In September 2016 I took my second trip to South Africa with a group of 5 other friends from the Tucson Cactus and Succulent Society (TCSS). The trip was over three weeks in length and took in a broad spectrum of South Africa’s biological diversity, both floral and faunal. Our destinations included the northeastern big game parks, the Drakensberg Mountains, the subtropical East Coast, the fynbos regions of the South Coast, the desert areas of the Little Karoo, and the cosmopolitan city of Cape Town. This installment of that trip includes photos from the Thornybush Game Reserve and Kruger National Park, which adjoin in the northeastern parts of the country and holds the highest concentration of large game animals in South Africa.

This solitary grazing hippopotamus at Kruger National Park earlier today shows battle scars, presumably from conflicts with other hippos. As it moved around, raw pinkish-red wounds were visible on the upper flanks above the hips and below the spine. This appears to be a young female, and while I would expect more scars of this nature to be present in males it shows that females don’t escape the aggression either if this assumption is correct. Hippos are rather territorial and competitive at times and they live up to their reputation as dangerous animals to cross. Her cohorts were sleeping in a pile about 200 yards away across the pond. I wonder why she didn’t join them? Maybe she’s new to the family unit? Hard to say. I wouldn’t want to be a hippo in any case….

The list of which animals kill the most people in Africa annually revolves, both from year to year as well as with the source reporting it. This dubious honor has been ascribed to hippos, Nile crocodiles, and Cape buffalo. Of those three, only the crocs are on the “expected” list, while lions, leopards, and other top predators don’t make it. That’s probably because there simply are a lot more of the ungulates and crocs than there are big felines, and their large size and territorial behavior plus the likelihood that you suddenly come across one while bush walking along a river with no place to escape to means they are deadly. If there were as many top predators as big prey vegetarians, they would probably be up there instead. But since that’s biologically impossible, the simple math favors the buffalo and hippos. Rhinos could in theory also be on the list, but there are so few of them because we poached most of them out of existence….

Have you ever seen a pile of warthogs in a wetland before? No? Well today is your lucky day!

I loved this scene of a gorgeous giraffe feeding beneath a giant ficus tree (probably Ficus sycomorus) at the Lower Sabie Camp in Kruger National Park on Tuesday, Sept 6, 2016. We headed away from big game parks today and into the mainly botany portion of the trip after Sept 7. Animals are still present across much of the rest of South Africa outside of the northeast, but their abundance and diversity declines, while ironically floral diversity increases as you head to the drier regions of the south and west.

However floral diversity does not always translate automatically into animal diversity, especially not if the climate is dry and the vegetation poor in nutritional quality, which in South Africa it tends to be. Plus humans have impacted the other regions quite heavily via hunting, agriculture, and development, and big game animals seldom coexist peacefully with humans in larger numbers. But let’s continue with the large animals and birds of the northeastern game parks….

I SWEAR that I didn’t see what was happening in this photo! I was taking this image at a nearly dry waterhole in Kruger, showing a bunch of chacma baboons foraging in the crackling mud. There were about 30 of them along with warthogs, impalas, and kudus. Most of them were doing whatever there is to be done at a muddy drying pond, but I saw one large male sitting there regally, hands on knees, observing the action and looking imperial. I casually snapped off a few photos and moved on to other subjects. I come back to the hotel, download the pictures from my camera, and discover this. I SWEAR I didn’t know! He’s the dirty one, not me!

Vervet monkeys are just as un-self-conscious as the chacma baboons I just posted are. This was not an accidental photo, unlike the other. I wasn’t able to get my camera ready in time to catch this scene at the Protea Hotel just outside of Kruger NP a couple of days ago, but my travel cohort Mark Dimmitt was prepared. Full credit to him for snapping this amusing naughty photo, which is just begging for a caption. So have at it, internet.

If I could pick my nose with my long purple tongue, I probably would too.

Okay, enough raunchy humor….

The yellow-billed hornbill is a noticeable mid-sized bird found in most of eastern and southern Africa. This is the southern variant, slightly different from the eastern one, according to Wikipedia and other online sources. We’ve seen three hornbill species to date on this trip, but this is the most common one by far. They walk and run along the ground at times, rather resembling American roadrunners in both size and foraging behavior if not really appearance. I wonder if Wile E Coyote can catch one? Probably not.

