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.

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.