2017/09 Part 6 Samburu - Mon am Leopard & gerenuks |
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Monday September 25th 
It was pleasantly cool for our breakfast looking out on the river. The opposite bank was busy with baboons and elephants. Our tent looked good in the daylight.
So did the river, but any thoughts of a cool swim soon disappeared when we saw this fellow out there on a sandbank. This white-backed vulture would be happy to help with clean-up too.
Raptors are always hard to identify because of their variation in coloring but we think the bird in the bush is a harrier and the one in the tree looks to be an augur buzzard.
Elephants are easier to identify and this group was demolishing a copse of trees; you can see why villagers get upset when the elephants raid their crops.
Then, a real surprise, we saw this magnificent leopard on the hunt. So
supple; it seemed to flow over the ground. It seemed very unhappy to see us; Nzuki thought it might be a newcomer to the park, not used to tourists and their vehicles.
Nearby was this dik-dik which might have been grateful to us for distracting the leopard.
These gerenuks might also have been at risk. When standing up to feed they look like something out of Star Wars. In close-up you wonder why they haven’t become Disney characters too. 
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We continued along the river bank, seeing animals everywhere, a mongoose and a large group of those glamorous guinea fowl, most gathered around water holes, but others 
proving they could fly by browsing in high shrubs.
Some of the larger shrubs hid giraffes and we’d suddenly see a head pop out and start munching on the highest leaves.
Baboons are always fun to watch. This one was using her tail as a car seat for her infant.
We stopped at the Samburu Game Lodge to fill up with petrol and use the toilets. This lodge also featured tents and grass 
roofs. 
These two designs came from the toilet’s glass doors.
Nzuki drove us out into the desert for a while but we didn’t see much that was new except for this yellow-necked spurfowl, similar save for its colouring to others in the Serengeti.
Then we stopped at this elephant skull, a spot where Nzuki thought it was safe enough for us to get out and walk around and look at the view of the Samburu Hills.
We were underneath a tree full of weaver nests. These were black-
capped social weavers, and there was also a pretty yellow bird in the tree top. After shooting a dozen pictures through a screen of twigs we almost missed it 
when the bird, a golden palm weaver, flew down by our feet.
The black bird is a drongo, notorious for mimicking other birds’ alarm calls so they can steal their food. 
In Australia there’s a similar bird, but in Oz slang it’s one of many names for a useless idiot.
Sandie captured these kids playing on the beach. Hopefully they were wearing
their crocodile repellant.
We saw more bee eaters, all perched on branches overlooking the river, where bugs were plentiful. The one on the right was trying to angle its bug dinner to where it could be swallowed but the bug didn’t want to go.
This common water buck poked its head up: I still think it deserves a better African name as those horns are quite handsome and it’s far from “common”.
Then we briefly saw a ground squirrel. Nzuki didn’t understand why we’d get excited about such a lowly species. We were just surprised to see one in Africa, our first.