I had been taking close ups of an adult giraffe’s face when all of a sudden this little guy appeared from behind its mother. It was getting close to mid day so the light wasn’t great but few things on safari are as cute as a baby giraffe.

These yellow hornbills were very common throughout all the camps I went to in Botswana. They like to forage on the ground, and I photographed this one while I was in my makeshift blind, waiting for the honey badger to arrive. Intrigued by the clicking of my shutter, it kept looking in my direction giving me the opportunity for some close up portraits. I also saw red billed hornbills and black billed hornbills, but these yellow billed guys were definitely the most popular.

It was extremely cold in the Kalahari Desert and the meerkats were doing all they could to stay warm. For this shot, they formed an almost perfectly round ball of fur.

It was very late in the day and the sun had long since disappeared when I captured this shot of two elephants in Botswana’s Linyanti Swamp. I used a split graduated neutral density filter in front of my lens (as well as a very high ISO of 3200) in order to hold the color in the sky while exposing for the foreground.

Here’s another one from the Central Kalahari at sunset. This is a springbok, the most common antelope in the area. More on these guys and their “pronking” behavior in a future post.

African wild dogs are an endangered species. They also happen to be one of the most sought after species by safari goers to Africa. People go crazy about these guys. It reminded me of the wolf people in Yellowstone. The first camp I stayed at in Botswana is supposed to be one of the best places to see them. Even so, it took us three days of tracking to find this pack of 11. When we did come upon them they were resting but would occasionally get up and walk around before plopping down again. And they yawned a lot — like this guy.

The male lions of the Central Kalahari Desert are famous for their black manes. Typically, the mane gets blacker as the lion gets older. This lion was part of the pride of 10 that I saw that included another, younger male with a much lighter mane. These guys also tend to be larger than the lions in the rest of Botswana.

These were two of three cheetah brothers that I saw on my first two evenings in Botswana (the third brother was on the ground behind the termite mound). It was the end of the day and I was able to expose for the foreground while holding detail in the sky by blending several exposures.

I really liked these black-backed jackals. They look a lot like coyotes, but a lot more attractive. At least I think so. I saw them throughout Botswana, but especially in the Kalahari Desert. For the most part they ran when I approached, but this one was quite curious and approached me. In this photo, it was just getting up from resting and stretching like all dogs do.

I photographed many different antelope species in Botswana. This one is called a red lechwe. These guys always stay close to water and it can be quite a sight when a group of them dashes through the flooded Okavango Delta.