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.

This is a martial eagle and it was photographed in the Olare Orok Conservancy of Kenya. Martial eagles are the largest eagles in Africa with a wingspan of up to 8.5 feet. They are powerful predators and have been known to prey upon young impala, warthog and baboons.

It was our last day in Laikipia, Kenya when we saw these lion cubs playing in a tree. There was a third cub as well — and the mother resting in the brush just to the right of these two 3-month olds. There wasn’t a lot of light so early in the morning, but every now and again, the cubs stopped moving for an instant and I was able to capture the moment.

I was hoping for clouds in the sky on our final morning in Lewa, Kenya but none were to be had when we spotted two white rhinoceros in front of Mount Kenya. Even without the clouds, it was a beautiful morning made even better by all the great landscape opportunities (Lewa was the most picturesque of the four areas we visited — although they were all fairly spectacular). We saw quite a few white rhino there, as well as plenty of black rhino, which I’ll post soon.

They call this guy the red headed agama lizard for good reason (there is also a blue headed agama — they call that one by its name for good reason too). The males have this Spider man like appearance while the females are more brownish in color. They are widespread throughout much of Africa. This one was spotted in the Masai Mara.

We saw two types of mongoose on the Kenya trip — banded and dwarf. This one is the dwarf mongoose and he was actually lurking around the edge of our camp. I spotted him while walking to our safari vehicle for our afternoon game drive. Always nice to get a few shots in the bag before you even make it to the car.