Hello ~ I’m Scott and welcome to your 5-minute vacation for March 26th. I share these snippets of our travels in the hope that my photos and stories will allow you to go on a vicarious vacation and “get away from it all,” if only for a moment. I appreciate you inviting me into your inbox today.
In the first half hour after entering the Serengeti National Park, we came across three zebras shadowing a cheetah on the hunt. It just got better after that.
Leaving the Ngorongoro crater, our next stop was the Serengeti. After breakfast, we loaded up the Land Cruisers and headed west for three bumpy, dusty hours. The landscape alternated between featureless plains and this:
We arrived at our next lodge, the Ndutu Safari Lodge, dropped our stuff in our small yet comfy rooms, had lunch and headed out on a game drive.
Our detached cottage at Ndutu. We had the left side.
There’s always the possibility that the animals won’t be where you want them to be. While the wildebeests and zebras follow the same route each year on the Great Migration, they stay or leave an area depending on the rains. We were lucky, our timing was good: the wildebeests, with calves, were in the area. I guess the rains this year were favorable to us both.
(A side note about the Great Migration: the name “Great Migration” seems a bit inaccurate to me. I think of a “migration” as having a beginning point and an end point but the Great Migration has neither. It’s a continuous, clockwise movement of the animals across northern Tanzania and southwestern Kenya as they follow the rains. I don’t know of a better name than “Great Migration;” perhaps “Great Circle”? Or is that to Lion King~ ish?)
And where there are wildebeests and zebras, there are predators digesting and resting before the next hunt.
Or perhaps limbering up after a catnap.
Sleeping lions lie where they like.
Compared to cheetahs and leopards, lions are social creatures. Over the entire Safari, we saw 57 lions and not once did we see a solitary lion. Once we saw a pair of young males but in every other sighting, the lions were part of a larger group, sometimes snuggling and sometimes hanging out within eyesight of each other. Very social. Speaking of social…
We saw several elephant herds, each with at least 30 animals of all ages. They had no fear of us ~ nor should they, of course ~ so they would walk almost within touching distance of our vehicles. Up close, they looked huge but when seen out in the grasslands, they looked small enough to be swallowed by the vast Serengeti.
The Great Migration includes wildebeests and many other species, including zebras, like this one reflected in a waterhole.
In addition to the migrating animals, there are also the locals, like this giraffe and his dental hygienist oxpecker. Oxpeckers eat the ticks they find on large mammals, notably cape buffalo and rhinos, but they will also feed on food stuck between a giraffe’s teeth. BTW, giraffe horns aren’t horns but “ossicones.” One way ossicones differ from horns and antlers is that an ossicone has a permanent covering of skin and fur.
I think most of us are interested in the large mammals because they are, yes, interesting, and easy to see/photograph. But I think the birds are just as interesting, if not more difficult to photograph.
For example, look at this beauty, the lilac-breasted roller. Perched on an acacia tree, it’s a delightful mix of blues, purples and diminished oranges. In flight, it’s a blaze of blue. I’m told Kenyans consider it their unofficial national bird.
And then there’s my favorite, that combination eagle head/turkey body on stilts formally known as the secretary bird (There are two here. The head of the second bird is barely popping up from the brush in the lower right corner.). We didn’t know secretary birds existed until we saw one during our Kenya safari last year. If we hadn’t seen one this trip, we would have been as disappointed as if we hadn’t seen a leopard (Spoiler alert: we were not disappointed. Leopard photos to come).
By the end of our first day at Ndutu, we had seen a cheetah, lions, secretary birds and oodles of wildebeest with calves. Could it get any better? Yes, it could and it did. I’ll tell you how next time.
Until then ~
Tschüss!
I'm really enjoying these postcards, Scott. Thanks.