Kruger Park

A friend is leaving Moz soon and asked if I'd go with her to Kruger Park for her last hurrah. We left Maputo early in the morning and arrived at the gate a couple of hours later. The first thing we saw were some really scrawny warthogs. Apparently they are the first to starve during a drought because they eat roots.
As we moved along we began seeing impalas--they are a dime a dozen. I learned some interesting things about impalas. They all give birth at the same time at the beginning of the rainy season, Nov-Dec. If it does not rain, they can delay giving birth for 1-2 months! (I can just imagine them wanting desperately for it to rain.) If it does not rain by then, they give birth, but kill the young so that they don't have to starve to death.
We saw lots of giraffe and zebras. Giraffe are so interesting - God really got creative when he thought them up.


















This ugly bird was up close. He turned at the last minute, I guess he wanted a profile shot.

Elephants were quite abundant as well as the hippos off in the distance. We saw several rhinos. One was running alongside the car. It seemed he wanted to cross the road so we stopped and he ran right in front of us. Better than running into us! Sadly my camera is slow to shoot and I just got his back side. Later we saw a big male lion trying to drag or chew on a dead rhino. According to another observer, some lions killed the rhino a couple of days earlier and were standing by to make sure no one else took it. Occasionally they came out for a snack. We saw lions several other times, but usually at a distance. The binoculars came in handy.

My friend really wanted to see a leopard as that is the one animal of the Big 5 that she has not seen. The Big 5 are lion, buffalo, rhino, elephant and leopard. I'm not sure who made that designation or why. I enjoy the other animals as well. We went on a sunset drive and I'm always impressed by the knowledge of the guides. They pointed out a hyena and talked of how hyenas love to eat bones. Their dung is actually pure white and other animals eat it as their calcium tablets! These guys were tired after being out all night.



When it got dark on the safari, we shone lights to see if we could spot any eyes. Sure enough, there were some big ones in a tree. The guide figured out that it was a spotted genet, a cat-like animal that is actually related to the mongoose. It had a black and white ringed tail, very unique. We also saw some bushbabies that jump like kangaroos and sail through trees like squirrels only farther.
Sorry I can't take credit for these last two pictures. My camera isn't that good. I got them off the web.

Whenever I'm at Kruger I know I'm only seeing a small part of what is really there. It is an amazing place and awesome to think that most of Africa used to be inhabited by these animals. Kruger is a really big place - as big as a small country! We could continue to visit there many times and not see it all.