2 March 2015
Another day
full of game spotting and apart from separate sightings a highlight was all the
new animals we saw today! We had a great display of the variety in the Kruger
NP: impala, waterbuck, kudu, crested barbet, a multitude of elephant sightings,
three cheetahs lazing on an old termite mount, carmine bee-eaters, two herds of
buffalos, yellow-billed kite, warthogs, golden orb spiders, klipspringer,
bateleur, common grey duiker, lilac-breasted roller, zebras, hippos, marabou
storks, crocodile, sadlebilled stork, baboons, leopard tortoises, wildebeest,
plenty of white-backed vultures, and twice a leopard.
Our morning
highlight was a family of vervet monkeys. We actually set watching this
mega-large herd of impalas when an impala called the alarm. We rolled forward
to see why and then a vervet monkey called the alarm, apparently for us. Most
like the monkey had also startled the impalas hence their frenzy. But after
calling the alarm twice, he settled back down and now that we had seen one
monkey, we saw more and more. And there was a tiny baby in this group, but it
already had an attitude! Playing with some monkeys twice its size, it wasn't
scared. It was cunning enough to even push one out of the tree! Impalas
forgotten, we sat watching those monkeys play for about 30min.
Our second
highlight came in the afternoon when we followed a tip about a cheetah mother
with two young cubs. Even though we were lucky and had already seen cheetah
yesterday and this morning, watching cheetahs never gets old, so we went down
to have a look. Coming close to the sighting we suddenly see this stream of
cars coming towards us trying to leap over each other. So we stop and look for
the cause in the bush. And there she was, right next to us, emerging from the
bushes, followed by two tiny little balls of fur that were much smaller than
the high thatching grass. We managed to get them in a bit of an open area to
get some great pictures, before she (being wary of all the cars following her)
crossed over and disappeared on the other side.
PS We checked the
result of last night's lion vs buffalo stand-off. We didn't see any more lions
hanging around, but there were still buffalos on top. We also did not see a
carcass, so we assumed the lions had not succeeded in killing one of the
buffalo, or didn't want to. And the buffalos had not killed a lion either...
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