This crested barbet stopped by the watering hole while I was at the Mkombe bird hide at Zimanga Game Reserve. For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, it reminds me of the cartoon character Foghorn Leghorn from the Looney Tunes cartoons I watched when I was a kid.
Here are the last few cheetah photos that I had flagged for editing from my October / November 2014 project with Wildlife ACT. It took a few days for our first sighting of Kalahari the cheetah, but I was very lucky to get to spend a fair bit of time in his presence, and learn a bit about his personality.
I’m not sure what will be up next, but I still have quite a few photos from that trip that I would like to share. Have a great day everyone!
There are sugar cane fields surrounding portions of Zimanga Private Game Reserve, and on some of our tracking outings, we would follow the cane field fence lines to get where we were going. After tracking the cheetah for some time, we finally spotted him, but I am sure the worker cutting cane (probably less than 10 metres away) didn’t have a clue he was there.
Two weeks ago, I managed to get loads of editing done, and had a post a day. This past week, each day seemed to slip by at record speed, and I didn’t manage a single post (or even to take or edit a single photo).
Thankfully, this morning I grabbed my camera bag when we headed out for our early morning walk. What a beautiful morning it was! I picked a particular spot at the dikes, both so I could get a few photos of the sky before heading out, and also the hopes of seeing some interesting ducks that I had spotted the evening before. It turns out the ducks are common goldeneyes, and I didn’t manage any decent shots of them, but at least they were good enough to get an ID.
This was my favourite shot from the morning. Enjoy!
We left so early for our walk today I didn’t bother grabbing my camera, and as we were leaving the dike I was kicking myself for it. This would have been so much better shot with something other than my phone. I’ve never before seen a heron perched on the top of the power lines.
Given the sheer quantity of warthogs I saw while at Zimanga Game Reserve, I’m surprised it has taken me this long to post any photos of them. They were everywhere I looked, from dawn till dusk. In our yard, wandering down the road (and seeming to take great joy in holding up the vehicle progress) and I am pretty certain there was at least one (probably more) hanging around every time we stopped the vehicle to do our tracking.
They could be described as having a face only a mother could love, but honestly I found something kind of endearing about them. And if nothing else, I really, really needed to work on a blog post of a land dweller, or I’d have to change the tagline of my site to “Images of birds and more birds”.
I’m both happy and irritated with myself at the moment. Happy that I discovered a few additional sunbird photos that had not been properly tagged, and annoyed with myself for not going through the proper workflow to begin with.
That off my chest, here are a few additional sunbirds I saw during my last trip to South Africa. Enjoy!