In honor of Botswana’s first ever Olympic medal last night (a silver in the 800 meters) I thought I’d post another of that country’s most ferocious residents — the fun loving honey badger. This guy was on the prowl late in the afternoon in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. He walked right through our camp while I was hidden in a makeshift blind consisting of about eight discarded boxes from the local villagers.

When a springbok pronks like this, it is warning would-be predators not to bother — that it is healthy and not worth the effort to try and catch. I suppose it works sometimes, not others. I photographed this springbok early in the morning in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve of Botswana.

I figured it was about time for another look at the meerkats. This go round it’s one guard communicating with another guard. They have quite the system, each meerkat taking a shift as a lookout while the rest of the troop forages.

I previously posted another shot like this from Botswana. I just found this one and think I like it better. The antelope is a springbok, which are very common in the Central Kalahari Desert. It was nice each night to capture the huge sun on the horizon with my telephoto lens (which compresses space, making it look even bigger than it actually is).

Usually jackals run away if you approach them too closely, but this guy seemed as curious about me as I was about him. I was even able to get out of the safari vehicle and down on the ground for some low angle shooting. He kept on moving closer and closer, sniffing the air every five steps or so. Eventually he passed by me about twenty feet away and headed on his way.

While I was sitting inside a makeshift blind waiting for honey badgers to arrive, several birds stopped by, allowing me very tight portraits. This one is a southern yellow hornbill. I previously posted a shot of this guy looking directly at camera. Here’s one that gives a good look at the beak and facial feathers.

I already posted one shot of this red lechwe dashing through the flooded savanna of the Okavango Delta. Here’s another. Red lechwes spend most of their time in the water eating aquatic plants. Their legs are covered in a water repelling substance allowing them to run quite fast in knee deep water. The water and tall grass also provide protection from predators.

It gets very hot in the Kalahari desert in the middle of the day. This is when every creature seems to be looking for a place to cool off. In this particular photo, an oryx finds relief in the shade of an acacia tree.

Last week I posted a photo of an oxpecker pecking in a zebra’s ear. This week it’s two oxpeckers climbing up the mountainous back of a giraffe. There were actually quite a few more of these small birds on the giraffe, and at one point I saw a flock of about 30 of them on another giraffe. The giraffes don’t seem to mind much (after all, they are getting rid of all their ticks) but a couple of times I saw a giraffe clearly annoyed by the parasitic birds.

Oxpeckers can be found on most of the large mammals of sub-Sahara Africa including elephants, rhinos, giraffes, buffalo, and in this case, zebras. They mostly eat ticks off the backs of their hosts, but sometimes they move in for a delicious bite of earwax. This zebra/oxpecker combo were photographed early one morning in the Okavango Delta of Botswana.