Tag Archives: Kruger

Calling Cameras in Kruger

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Today we left Kruger. While in the park, we feasted our eyes, ears, and noses on the park. We saw lots of animals, we heard the bird calls, screaming cicadas, groaning hippos, and roaring lions, and we smelled the flowers (the park was in full bloom from the recent rains) and dead hippo. The primary point, though, was the animal life. We saw more of any animal than in any of the other parks, excepting gemsbok and springbok, which we didn’t see, and giraffes (in Etosha we saw 91; we saw only 75 in Kruger).

Here is my total:

2,781 black-faced impala
564 African elephants
483 blue wildbeeste
419 zebra
94 Cape buffalo
75 giraffes
67 Nile crocodiles
59 hippos
48 waterbuck
27 lions
13 white rhinos
11 bushbuck
10 spotted hyenas
8 African wild dogs
8 nyala
7 scrub hares
6 cheetahs
2 small-spotted genets
2 honey badgers
2 leopards
1 large-spotted genet
1 Sharpe’s grysbok
1 black-backed jackal

Beyond these, we also saw baboons, vervet monkeys, leopard tortoises, banded mongoose, a duiker, three steenbok, ground agamas, and, apart from the many types of birds including the Southern ground hornbill, Marabou stork, pied kingfisher, Egyptian goose, helmeted guineafowl, and Verreaux eagle-owl, my very favorite animal sighting: a puff adder.

Ciao!

Sorry at Sunset

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Tonight we saw a caracal! And a leopard! And a serval! And a civet!

Not. We did see a sunset (good, since it was a sunset drive), impala, zebra, blue wildbeeste, waterbuck, hippos, the dead hippo with the dozens of Nile crocodiles, scrub hares, and birds, but we didn’t see any carnivores. We saw a leopard tortoise, which Cecilia, our driver, told us was one of the Little Five, whose names mimic those of the Big Five: leopard tortoise, ant lion, rhino’s horn beetle, buffalo weaver, and elephant shrew.

Cecilia seemed genuinely sorry that we didn’t see anything interesting after waiting an extra fifteen minutes for the last two people to arrive. We were heading out the gate when someone pointed them out.

Before the drive, Ethan and I had swam in the pool, seen many of the bushbucks who live in Letaba Camp, and watched a crested barbet gobble up a mopane worm.

Ciao!

Animated Animal Sightings

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“Ooh, look, some of those impala are preggie,” Mom said.

“Preggie?” I asked.

“Preggers.”

“Pregnant.”

Ethan laughed. We were driving from Letaba rest camp after resting (it is a rest camp, after all!) up after our tiresome drives this morning. We got up at 3:30 to go on a morning drive, and we saw eight lions, thirteen elephants, twenty-three giraffes, a small-spotted genet, and a Sharpe’s grysbok. We returned to bungalow 117 and had breakfast before finally leaving Olifants.

The drive was about forty kilometers, and we saw Cape buffalo, elephants, hippos, crocodiles, elephants, wildebeeste, zebra, impala, giraffes, waterbuck, a male bushbuck, and lots of different types of birds. The next drive was when we saw the pregnant impala. We also saw a new animal for Kruger: banded mongoose.

When we drove up after I shouted “Stop!”, they ran up to the car, mouths wide open. These squeazels (as we’ve dubbed them- a cross between squirrels and weasels) were bigger than any we’d ever seen before. Just as I rolled down my window to take a picture, they retreated into the shade. After many repeats of this, we discovered that it was a raptor of some sort that was scaring the mongoose back and forth. We left after having taken lots of pictures.

On the bridge over the Letaba River where you could get out, we saw baboons, waterbuck, birds (of course!), and a couple who told us about crocodiles trying to get at a dead, bloated hippo. So after we were done on the bridge, we followed them and saw the hippo. There was another live hippo next to it, and we were told that sometimes the crocs tried to eat it, too.

Ciao!

