A week in the Kalahari Desert provided many opportunities like this with a big red sun on the horizon. On this particular occasion, the haze in the atmosphere worked to my advantage by lessening the sun’s brightness and allowing me to easily capture a non-silhouette shot of the two oryx. Oryx, also called gemsbok, are a larger antelope species. Both males and females have long, straight horns that can be lethal at times — even known on occasion to kill lions.

Just a couple of meerkats lining up for a family portrait in the Kalahari Desert.

I saw three leopards in Botswana but only got decent looks at this one. We followed through the forest for about 30 minutes. It was very dark as the sun had already set, but despite the lack of light I was able to photograph her in a variety of settings. I kind of liked this one as she seemed quite curious about something up in the tree. This one goes out to another cat that I know that has had a rough couple of days.

This is the honey badger, also known as a ratel. Instead of me giving a long description on this most interesting species from the Kalahari Desert, best to leave it to an expert at the following link: http://youtu.be/4r7wHMg5Yjg

Back from Botswana today — a trip that was at times exhilarating while at others a bit disappointing due to a lack of animal activity. The local guides kept telling me that it was a bad time of year for wildlife, and that because of the extreme cold temperatures the animals weren’t getting up and about. That being said, after two straight weeks of game drives every morning and afternoon, a fair amount of good encounters started to add up. So although it wasn’t the bonanza I had expected based on previous trips to Africa, I was able to get decent to good looks at leopard (one adequate sighting), cheetah (encountered a trio of the same brothers on two occasions), civet, honey badger, elephant, zebra, giraffe, warthog, meerkat, mongoose, baboon, hyena, hippo, water buffalo, jackal, wild dog, wild cat, bushbaby, ostrich and many different bird and antelope species (steenbok, reedbuck, oryx, impala, red lechwee, kudu, springbok, tsessebe, etc) And of course… a few lions. For a while it didn’t look so good for me and lions and I thought I would set a new record by being the only person to ever take a two week safari to Africa and not see lions. This pride of ten (including six cubs, two adult females and two males) was spotted a week and a half into the trip. Up until then I hadn’t seen any. And it was in an area that I wasn’t really expecting to see any lions — the middle of the Kalahari Desert. I’ll upload a few shots of the majestic adult males in a future post, famous for their black manes.