This was only three of about 18 different elephants we saw drinking at a watering hole yesterday morning. Plus there were a hundred impalas, several wildebeest, and a bull giraffe as well. And a host of birds, including a pair of Egyptian geese. Water is life here as much as everywhere else.

How much more African can a scene get? Two of the largest terrestrial animals on earth in the same view. One coming to drink, the other leaving after a drink at a waterhole. Just another day in the bushveld.

There are two lion prides at Thornybush Game Reserve. Most lion prides consist entirely of 4 to 6 females with one male and a few offspring, since males hate each-other and compete fiercely for mating dominance when around females. (Ironically, many single males join forces, and hang out together as bachelors for one or several years before attempting to muscle an existing male out of another pride and supplanting his position. But around lionesses, only one adult male is the norm.) The two prides at Thornybush have only one male between them, so he shuffles back and forth between them as needed, breeding and feeding. Most king lions don’t have it anywhere near that easy. This is one of his cubs with one of his mistresses.

In the South African bush, even very large animals disappear from view within moments as they migrate farther into the vegetation. This large kudu antelope has the cryptic tan coloration broken up with faint white lines along the spine and sides which help camouflage the animal as it feeds on the trees and shrubs, It can be hard to snap good images of many animals as a result of this, but if you are both persistent and fortunate you can get them.

Leopards are generally the most difficult of the cats to locate and get good shots of since they are frequently shy and prefer to hide in dense bushes. However this female who had just made a kill the day before was content laying about in the open, letting us take her portrait in full view for a good 15 minutes. This plus the mating lions was a sort of double-feature of successful safari touring. A GRRRREATT! way to start the trip. Okay so that was Tony the Tiger, but I’ll borrow the catchphrase for the purposes of this post.

Today’s best shot, Sept 3, 2016. We went back to the site of the leopard impala kill today. The kill was made three days ago and the female was still hanging out feeding upon the remains in the same place. I caught her in a fierce-looking yawn, capturing the entire sequence, but I thought this one was worthy of a stand-alone post. She also fed on the carcass and urinated within 5 feet of our vehicle, giving us an intimate glimpse into her life of solitude. What a great day!

Coming out of the yawn. It looked loud, like a roar, but of course it was entirely silent. And I was lucky to be there to see it.

The leopard returned to her normal nonchalant self immediately afterwards. As if she just couldn’t be bothered with those silly gawking primates in that strange motor contraption who always come by 30 times a day.

Since I referenced it above, here’s a shot of the leopardess peeing mere feet from our safari vehicle. Since it’s not exactly the sort of wildlife image one sees regularly, I figured it was worth including.

South African traffic jam. What do you do when white rhinos block your path? Edge forward, wake them up from their nap, and make them move sideways into the bush. Hopefully they won’t charge at your vehicle in the process.

This was about as much as we saw of these two hippos in the drought-shrunken water hole we visited. One is giving our group a “don’t mess with me” side-eye. Despite their cuddly-looking rounded features and vegetarian nature, hippos are cranky and territorial and cause a number of human deaths in Africa every year. They are not to be trifled with, and the glance says it all, doesn’t it?

Bee eaters are a family of old world birds that as the name suggests feed primarily upon bees and other flying insects. There are a number of species in Africa. It took me awhile to find this one, which is probably the little bee eater (Merops pusillus) found across much of the continent from Kenya to South Africa. They are all beautifully colored and prefer to feed upon bees, wasps, and hornets. Bee eaters have learned to remove the stings from the insects before consuming them, usually by knocking the bug against a hard surface such as a rock or tree trunk.

Our game drives started early, with us leaving the lodge at sunrise at 6 AM in order to catch the best animal activity. This saddlebill stork has caught himself some breakfast, in the form of a frog. We catch breakfast after the morning drive ends at 9 to 9:30 AM. We repeat the game drive in the evening between about 3 PM and sunset, after which we have dinner. The food is great here. I’m not losing any weight, you will be relieved to know, nor have I had to eat a raw frog myself.

I took nearly 10,000 photos of various animals and plants in the week we spent at Thornybush and Kruger alone, the majority of them of birds and mammals in motor-drive burst mode. As a result of being willing to weed through so many images (most end up being deleted as duplicates or for being blurry) it is possible to catch some very candid moments in the lives of these creatures. I’ll make more posts about this trip and the animals we saw on it in future months.