Lots & Lots of Olifants

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Today we saw over one hundred elephants in all different places. The first sighting was on the tarred road at a dam. One herd of elephants had just finished playing in the water, and we stayed and watched the next herd move in. The hippos in the dam had moved off to one side, as if they were afraid of the elephants (a sensible move, since a full-grown bull elephant could easily squash a hippo). We also saw a marabou stork there. On our morning drive at Lower Sabie, we learned that marabou storks pee on their legs to keep cool.

We continued on to a gravel road, where we came across three separate elephants, plus impala, two steenbok, waterbuck, giraffes, vervet monkeys, and a giant eagle-owl. We drove to part of a river where there was water (!!!) and stopped there, watching a herd of 33+ elephants drink. Mom was worried the whole time that an elephant would take it into its head to knock our car over. (None did.)

We saw some more elephants as we continued on, stopping at a bridge over a river to get out and look at birds. We continued on and arrived at camp around 1 o’clock, where I got to put up three dots on the sighting board: one for Cape buffalo today, one for elephants today, and one for a leopard on our night drive yesterday. We got Magnums (biscotti for Ethan, Mom, and me, and Death by Chocolate for Dad) and sat at the view point.

From there, we could see for miles—excuse me, kilometers. We saw giraffes, impala, hippo heads, waterbuck, zebra, and nineteen elephants. Eighteen of those crossed the river in two separate herds, and one was a lone bull wandering on the far side.

Oh, did I forget to mention what the name of the river was? And our camp?

Olifants, meaning elephants in Afrikaans.

Ciao!

Today We Saw a Leopard…

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… tortoise. It was actually moving pretty quickly at the Elephants waterhole, where we did see elephants.
After going back onto the tar road (H2-1), we drove for five minutes before coming to five stopped cars.
“Leopard on the right!” Dad exclaimed.
“Yeah, right,” was the general reaction.
“What are you looking at?” Mom asked. “Uhm, there’s a leopard on each side. One just killed a warthog, I think…” was the helpful answer from a nearby car.
The leopard then crossed the road from left to right, causing some squealing. We backed up to look for the other leopard, but we couldn’t see it. The people in the car overlooking the leopard waved us up and pointed out the leopard to us. It was laying against a rock, with its spots providing good camouflage. We dubbed him Kinky, after his tail.
Suddenly we heard some squealing and turned to see a large, bleeding warthog run away, leaving us wondering why the leopard didn’t just kill it outright.
Kinky didn’t even blink.
Eventually he got up and walked down the road a kilometer before disappearing into the veld.
We continued on to Satara, where Mom, Ethan, and I had supper before all of us went on a night drive with twenty of our new closest friends.
My wish list for the night drive included  caracal, serval, rhino, and lion, because, if we saw the last two, we would have seen all Big Five (elephant, rhino, lion, leopard, Cape buffalo) in one day.
So we started out by seeing… IMPALA!!! (Gasp.) Then we saw a steenbok, some wildebeeste, a giant eagle-owl, and some more impala before coming across our first carnivorous mammal: a small-spotted genet. It was small and in a tree, but we saw it. Our next big animal was a male lion and another lion (but we only saw its eye-shine).
We saw hippos, a bushbuck and her baby, wildebeeste, and impala before I saw a large-spotted genet. (No one else did because I forgot to tell City, our driver, to stop.)
Even with all the racket we were making, we still saw a cat-like figure crossing the road: a leopard.
So I didn’t get to see all Big Five in one day, but seeing two totally unrelated leopards was awesome. We’ve gone to three game parks (Etosha, Kgalagadi, and Kruger) and we’ve seen at least one leopard in every one.
Ciao!

BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!

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My alarm clock when off at 3:25 this morning. This was, sadly, no accident. We had a morning game drive to catch at four a.m. It would last three hours and we were supposed to see rare animals like leopards, genets, servals, and caracals.

