Monday, July 4, 2016

7/2 -- Stuck in the Sand, Two Flat Tires, and a Leopard

I was going to call this "First Full Day at Thornybush". Doesn't my  new title sound more intriguing??

Today started early -- wake up call at 5:30 (no hot water for shower! OOPS!), coffee, tea, and snacks at 6, start a game drive at 6:30, before sunrise. Back to the lodge at 9:30 for breakfast, walk for over an hour in the bush at 11:30, rest, lunch at 1:30, tea and snacks at 3, game drive at 3:30, back around 6:30, dinner at 7:30, collapse and do it all again tomorrow. I am getting inclined to skip some of the meals and snacks to avoid looking like a blimp!

We started out with giraffes and sunrise. It was really chilly -- we both wore bright down jackets under our requisite dirt-colored soft-shell jacket plus gloves, and I had a hat that sort of covered my ears. Each seat on the truck had a hot water bottle and a blanket, which I used to good advantage the entire time. Even after the sun came up, it stayed chillier than yesterday and quite windy. Our main goal was to find a small lion pride and the leopard who had taken down the warthog a day or 2 ago. Liam said there has been a lot of roaring around the camp lately and they are surmising that the big alpha male, who owns a large territory with 2 separate prides is coming under pressure from a group of 4 younger males. We were looking for a mom with 4 cubs -- one is a female from last year, about 14 months old, and the other 3 are two males and a female from this year, about 3-4 months old. It is apparently unusual for two litters to have been born so close together, and also unusual for a litter to be only one cub. On our way to find the lions, Eleck, our tracker, spotted leopard tracks, so he got out to try to locate the leopard on foot while we went lion hunting.
Birds (vultures?) at sunrise



Sunrise over Thornybush
Cape Buffalo

White Rhino

Wildebeast

Kudu?

We got word that a lion was resting on top of a dry river bank, so we drove off the concrete 'bridge' into soft sand and immediately got mired. Back and forth action got nowhere because the bump up back on to the concrete was too high, given the lack of speed the truck could produce. Liam let a LOT of air out of all four tires, we exited the vehicle and watched, and he was able to regain the road, in part because the back tires were soft enough to put up little resistance when the encountered the concrete. We tried the river bed again from another entry point and successfully located the lion, who promptly ambled away. 
Lion hidden along the river bank
We headed back to the road and found the group. The older 'sister' came toward our truck pretty aggressively and we wondered if this could go terribly wrong, but she stopped and stared us down instead. When she walked away, we drove in after her and found mom and the 3 little cubs, one of whom posed nicely for us. He then decided to play with his older sister, who was quite tolerant of his playful battering and got a thorough ear cleaning as a result. 
Later, closeup

Playing with her little brother

Then it was time to rescue Eleck, but locating him was a challenge and we stopped for a refreshment break on the way. The warmest place to be was in the windshadow at the back of the truck, so several of us huddled there while drinking our warm beverages and eating snacks. Eleck finally appeared and we started to head back to the lodge, seeing several other mammals along the way.
Impala
Wart hog

Giraffe
After breakfast/brunch, we got a bit of a rest (translate: copy photos to the laptop and prep the ones for the blog) before going for our walk. We were warned that big mammals would mostly run off way before we were close since we are so noisy, but we got to look at the vegetation and the environment more closely, and the giraffes tolerated our presence very nicely. At the end, we saw a hippo away from the water because it was such a windy day. I had a horrible time trying to see it -- finally figured out what I thought was a rock was really a sleepy hippo. 

Three Giraffe photos

 


Strangler fig killing its host. A bird who has eaten a fig poops out the seeds in a tree, and it grows right where it is burrowing into the tree for sustenance. It sends more and more roots down to the ground, and eventually kills the tree, but in the meantime, has built a structure that will sustain it.

Sleepy hippo (thanks to long zoom!)
We thought we had been told there was no lunch due to brunch -- and at 1:45 got a call wondering why we  had not appeared for  lunch. We were so full, we opted to skip lunch and I worked some more on photos and writing while Jim napped. Before we left, Jim got up and discovered Vervet monkeys in the trees next to our balcony, so we had fun taking  pictures and trying to entice them closer with fruits from the tree they had been eating from. No dice, but got some okay photos, I think.


The sky had clouded up just before our 3:30 game drive, but I made the mistake of not taking my down jacket and was really cold most of the time. We didn't see much and by 4 or so, I was thinking we should just go back and relax. But no. We went north again to see more lions, and around 5:15, got a flat tire. Unfortunately, the spare was also flat, so Liam contacted the other drivers to see who was close and could provide a tire. We wisely used the time to have our requisite libation break.
Another giraffe

Red-billed hornbill

Flat tire + flat spare = break time
When we finally got on the road again, Liam got a call that a leopard had been spotted, so we joined the hunt. The one he had been trying to find was stalking a herd of  impala and we got to see it when one of the trucks briefly shown a  light on it,  highlighting its silhouette. The light was quickly turned off because it could impact the result of the leopard's hunt, so we went back to the lodge knowing we had seen one, but without proof. 

No comments:

Post a Comment