Next up for Mother’s Day week is this fine looking African elephant and her young calf. We spotted them just down the road from the rhinos that I posted yesterday. Both the rhinos and the elephants make their home in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. On another note, I’m hoping that all my server issues have been resolved and everyone gets this post. Sorry for the problems yesterday.

Continuing with the theme for Mother’s Day week, here is a rhino with her calf. Baby rhinos can weigh up to 150 pounds when born. Unlike many other mammals that will trail their parents, baby rhinos will often run out in front of their mothers for protection… and there aren’t many animals that want to mess with a full grown and angry rhinoceros.

This olive baboon didn’t seemed too bothered by all the rain and let out a big yawn just as I snapped the shutter. The locations was Laikipia in Kenya. Again, if this post appears and then disappears (or doesn’t appear at all), it’s because I’m in the process of changing service providers. All should be back to normal sometime on Wednesday.

This may be the last post for a couple of days as I attempt to move my site to a new server, but who knows. If you don’t hear from me for a few days, well… that’s the issue. In the meantime, this is the cheetah that we were able to get extremely close to. They were in the process of re-introducing her to the wild. She had already made several kills on her own, but was still very comfortable around people. I, of course, was loving it, being able to get wide angle shots like this with very little effort. The location is Lewa in Kenya.

In honor of my mother, whose birthday it is today, I had to go with a mother/baby shot. These two lions were temporarily separated from the rest of the pride — the mom guarding a wildebeest kill she had just made. The baby kept nuzzling up to the mom, but every now and again — probably bored because there was no one else to play with — would come out of the bushes to investigate us. Happy Birthday Mom.

This poor little lion cub got pinned against that log when its mother rolled over in her sleep. After a quick struggle, the little guy was able to get free and climb on top of mom to continue playing.

This crested crane had about five chicks, but they were all scattered about in the grass. At least you can see one, blurred out in the background. It was raining pretty hard, but it also happened to be a great day for shooting. The location was Laikipia, Kenya.

Striped hyenas are much more rare than spotted hyenas and we were lucky to see this one in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. Not only are they endangered, they are also almost strictly nocturnal and rarely seen in the daylight. This was at the end of the day and shot in very low light as two of them were ducking in and out of their den, getting ready for a night of foraging. Our guide said that he had only seen striped hyena a few other times in the reserve.

This is a banded mongoose, photographed in the Masai Mara of Kenya. Unlike other mongoose species that live solitary lives, the banded mongoose lives in colonies. This particular mongoose and the rest of its colony lived in a network of burrows that was right next to a bat eared fox den. The banded mongoose will also live in close proximity to baboons and warthogs — foraging and actually being handled by the former, and picking ticks from the latter.

Servals are nocturnal and hunt mostly at night. We were lucky to catch this one in the late afternoon as it was heading out for the night. I previously posted another shot of this serval — more of a portrait. It gave us several different shot opportunities as it slowly got up from its hiding place in the grass when it realized we were onto him/her.  It then took a few slow steps, then a few quicker ones, before leaping away. I captured a bit more motion blur than ideal in this photo, but there wasn’t much light and my shutter was pretty slow. Even so, I ended up liking the effect.