We didn’t see any of those cat-like animals, but we saw three others: lions, hyenas, and cheetahs. The first we saw of these was a spotted hyena, which we saw after a marabou stork, steenbok, and some impala. It was walking towards a family of six cheetahs (a mom and her five cubs). The cubs were a few months old. Martie, our guide, said that the group she took on the morning drive the day before hadn’t seen the cheetahs, so she didn’t mention it to them when she stopped by their car after we saw the two female lions dozing on the road.

They moved off, but it wasn’t because they were intimidated by the two barking African wild dogs. “I don’t know what to say because I’ve never seen anything like this,” Martie said. “Usually wild dogs just move away from lions.”

Later on the tarred H4-2, Martie pointed out a bird and said, “We rangers have funny little things for birds to help us remember their names, like this one. We say it goes, ‘My mother is dead. My father is dead. Everyone is dead dead dead dead.” (“Dead dead dead dead” is the sound the bird makes.)

So our total before 7 o’clock this morning was…

1,000 impala
15 baboons
13 African elephants
08 nyala (“They aren’t usually seen this far south,” Martie said)
06 cheetahs
02 spotted hyenas
02 African wild dogs
02 lionesses
02 African fish eagles
01 bushbuck
01 common duiker
01 brown snake eagle
01 magpie shrike

Ciao!

Lots of Baby Hippos

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“Look at it! It’s a baby hippo,” Ethan cried. “Sssh,” Dad hissed. “And what are you talking about? That’s no ‘baby hippo.’”

It wasn’t. It was a warthog, our third one today (and our third in Kruger, too). We saw more when we stopped to look at some vervet monkeys.

Warthogs weren’t our only W-animal today. Guess what it was, please. Walrus? Whale? Warbler?

Think again: wild dog. Officially known as the African wild dog, it was a first for all of us. It was called the ‘wild African dog’ on Fox News when the station reported on a group of the mauling a little boy to death on the USA’s east coast. These six were more docile. There was even a puppy!

Later on we visited the Hippo Pools, where we saw some hippos and a snake coiling around its food. We’re not sure what type of snake it was, though. On the way back up to the Crocodile River Road, we saw a car pulled over and stopped to see what the fuss was about. Turns out there was a smallish pride of lions near the road.

After Hippo Pools we visited the Crocodile Gate camp where used the ablution blocks and bought drinks (yellow fruit juice for Mother, 330 milliliters of Lime & Soda for Ethan, a can of Rock Shandy for Dad, and an ‘Orange Flavoured Drink’ by Fanta for me) and chocolate chip cookies. It was on the road up to Lower Sabie camp that we saw the first baby hippos.

We saw more at the Sunset Dam, where they were all silhouetted. Our plans for watching the movie after supper were dashed because no movie was showing. So now I’m writing instead.

Ciao!

Darth Vader

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Since we went to three waterfalls yesterday (Mac Mac, Lisbon, and Berlin), I will mention that we visited those and Bridal Veil Falls this morning before driving to Kruger National Park.

After going through Numbi Gate and Reception, we drove several kilometers to Pretoriouskop, seeing [my first] four waterbuck along the way, plus an impala and several Cape glossy starlings.

After getting another Kruger guide book (the GPS [whose current voice is the Australian Karen] pronounced it “KROO-jer.” It’s pronounced “KROO-ger”), we got back on the road, not knowing that, before arriving at the Berg-en-Dal camp, we would see seven rhinos, eight African elephants (including two little ones who were play-fighting), two honey badgers (which are usually nocturnal), a pride of ten lions made up of three lionesses and their seven cubs, six of which were jumping around (Mom, shockingly, called them “feisty”) playing with someone’s tennis shoe, a mother and her four spotted hyena cubs, and innumerable kudu and springbok.

We arrived at Berg-en-Dal seven minutes before the gate closed. We put our stuff in our chalet and then had supper at the restaurant. For dessert we had chocolate cupcakes after Dad opened his presents (a movie, a pair of rhino, elephant, and lion socks, a South Africa polo shirt, comics from home, and a Cadbury bar). So he is now 52 and a very ou vader. Not Darth Vader, mind you, but ou vader, which means ‘old father’ in Afrikaans.

Ciao!