tortoise, Kruger National Park
But bless it, it was totally unfazed and continued to plod across the road. I had to flash at an oncoming vehicle and point down at the road to get it to slow down as it clearly hadn’t seen it either – my good deed for the day.
21 – Diving with turtles
Sticking with the same theme, from tortoises we get to their sea dwelling relatives, the turtles. Equally cool, but far more graceful and definitely quicker…
First, Aliwal Shoal, off the east coast of South Africa just south of Durban:
Cristina with a turtle
And then months later, again off the east coast but this time further north, off the coast of Tanzania at Mafia Island:
And yes, they are just like Crush in ‘Finding Nemo’ – very chilled out, and when they’ve had enough, they just gently (but surprisingly quickly) swim off – no fuss, no drama. Duuuuuude…
20 – Hyenas eating newborn wildebeest
When you’re on game drives, I don’t think anything quite rams home to you the fact that you’re witnessing the daily struggle for life as seeing animals being hunted (and subsequently eaten) by other animals.
For some people, its a horrific/gruesome sight, but those people (IMHO) should probably be on a golf course or sitting on a beach and not paying good money to be shocked by animals doing what comes naturally to them.
Admittedly, it can be unpleasant to watch, especially if the animal being eaten is a youngster of some variety – they tend to be more cute and (presumably) cuddly. But this is ultimately why you’re here ‘on safari’ and not driving around Whipsnade/Woburn or worse still, walking around a zoo.
The animals do what they need to do in order to survive – if that means killing other animals then they’ll do it, if that means running away from other animals intent on killing them, then they’d better do so! If they survive long enough they’ll hopefully breed and maybe their offspring will live long enough to repeat the cycle.
Young animals, particularly newborns, are particularly vulnerable to predators which presumably is why most animals can walk and run within moments of giving birth – which makes you wonder how we (as a species) ever survived this long!
Hyenas are (we were told) known to actually snatch baby wildebeest as they are in the process of being born. We didn’t quite see that, but the photos below, taken in the Ngorongoro Crater, show a hyena eating what was, we were assured, a newborn wildebeest. We arrived after the kill had been made so all we got to see was this this hyena mopping up.
Hyena eating another kill – we were told this was definitely a young wildebeest
19 – Upside-down hippos
Sticking with the Ngorongoro Crater for the time being, we come next to hippos.
I saw plenty of hippos during my time in Africa, mostly in the water but one or two out for a stroll in the sun (unusual because they rely on the water to keep cool, having no sweat glands) and one at night, so why does this particular ‘encounter’ stand out?
Well, all the other times I saw hippos, they were the ‘right’ way up.
Seemed quite content!
18 – Giraffes drinking at the waterhole
Giraffes are well adapted for reaching the leaves at the tops of trees, which presumably has helped them survive as a species over the years.
Their long legs and necks seem to be a bit of a problem though when it comes to drinking, requiring some delicate maneuvering of their legs to get their lips down to the water. All the time of course, they are incredibly vigilant as will jump up at the slightest disturbance and run off, which in itself is worth watching as its quite graceful and yet ungainly at the same time!
Whilst giraffes are likely to be seen in most game reserves, the only time I really got to watch them drinking at waterholes was in Etosha National Park (Namibia) where you basically just park up by a water hole, and wait to see what happens…
No, the oryx in the photo above doesn’t have its head up the giraffe’s backside, incidentally.
Evolution can be a bit short-sighted sometimes…
17 – Wildebeest giving birth
Returning once more to the Ngorongroro Crater, we were fortunate enough on the pre-dawn descent into the crater (you can’t stay in the crater itself overnight, but there are lodges and campsites around the ‘rim’) to see, in the distance, a wildebeest being born.
I don’t have any decent photos of this one I’m afraid so you’ll have to put up with some very blurry ones – it was dark and this was happening a long way away…
Newborn wildebeest (on its knees, having just fallen over)
Within seconds the baby was up and suckling from his mother, although on very unsteady legs – not helped I imagine by this all taking place on a bit of a slope so the poor thing tumbled over a couple of times…
Shaky photo, shaky legs!
