African Wild Dogs!!

 

The three amigos...

The large saddle-billed stork on shore...

and in flight.

Brown hooded kingfishers.

Pearl owlet

See how high can I reach.

A yellow billed hornbill with a bug.

Two dwarf mongeese.

A herd of waterbuck.

Monday, May 8^th.

This morning was a fantastic morning drive! After the 24 hours of game drives on the weekend, I had thought of perhaps skipping this morning’s and staying in the camp to update the blog about the Kruger trip, but I am exceedingly glad I didn’t. Today it was just the boys, Matt, Bruce, Koert and I with Heidi as our guide, the girls were all in a different truck. It rained overnight and the road were a bit wet and muddy. Shortly after crossing into Buele Reserve we found the wild dogs, walking down the road in front of us! This was the pack of three dogs we had briefly seen three weeks ago. They were aware of us and kept looking back at us, but were clearly on a hunting mission. They walked together or fanned out to scout the area as we followed. A couple of times they trotted off into the bush and we thought that was it, but they came back to the road. One time they came out running towards us which was amazing and we got better photos from the front. Animals seem to like the man-made paths as they are easier to walk or make time. Heidi alerted the other two game viewers, and they joined us. We switched places a couple of times to try to give everyone the best sightings. We saw a few impala pronk (a jumping display they do to show how fit they are) in alarm at the sight of the dogs, and a group of baboons went crazy yelling and calling while running away or climbing trees. This is why we all came to Africa, we wanted to see predators and prey in action. I wasn’t sure if I really wanted to see them catch an impala, as they are beautiful animals, and to watch them get caught and ripped apart would be hard to watch. Unlike lions and leopards, dogs do not have the ability to deliver a killing bite to the throat. Instead, they grab it and hold on until the rest of the pack arrives. Then they rip it apart. In the long run we were spared that as they finally ran off into the bush and we lost them, or they lost us. We were with them for well over an hour! I have seen African dogs in Kruger a few years ago, but they were just laying by the side of the road relaxing. Easy to photograph but no action. This time, lots of action and very hard to photograph. However, out of the many I took, I did get some good ones. We stopped for a coffee break at that point, at the same spot where we came across the buffalo last Friday. Again, we walked down to the river and found fresh leopard tracks, but no cat and happily, no buffalo. We saw a large crocodile with its mouth open warming up in the sun, and the beautiful large saddle backed stork, both on the shore and in flight. We also saw an elephant crossing the river. When we continued, we saw a pearl spotted owlet, two brown hooded kingfishers, many flying vultures and eagles, and the usual herbivores: giraffe, kudu, impala, water buck and an elephant using its trunk to reach branches well above its head and rip them off. Koert said it best when he said he was on a photographer’s high… What a great morning drive! Back to camp for lunch. Then we had a debriefing with the powers that be here about our Kruger trip, because Timo and Koert complained about the driver/guide Andrew and about the shoddy arrangements of booking a camp that far away and not leaving early enough to get there without driving like stink. In the afternoon we had our last gin drive. On route we saw kudus, a yellow-billed hornbill eating a worm, a colony of dwarf mongeese, waterbuck, vervet monkeys and elephants. We found one along the rail tracks that cross the reserve. It was in a deep crevasse that was made for the train tracks to go through a hill, which is scary because wildlife is sometimes killed by the trains and earlier in the month we had been at a spot where a dead elephant had been put for the scavengers to eat. Anyway, we tried not to think of that outcome and instead enjoyed watching as he demonstrated how high he could reach to strip leaves and branches off trees. On the way back we saw a Verreaux’s eagle owl, and after trying a few different settings I got a couple of good photos.