The meerkats seemed to have three morning activities — standing guard while watching for predators, eating, and playing. I was never quite sure where a fight would break out but was able to catch the action every now and again.
I have many more photos from Botswana to post, but thought I’d break it up a little with a shot today from Yellowstone. This was taken on my most recent “spring” trip to the park. It was very cold for late May — even for Yellowstone — but the weather provided for some nice views of the landscape and the animals within it. It was still very early in the morning when I saw this bison mother and calf in the northern part of the park near the Wyoming/Montana border.
Here’s another of the black backed jackals that I saw so many of in the Central Kalahari. This particular guy was as intrigued with me as I was with him. The sun was setting behind him providing the nice backlight.
This antelope species is called a tsessebe. Not the most striking hooved quadrupeds on the savanna, but they did look pretty good silhouetted in the tall grass on this one particular morning.
Other than meerkats, there wasn’t a lot of activity in Makgadikgadi Pan in the dry savanna of northwestern Botswana. Makgadikgadi Pan is one of the largest salt flats in the world and is all that remains of a great lake that dried up thousands of years ago. Being such a vast, flat area, it was pretty cool to see the occasional zebra making its way across the Pan. I took this photo first thing in the morning and I was able to get out of the safari vehicle and down on the ground to get the perspective of the zebra against the blue sky. I also used a very slow shutter to give a little motion blur as I panned with the zebra’s movement. This one goes out to my zebra crazed cousin Cristin.
The elephants in Botswana are some of the largest on the African continent. We were obviously very close to this guy, and when he raised his ear in a defensive display it gave me the opportunity to get an edge to edge close up.
Hippos are fast. Very fast. I knew this, but had never seen one running before. They can top out at about 30 miles per hour — faster than a human. Pretty amazing considering that they are the second largest land mammal next to the elephant. We saw this guy darting through the grass first thing in the morning, just outside of our camp. The oxpeckers were doing their best to keep up the pace.
This bird is called a little bee eater. And, of course, what good is a bee eater if it isn’t eating a bee? Little bee eaters are fairly common throughout Africa. This one was photographed in the Linyanti swamp in northern Botswana.
Always nice to get some backlighting at the end of the day. These two cheetah brothers were playing as they moved on to a new location.
These were the three three-month old lion cubs that I saw in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. They were in a pride that also had three one-month old cubs from another mating pair of adults. These guys were just kind of hanging back waiting for their mother’s to finish drinking at a water hole.