Very cool to see this taking place, although this was only a few hours before the hyena shot above. Hopefully it was a different baby wildebeest!
16 – Boulders Beach penguins
When you think of animals in Africa, you’ll probably come up with the ‘usual suspects’ – elephants, antelopes, giraffes, and of course, the big cats. You might be forgiven for forgetting the various birds (of which there are many varieties, from the ostrich and big vultures down to small hummingbirds) and, perhaps a little bizarrely, penguins.
Down in the far south-western reaches of South Africa, on the peninsula that ends in the famous Cape of Good Hope, live a colony of African Penguins.
I like penguins… probably because they look daft. They clearly aren’t very well ‘designed’ for walking and waddle more than anything, all of which adds to the entertainment 🙂
15 – First leopard in the wild
As I mentioned earlier, there is a huge difference to seeing animals in the wild vs seeing them in captivity; I was fortunate enough to see a leopard whilst touring the Tenikwa sanctuary in South Africa but that was the only one I saw until my last full day in Zambia, several months later.
Leopards are notoriously difficult to spot as they are mostly nocturnal and tend to lie in ambush waiting for prey to come into range, which makes them the hardest of the ‘Big 5’ to tick off. You are most likely to catch a sighting of them during evening, or early morning, game drives when they are more active.
The first one I saw in the wild was in South Luangwa Game Reserve in eastern Zambia, during one such evening game drive. Our driver somehow spotted it sitting at the base of a distant tree. These guys are good – they either have incredibly good eyesight, or these animals don’t wander much from day to day ; either way, guides regularly spot things most of us would just drive past.
Presumably the leopard had only recently woken up as it was yawning lots – and those yawns turned a bit colourful as it eventually decided to throw up – charming!
Errr…. another big yawn, of the technicolor variety!
Clearly the vomiting helped as it then wandered off to find what was left of the day’s sun, sitting down to soak it up before heading off in search of something to replace the lost contents of its stomach!
Off for a walk into whats left of the sunshine
14 – Feeding fish eagles
The African Fish Eagle is a relatively common sight in game reserves, particularly those (as you might expect) with large bodies of water.
And as far as large bodies of water go (in Africa), they don’t get much bigger than Lake Malawi. In fact its the 3rd largest lake in Africa and teeming with fish, so its perhaps not too surprising that they have a few fish eagles around there.
Whilst staying at Cape Maclear in Malawi, towards the southern extent of the lake, I took a boat trip out to Thumbi Island which included the opportunity to ‘feed’ the island’s resident fish eagles with some fish caught by local kids out on their ‘canoes’.
My guide would whistle a few times (which the eagles have presumably become accustomed to meaning ‘feeding time’) and wave a fish in the air before throwing it into the water close to the boat; invariably an eagle would launch itself off from a branch on the island and swoop down to grab the fish although sometimes a sneaky hawk or other bird of prey would nick the fish before the eagle could get there 🙂
Needless to say, I took the opportunity to take a few photos…
13 – Up close and personal with the biggest land animals in the world
Elephants are very big and very heavy (weighing up to 7 tonnes) and for the most part you could think of them as ‘gentle giants’. Its surprisingly soothing to sit and watch them mooching about, eating and drinking and rumbling away to each other. But sometimes they can be quite intimidating, usually when someone has annoyed them or they feel that their young are threatened by your presence. Or, of course, when the males are in “musth” when their testosterone levels sky rocket.
Those are the times when you may not necessarily want to be sat right next to them in an open sided, open roofed 4×4 vehicle (or even a 3.5 tonne campervan for that matter).
One such time was when I was visiting Ruaha National Park in Tanzania. Fari had parked us (in his 4×4) close to a group of females who were generally a bit upset with our presence as they had several young elephants with them ; one of them in particular was flapping her ears quite a bit and even went as far as starting a ‘mock charge’ towards us – for a couple of steps, that is. Meanwhile, a young male, presumably part of the same group but on the opposite side of our vehicle, decided to show off a bit and did a bit of ear flapping and scuffing the floor and generally letting us know who was boss.
