Some dry season views

OK, my ‘Smith’s Mine’ post worked so here goes for the next instalment.

A lot happened in the six months gap between blog posts so I’ll just use a few of Sue’s nicer animal photos for this one…….

The dry season is, of course, the best time to see lions as they hang around at the water points and wait for their next meal to come along. We met this nice male near Salt Spring one morning……..

 A lot of lion sightings are just a patch of tawny fur and the occasional flick of an ear in the shade of a bush but early on a mid-winter morning even the lions are awake and it was a pleasure to watch this one walking through the bush.

  At Masuma the lions killed a buffalo just behind the dam wall where they were invisible from the viewing platform. Occasionally one or two of them would come to the water for a drink……

But a great deal of the time they were intimidated by some of the dam’s resident hippos

  The viewing platform soon filled up with tourists and we changed from lion watching to people watching. Wild animals are wonderful but sometimes people are even better!

    Just last week we were passing Masuma and the attendant warned us that there was a sick lion near the road. Down by the bridge we found one of the males walking slowly towards the shade with his face swollen, one eye completely shut and the other almost closed as well

   By mid afternoon he was worse, struggling to breathe and obviously suffering. He died an hour or so later. It seems he was probably kicked in the head by a large animal and died from the effects of the kick but there was a slight possibility of disease so samples were taken and sent away for testing. This sort of tragedy happens all around the Park every day of course, usually with the predators coming out of it on top but most of the time we are not aware of it. At Sinamatella my friends the baboons have quietly played out a little tragedy of their own.

   Baboons are apparently devoted mothers. Back in July, Sue saw one of the females of our local troop carrying a dried up dead baby. We saw her many times over the next few weeks. At first she carefully put the baby down when she stopped to feed then picked it up and ran or walked with it in her arms. Eventually she became more careless and started carrying it in her mouth…

Finally she must have given up and dumped the remains as we haven’t seen her carrying the baby for a couple of weeks though we see the baboons often.

    Time for some nicer pictures I think.

    Sue selected this zebra as one of her favourite pictures. I asked her why and she said ‘because I like it’. Can’t argue with that………

   This one, I like…..

And this one as well…….

  The elephant and herd of buffalo were at the top end of Mandavu Dam. We haven’t seen all that many of either species this season because last year’s rains were so good there is still, after nearly six months without any rain at all, good natural water in a lot of places and there has been no need for animals to move to Sinamatella. It has also been a surprisingly cool dry season. Even now in mid October we are only experiencing temperatures in the low thirties. The highest I have measured so far was thirty nine but that hot spell only lasted a couple of days. Some people are saying that’s a good sign for the coming rainy season, some say the opposite. We’ll see and if I can keep uploading photos to the blog, I’ll let you know.