When giraffes fight, they use their long necks to try and punish their opponents. The behavior is called necking and we only saw it once when we were in Kenya. These two males were really going at it, slapping each other with their heads, both landing blows here and there, but neither really delivering a knock out punch. Eventually they grew tired of whatever it was that they were fighting about and they resumed foraging.

Here’s another of the many silhouette shots from Kenya. This time a male impala in the Olare Orok Conservancy.

This will be my last post for about ten days, as I’m off to India tomorrow in search of tigers. In the meantime, here’s another dik dik — as I mentioned in a previous post, one of the smallest antelope species in all of Africa. This one was walking through our camp one afternoon when we were walking back from lunch. Enjoy, and stay tuned for new shots from India.

This bat-eared fox had particularly large ears. I mean, they all have large ears, but this guy really went above and beyond. They are quite skittish and it was difficult to make a close approach, especially since they hear you coming before you can even see them. This guy, however, held out just long enough so that I could get a few portraits. The ears are full of blood vessels and are also instrumental in keeping the fox cool

Spotted hyenas don’t get much respect from the locals in Kenya. It seemed everyone we met talked about how ugly they are — but most of those people did concede that the babies are kind of cute. I’m a bit amazed at how much they can look like underfed grizzly bears. These two weren’t exactly fresh from the womb (especially the one on the right), but I thought they were quite attractive indeed.

Earlier on this particular day we had spotted an impala carcass hanging from a tree — a sure sign that a leopard was in the area. We couldn’t locate the leopard but knew that eventually she would come back to claim her meal. We returned a couple of hours later and there she was, enjoying a little lunch up in the tree. We checked back in one more time at the end of the day and saw her again. She was still on the kill, but eventually got up and walked down the tree, allowing me to take this silhouette shot.

A blessing and a curse, the elephant tusk is actually an elongated incisor tooth. Elephants use their tusks for many things, including fending off predators or other elephants, foraging for food, stripping bark from trees and for moving larger objects out of the way. Unfortunately, humans have many uses for  tusks too, which has led to wide scale poaching over the years and the near eradication of the species before stricter laws were enforced. Elephants have been so decimated by poaching, in fact, that the gene that produces larger tusks has almost been bred out of the species. As a result, today’s elephants have smaller tusks than they did a hundred years ago.

Another lion cub from the Masai Mara. This little guy was really going at that branch, trying to gnaw it in half. In the process, he/she gave us a good look at the underside of those big paws. There were about nine cubs in the pride, several, like this one, only a month old.

There was a reason why the writers of the Lion King insisted that one of the main characters be a warthog. Ugly little guys, but they have lots of personality. Especially the babies, like this guy here from the Masai Mara.

These two three-month old lion cubs took a quick break from jumping on top of each other, to do their best Gene Simmons impersonation for the camera. I captured this one very early on a rainy morning in Laikipia, Kenya.