Ok, I was worried by now
Had this been me driving, I would have been reversing right about now. Fari, however, grew up around these animals and is an experienced guide, and just stuck his head and arm out of his drivers-side window and ‘shooed’ the elephant off – surprisingly, it seemed to work!
A close runner up to the elephants above comes the elephant who, whilst walking through my campsite in South Luangwa (Zambia) one night, managed to pull down an overhead power cable and not only take out the power to our part of the campsite for a day or so, but give itself a nasty shock in the process! All I heard was a loud ‘trumpeting’ from the elephant and some thudding as it ran off ; it was apparently ok, but probably didn’t come back through the camp for a while!
12 – It takes two to tango
I saw lots of zebra during my time in Africa and for the most part, they are to be found standing around, grazing. So it might seem unlikely that zebra would feature so highly in this list, and if it weren’t for 2 notable moments, they probably wouldn’t.
In Etosha I saw an ongoing scuffle between two zebra although I don’t know what it was all about – they were clearly having issues though…
But perhaps the most memorable zebra-related-moment was when I was in the Masai Mara and saw a rather ‘enthusiastic’ male zebra trying to ‘get in on’ with a less enthusiastic female.
Our guide told us that the male would basically keep ‘hassling’ the female, chasing her for ages until she either got away or gave in and let him mate with her. We were lucky enough to see some of this going on…
No, she definitely wasn’t interested 🙂
But credit where credit is due – he didn’t give up. After 5 or 10 minutes of this, they eventually ran off across the plains. I would say ‘to live happily ever after’ but she was clearly still trying to get away from him and he was still quite keen to get his end away.
We’ll have to wonder how that panned out because we left them to it and went off in search of rhinos at that point 🙂
11 – White rhino
There are estimated to be just over 20,000 white rhino alive in the wild at the moment ; in 2014, over 1,200 were poached in South Africa alone, an average of one every 8 hours. Across the whole of southern and eastern Africa, you can be sure that number is higher. In 20 years they will all be dead.
And whilst appalling, this is nothing compared to the numbers for elephants – some 40,000 elephants are killed per year for their tusks – more than are born per year – and if poaching continues at this rate, all elephants in the wild will be gone in the next 10 years.
All of which makes any encounter with a rhino or elephant special.
Rhinos aren’t particularly active animals – they graze a lot, and when they have had their fill from one patch of grass, they move on to another and continue grazing.
Any animal that spends its day eating is going to need to, well, relieve itself at some point, which brings us neatly on to the photograph. I happened to capture a shot of just this moment and for some (childish?) reason, its one of my more memorable encounters with these fantastic rare animals.
Rhino taking a poo! Kruger National Park
Savour the moment, ladies and gentlemen ; in a few years time, you’ll only be seeing them in zoos, thanks to the demand for their horns in the Far East for traditional medicines which of course, don’t f*cking work.
10 – Mako shark trying to take a bite out of our (inflatable!) boat
Every Most years, millions of sardines gather off the southern coast of Africa and begin a mass migration northwards, along the eastern coast towards Mozambique and out into the Indian Ocean – this is one of the largest migration of animals in the word and is known as the ‘sardine run’.
We happened to be in the area at approximately the right time to catch this event, so booked ourselves onto a ‘sea safari’ out of Port St John, hoping to be able to get in the water and dive amongst the action, as the sardines are hunted by sharks and dolphins from below, and seabirds from above.
Sadly, being a ‘natural’ event, it isn’t always predictable and in this case, the ‘run’ never seemed to get started. It usually happens every year – but sometimes it happens miles out to sea and as such, its not easy to catch. Either we were too early, or it was happening elsewhere, as we didn’t see much activity.
However, we did see some rather cool things – one of which was a mako shark (a close relative to the great white shark, and one of the fastest sharks in the world, with a top speed of 60 miles per hour).
