Cape Town and the Garden Route

Here are some photos from the trip that Dawn and I took to the cape. Ill have to post about the trip on my next venture into town, but here are some photos in the mean time. Please let me know if my photos are to light or too dark. I'm editing them on my hp, and i'm not sure if what i'm doing on that laptop is translating well to other computers.

Kruger Part 3

Originally I was anticipating writing a small blog post about every day in Kruger, but it’s hard to get into town to upload and I already have another trip (to the cape) to post about. Here are some more shots from Kruger, and some of the highlights of the trip:

1. Most game parks offer night drives, where you are taken out in an open top safari vehicle for a few hours after dark. Otherwise nobody is permitted outside of the camp gates after sunset or before sunrise. During our stay in Kruger, we went on two night drives and had some spectacular sightings. We saw several small spotted genets, Civets, a cackle of hyenas on the prowl, and perhaps the coolest sighting of the trip; a lioness attacking a porcupine. When we first spotted them, the lioness was circling madly around the porcupine. If a lioness can manage to get a paw under the porcupine and flip it over, she can kill and eat it. They circled for about 2-3 minutes getting closer to our vehicle every circle, until they were only 15-20 meters away. In a flash the lioness’s front leg was coated in quills. She limped away unhappily and began to groom herself, snapping each quill in her teeth after pulling it out of her leg. We watched her groom herself for a minute or two, while the porcupine remained patiently in a defensive position for her to leave. Angrily, the lioness started to circle the porcupine again for a few seconds before deciding that the effort wasn’t worth the meal, and slipping back into the darkness.
2. On our first morning in the park, we stumbled across a group of ground hornbills (featured last post). There was at least three adults with 1 juvenile. Two of the adults started to feed each other, and then the juvenile they were with. The Ground Hornbill is endangered, and their range is now limited to large parks like Kruger, so it was nice to get a solid sighting of them.
3. Seeing all of the big five in one trip was a nice surprise. The big five is the name given to the list of most difficult game to hunt on foot in Africa, and consists of the lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and Cape buffalo. Obviously I wasn’t hunting any of them, but they are still some of the most charismatic mammals to see in Africa.
4. At one of the water holes we stopped at we managed to spot and African Harrier-Hawk climbing around a red billed buffalo weaver nest (check the nests out on google). Although we didn’t see it grab any chicks, it was cool to see.
5. On our last night we stopped at a bird hide that was close to the main camp, where there was a fairly large heron rookery. An African fish eagle flew over, and the entire water hole filled with piercing heron screams. After the fish eagle passed over, we watched the herons feeding and building their nests for about an hour. There were several hippos around the hide as well, including a mother who was playing with her calf.

All in all it was an amazing trip. We managed to spot and identify 114 species of birds, most of which were lifers for me. I have to come back some day and spend a little bit longer.

Hammerkop

 Red Korhaan

 Zebra

 Cape Vulture

 Lappet Faced Vulture

 

Black Backed Jackal

 

 Waterbok

 

Yellow Hornbill

     At the end of July, it was time to say goodbye to four of our Undergrad technicians (sad), but it was also time to start our trip to Kruger National Park (happy)! On our way down from Bloemhof we stopped off to the Carnivore; an all you can eat restaurant that serves a bunch of different type of game. Every few minutes, the server stopped by the table with a large chunk of meat impaled on a sword. If you wanted the type of meat he was offering, he would slice a chunk on to your plate. We ate Kudu meatballs, Impala, Eland, Ostrich, Warthog, Crocodile, and even some chicken, beef and lamb on the side. Why not start a safari trip off by eating several of the animals you might see? After Lunch/Dinner we dropped our friends off to be shuttled to the airport, and spent the night in Pretoria.

Kruger Day 1

     It was a fairly scenic six hour to drive from Pretoria to the Phalaborwa gate of Kruger. East of Polokwane the road twisted through some very hilly tea and banana plantations. After spending the last 3 months in incredibly flat grasslands, any sort of topography was a nice change.

In any park with large game and predators, there are fairly strict guidelines for entering/exiting through park gates. In order to keep lions, buffalo, hippos etc. out of camping areas, all camps are enclosed in a gate that opens at 6am and closes at 5:30pm. We approached the Phalaborwa gate after 4pm, and by the time we checked in we had just over an hour to reach our campsite 50km away. Although 50k doesn’t seem like far to travel in an hour, consider two things: 1.) The speed limit  on tar roads in Kruger is 50kph and 2) for the rest of the trip we would stop to look at something approximately every 100 meters, bringing our average speed to 6kph. About 500 meters into the park, we stopped to watch a herd of impala (probably the most common mammal we would see, but we weren’t thinking too much about our time constraints at this point. A few kilometers later we found my first lilac breasted roller, which is probably one of the most colorful birds on the planet. Of course I had to take a few photos:

     At this point we had about 45 minutes to travel 50 km to our camp gate, so we booked it the rest of the way.  We could barely stop for the black sparrow hawk that was by the road, or the elephants that were browsing in plain sight. We didn’t even stop very long to look at the bat hawk we found, which is a bird that Jane (my MSc supervisor) has been looking to see for the last 25 years. It was an eventful first hour in Kruger, but I cringe to think of all the things that we missed along that stretch. We made it to the gate at 5:35, and they let us in without any sort of hassle. We set up our tent in an extremely crowded campsite, made some dinner, and immediately crashed for the night. 

Day 2

The next morning we got up at 5:30, to try and be out the gate for 6.

 Grey Hornbill

 

Southern Ground Hornbill

Red Hornbill

 Tree Squirrel

 Vervet Monkey

 

 Crested Guinea Fowl

 Giraffe