This little baboon had just jumped out of its mother’s arms and started to play in the rain. When a termite flew by, the baboon couldn’t help but try to grab it.

The short rains in Kenya also herald the onset of the impala rutting season. These are competing males — the one giving chase is defending his territory and right to mate.

This topi and her calf were running from a hyena. It wasn’t much of a chase as the hyena quickly got tired and gave up. Topi were the most conspicuous animals we saw in the Masai Mara and every mother seemed to have a baby with her.

I know I don’t usually post on Saturdays but I need to do a test because many subscribers to this blog haven’t been getting emails. I think I have finally figured it out, but who knows.

This is a black backed jackal, nipping at a lion’s tail. The lion had a wildebeest kill and was taking her sweet time with it. When jackals begin to get impatient waiting, they’ll sometimes try to annoy the lion to get it to leave. There were two jackals and they were walking circles around the lion, yapping. This guy got bold enough to sneak up and nip the lion’s tail. The tactic didn’t work and the jackals eventually gave up and left.

These three cheetah brothers were marking their territory — going from tree to tree — as a herd of nervous zebras looked. We would eventually see a chase — the cheetahs coming up on the losing end as they were unable to penetrate a wall of adult zebras boxing in their young.

For the Valentine’s edition of photo of the day, I figured I’d try to find the most romantic pair of creatures in my collection of images — an endeavor which led me to this pair of undeniably sexy ground hornbills. In Fact, we watched as the male hornbill, in an act of pure chivalry, shared a delicious dung beetle with the female before grooming.

A while back I posted a shot of this mother giraffe kissing this baby. Here’s another, wider-cropped shot from that same interaction that we witnessed in Lewa, Kenya. This was just after the kiss, when the mom proceeded to rub her head against the baby’s chest. Of course, like most absent minded giraffe mothers, she then walked away to forage on the bushes, most likely forgetting that she even had a baby.

No animal in this one, just a lone acacia tree silhouetted against the Masai Mara sky late one afternoon.

Without any frame of reference here, it’s hard to imagine just how small this little jackal pup is (probably about the size of a very small house cat). As we made a very close approach, he/she seemed quite comfortable and unconcerned sitting there in the dried up mud on the side of the road. There were a couple of other pups playing nearby in a field, probably waiting for the mother to return to the den with breakfast.

Another thing that I like about rainy season in East Africa is the possibility for rainbows. This photo of a mother and baby zebra was taken on the Laikipia plains late in the day one such afternoon.