We received a call over the radio from another sea safari operator telling us that a mako had been circling their RIB (rigid hulled inflatable boat) for the past 45 minutes and kept taking particular interest in their propellors for some reason – even trying to bite the propellor blades every few laps of the boat.
So of course, we went to go and have a look, positioning ourselves alongside the other RIB.
The mako adjusted its circling pattern to now include our boat and I was lucky enough to grab this shot from my GoPro by holding it just below the surface ; there was no way I was getting in the water as the skipper told us they were generally quite aggressive but this one was particularly so. One of the other guys on our boat was dead keen to get in but the skipper just wouldn’t have it – rightly so, I think.
Mako shark
The shark was clearly quite interested in our props now as well, but perhaps more worrying, it decided to start taking an interest in our inflatable rubber tubes! The skipper was having none of this, and at one point had to resort to fending the shark off by pushing it away as it came partly out of the water to try and ‘taste’ our boat:
Rather him than me!!
9 – Walking with cheetahs in South Africa
I’ve mentioned Tenikwa a couple of times already in this post but in case you’ve missed it, its a wildlife sanctuary and education centre specialising in the care and rehabilitation of cheetahs and other wild cats ; they take in injured cheetahs, leopards, caracals and such and take care of them, though I don’t think they always release them back into the wild. The also try to educate farmers (who are often responsible for injuring/killing these predators) as to how they can protect their livestock without resorting to shooting/trapping the wildlife.
However our main reason for visiting the centre was to take a couple of their resident cheetahs for a walk – one of the more bizarre things I’ve done! I’ve taken my family dogs for a walk – thats quite normal. I once took small yappy terriers for a walk which was, well, embarrassing, really. Taking cheetahs for a walk? Thats got to be cool, right?
Well it was definitely quite different and frankly a little disconcerting, as you have to follow strict rules about, for example, not getting forward of their shoulders, not looking them in the eye, and not crouching down in front of them. Any of which could result in them trying to take a chunk out of you!
Our guides were also quite clear that if the cheetah decided to take off, not to try and hold them back (they are very powerful and do you really want to p*ss them off?) or keep up with them (they can reach speeds of up to 60mph in under 3 seconds). Just let the reins go and they’ll come back in a few minutes (apparently).
We got to stroke the cheetahs a bit and their hair was surprisingly coarse – the dark hair on the spots is actually quite different to the rest of their hair. There is probably a good reason for this but I can’t remember what it is!
They spend a lot of their walking time lying down and rolling around 🙂
A very cool experience!
8 – Getting buzzed by ragged tooth sharks
As the shark approached I mentally ran through the dive briefing we’d received a short while before jumping into the water…
“Don’t worry, they’re vegetarian sharks”, they had said.
I’m no expert but I am pretty darned sure that raggies (ragged tooth sharks) eat meat.
“Well, ok, not vegetarians, they only eat fish”.
Looking at the teeth getting closer to me, I wasn’t feeling particularly reassured at this point.
“If they come towards you, just drop down onto the seabed or position yourself above them – just don’t get in their way”.
So they are vegetarian but clearly not to be messed with. Great.
I dumped the remaining air from my BC (buoyancy jacket) and lungs and pinned myself to the seabed and ducked. And just as the dive guide said, it passed straight over the top of me. Superb! A bit hard on the old sphincter muscles, but still, pretty superb!
Ragged Tooth Shark
Once you had survived your first encounter, the rest seemed positively laid back and I was able to get quite close to them throughout the remainder of the dive – definitely one for your bucket list!
Best shot of the set I think – Cristina, raggie, and a ray…
It was much safer than the other popular shark/diving encounter South Africa is known for – diving with great white sharks. It was definitely a more natural experience as in this case we were seeing the animals behaving normally ; with cage dives the operators tend to ‘bait’ the area to draw in the sharks (which I don’t think is a good idea) and of course, with great whites, you are in a cage.
