2017/09 Part 4 Serengeti - Thu am Migrations |
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Thursday September 21st
Our schedule called for morning and afternoon game drives, but we’d told Ayoub that we were so stuffed with food that we’d be happy to stay out all day and skip lunch. He compromised by ordering a packed lunch for us all, so we were going to spend all day in the Serengeti.
It was a warm sunny morning, but the tracks bore evidence of the recent rainstorm. Ayoub confirmed that the rain has started the reverse migration, the return of wildebeest and zebra from the Masai Mara in Kenya to the Serengeti in Tanzania.
Our first evidence of wildlife was definitely dead, a skeleton that had recently been picked clean. 
We’d see many more in the Serengeti, an ecosystem with millions of prey animals and thousands of predators eager to dine on them.
We saw this magnificent impala, with fearsome horns. Less magnificent but definitely cute was this dik-dik, with just its head poking out of the undergrowth. Dik-diks are the Snickers bar of Africa, a tasty snack for just about every predator, including humans.
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Serengeti Thursday AM impala & hornbills (2.25) |
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We saw our first hornbills, a Van der Decken’s with a red splash across 
its bill and a yellow billed.
While we were looking, this weaver bird landed in front of us, a white-headed buffalo weaver.
We came across a big gathering of impalas, mostly females 
and calves, all dainty gazelles.
Mixed in were a few hartebeest, not as elegant, looking to me like a cartoonist’s rendering of an antelope.
This giraffe was browsing on the shoots of the whistling acacia, loaded with two inch thorns. Even worse, some of the branches have galls full of biting ants which come out to defend their home tree. Maybe that’s the reason for the giraffe’s sour expression. The other picture shows a giraffe drinking, hard to do when your head is usually 16 feet up.
We were now on the great plain of the Serengeti, with 
grazing animals as far as the eye could see. The scenery was quite varied though, with distant hills and the occasional line of trees following a stream. Roads were gravel, mostly good except for recent rain damage.
Both zebras and wildebeests were on the move, the zebras moving as a clump and the wildebeest in long lines. The two species do not compete; zebras like to eat the top of the longer grasses while wildebeest prefer to eat the short grass. It’s obviously best if the zebra get to the grass first.
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Serengeti migrating herds (17.37) |
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We stayed still watching the movement. As so often happens, staying still means other things happen around you, like this mongoose returning to its roadside lair, and some white-bellied bustards came by. Yes that’s the third kind of bustard we’d seen here.
Ayoub took us out to a side road where we had wildebeest lines passing on either side of us. The leaders zigzag rather than stick to a straight line, and the rest plod along the same path. Occasionally
they’d break into a canter, presumably more from exuberance than fear as there was no obvious threat. They stayed fifty yards or so away from us, more wary than the lions.