On Safari With Karen from 2 January 2016

2 January 2016

Our first safari of 2016 brought us to the park early in the afternoon and right away we were treated to some lovely animal sightings. But our highlight was seeing a journey of five giraffe in all sizes. As I am driving a car full of female guests there were a lot of "oh"s and "ah"s when a baby was discovered next to its mum!

Our second highlight was spotting our first elephant! Majestic animals as they are, all were happy as he was munching not too far from the road. So far we saw him eating just grass, but the tree pushed down over the road a little further on showed how much damage they actually can do. 

Other animals seen: buffalo bulls, klipspringers, impalas, lots of zebras, a warthog in its bathroom while having a mud bath, more giraffes, hippos, kudus, blue wildebeests, common grey duiker, a well hidden sable bull, and a warthog mum with piglets.

3 January 2016

This morning we left after breakfast for our early game drive. It was already getting hot at 6am! During the day we had many highlights and my guests surely appreciate all the babies in the park.

We got lucky with two sightings of tiny zebras, saw many impala lambs, blue wildebeest calf’s, a teeny tiny baby kudu, young elephants, a baby hippo, buffalo calf’s, very cute baby baboons, young reedbuck and baby giraffes. 

But our super highlight was seeing hyenas. My guests were soon agreeing that hyenas are the cutest things in the world and nothing like Disney has portrayed them! We had two separate sightings and the first young one we saw had the "puppy dog eyes"-look mastered. Instantly all fell in love and the little fella posed nicely for pictures.

At our second sighting a suckling mum was also babysitting three other young ones and we couldn't get over the cuteness of it all. However, claiming the sighting wouldn't be very nice to the other visitors of the park so after a while we moved off. 

Other interesting sightings: a family of common reedbucks, baboons, kudus, waterbucks, giraffes, herds of buffalo, white rhinos, impalas, zebras, blue wildebeests, lions, hippos, elephants, and warthogs. 

Birds included lilac breasted rollers, European bee eaters, white breasted cormorants, brown snake eagle, yellow billed kite, grey and yellow-billed hornbill, african fish eagle, blacksmith lapwings, red-collared widowbirds, pintailed whydah, cape glossy starlings and black-collared barbets.