7 – Humpbacks breeching
Earlier in this post I mentioned a day out on a RIB ‘sea safari’ where we were lucky enough to have a close encounter with a mako shark ; that was quite something but perhaps trumped by seeing several humpback whales ‘breeching’ time repeatedly as we followed alongside them.
I don’t have a huge amount to say about this, but as you can hopefully imagine, it was fantastic to see these huge animals playing around like this.
We were closer than the photos suggest (due to the lens distortion of the ultra wide angle GoPro), but there was no way I was taking my SLR on the boat without a decent housing! The skipper had his, and took it out once to try and get ‘the money shot’ of two humpbacks breeching at the same time, and it got soaked. He wasn’t happy.
6 – Lions, Masai Mara
As we approach the top 5, lions finally make an appearance. And, if you’ll excuse the pun, they arrive with something of a bang 😉
It was all over in a few seconds …
Full marks to this chap, who was clearly not suffering from stage fright or anything. There were probably 5 or 6 fully loaded vehicles full of tourists watching him and he didn’t seem at all phased. Our guide told us that they would repeat this many times during the day. Good effort, I say!
Now if we were able to fast forward 6 months or so, we’d see the results of this, cough, labour.
And with the magic of the internet, I give you – lion cubs!
Awww 🙂
5 – Going batty in Zambia
One of the great things about travelling under your own ‘steam’ and without a fixed agenda or plans is that you can take advantage of tips from other travellers and go and see things that you hadn’t heard of.
My trip to Kasanka National Park, towards the north-east of Zambia, was one such trip. I had heard great things about it from various other guests during my stay at Pioneer Camp (Lusaka) and from the owner and his partner, so I decided to delay my planned exit from Zambia via South Luangwa for a few days and head off in a different direction on a very long round trip.
All to see a few fruit bats.
Ok, when I say “a few” I may be understating the numbers a little.
The general consensus is that there is typically between 5 and 8 million bats at Kasanka at that time of year, as they migrate to Angola (if memory serves). At sunset, seemingly just as the sun finally dips below the horizon, the bats take flight – just a few to start with, but in increasing numbers until the sky is full of them.
If you were to ask people about mass animal migrations in Africa, they would understandably think about the Great Migration of (predominantly wildebeest) around the Serengeti and Masai Mara.
However the numbers involved in the Serengeti migration, whilst huge, are about 1/4 of the number of bats estimated to take part in this particular migration, which is the largest migration of warm blooded animals in the world.
I’d still like to see the wildebeest migration though 🙂
4 – Brief but alarming encounter with a pair of harassed black rhinos
White rhino are cool, and increasingly rare, but black rhino – well, they are even rarer and of course, it won’t be long before they disppear from the wild entirely 😦 Their numbers have dropped by 97% since 1970 due to poaching, and there are estimated to be only 5,000 or so of them left in the wild…
I didn’t see any black rhino until my penultimate game drive, which happened to be in the Masai Mara. I have very mixed feelings about this particular encounter as it was positive and negative.
Positive, because I got to see a very rare animal.
Negative, because the rhino were being hassled by the drivers of the ‘safari’ vehicles, ours included.
You see these animals had been sighted and, as with all notable sightings, announced over the radios to other operators’ vehicles and what followed was a mass high speed exodus across the Masai Mara to try and catch a glimpse. And yes, it was exhillarating, I give you that.
When we arrived ‘on site’ the rhinos were nowhere to be seen, so the drivers abandonned the ‘rules’ that said they had to stick to the tracks and ploughed their vehicles into the undergrowth to try and find them, trampling over bushes and small trees in the process and, potentially, smashing birds eggs or small animals in the process.
Our driver took a slightly different route and we were fortunate to catch these 2 black rhino trotting out of the cover of the bush, clearly trying to get away from the majority of the vehicles who were now behind them.
The rhino weren’t happy when they saw us. We were just about to start snapping photos when our guide told us to sit tight as he was moving away from them, believing that they were about to charge us.
So unfortunately, after all that, I only managed 1 or 2 usable photos.
Yes, it was exciting (although had they charged us they would probably have done some serious damage to our vehicle and probably us as well), and of course, yes, it was great to see them. I’m just not sure I am happy with the way it happened.
The elusive, and in this case, rather pissed off, black rhino!
3 – Young cheetah playing with young antelope
Rocking up at number 3 we have the cutest little cheetah cub playing with an equally cute baby Thomson’s gazelle on the plains of the mighty Serengeti…
The cheetah in question had, just a few moments before, been sat with its mother on top of a mound of dirt (termite mound?) watching this gazelle and its mother in the distance. The cheetahs silently stood up and started walking nonchalantly towards the gazelles, who were looking in their direction and must surely have seen them…
Stalking their prey in the distance
The cheetahs then adopted the classic ‘stalking’ posture, getting closer to the gazelles before breaking into a run. The gazelles took off and we assumed that would be the end of it it, but no – the young gazelle didn’t get away and the (mother) cheetah caught it.
But there was no kill.
The cheetah let the young gazelle go but only to use it as a training aid for her youngster, who wasn’t quite sure how it was supposed to react, or proceed… A few times the young cheetah just stood there, looking at the gazelle, who also wasn’t sure how to react, so rather than try to run off, it would just stand there as well…
The youngsters really doesn’t seem to know what its supposed to do next 🙂
Occasionally the cheetah’s mother would come along and stir things up a little bit, encouraging its youngster to chase the gazelle.
This was of course amazing to watch, although I guess sooner or later the young gazelle was turned into a snack.
2 – Lion catching and eating an impala
And talking of snacks – whilst I didn’t see the cheetahs kill that gazelle (above), I most certainly did get to see this lion hunt, kill, and eat a young impala (not in that order, mind you) in South Luangwa, Zambia – the only kill I actually got to see during my 10 months or so in Africa.
I think the baby impala had sensed something was wrong but the mother seemed oblivious to the danger
The mother scarpered, but the youngster didn’t really know what to do and was swiftly taken by the lion – no contest, really.
Walking back into the shade for its snack
Now we thought that the lion had killed the impala outright, but it turns out it hadn’t ; once the lion settled down with it between its front paws and started munching away, the impala (which had been keeping very still all this time, hence us thinking it was dead) started lifting its head and bleating, presumably calling out for its mother.
Definitely still alive at this point
This was, to be fair, quite hard to watch (and hear). Had it killed it and then eaten it, I wouldn’t have been bothered, but hearing the crunch of the bones intermingled with the bleating was admittedly upsetting. But then, as I said earlier, this is just the way it is in the wild…
A once in a lifetime experience… For the impala, at any rate.
1 – Meeting the relatives
And finally… Top of the list goes to the hour that I spent in the company of some of our closest evolutionary relatives – the mountain gorillas in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda.
It was an immense privilege to spend time watching these incredibly rare animals interacting with each other and, at times, directly with us. At one point, one of the guys in our group got kicked by one of the gorillas as it hurried past us and you can well imagine that if they wanted to, they would be able to do some serious damage – but they don’t (normally!).
I’ll let the pictures below (and the main post I wrote about it) do the talking.
Family portrait 🙂
I think we were told this one was just 6 months old – but not sure
There are estimated to be less than 900 of them left, and its weird (and sad) to think that in that hour I was surrounded by about 10% of the population of the entire species.
Thats all, folks!
So there we have it – my most memorable wildlife moments from my time out in Africa. This list doesn’t necessarily reflect my favourite animals, I’ve just tried to pick out individual moments that stick out.
If you thought wildlife viewing in Africa was all about lions and elephants and giraffe, you’d be wrong. There is a huge variety of wildlife to see and this list only scratches the surface of what the continent has to offer.
I suggest you get out there and have a look for yourself, before its too late… I would love to say that a concerted effort to stop poaching would mean you wouldn’t have to rush, but sadly, I just can’t see that being the case 😦
Around the World in a Campervan 