Afternoon Game Drive
By mid-afternoon we enter Lake Nakuru National Park.
It's a very warm day but soon we are driving slowly a narrow dirt road through shady woodland and a breeze from the nearby lake cools us.
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At first there are few animal sightings. We hear rustlings in the tangled undergrowth but the animals are not always easily seen. Sometimes we catch a glimpse of antelope horns and hear the crash of bushes as a waterbuck startles.
Can you spot the antelope in this photograph?
I spy a hammerkop nest, an enormous mass up in a tree. The bird who builds it may be small, but it likes a lot of leg- room.
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The landscape becomes more open; to the left are low rocky hills with spindly trees, to the right is shrubby meadowland with the sandy lakeshore on the horizon. Later the land becomes a flat and grassy plain. One can see a long way.
There is a large population of waterbuck in Nakuru and we see these and other small antelope ,like impala and Thompson's gazelle, nimbly crossing the road in front of us a
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We see numerous small huddles of broad-shouldered African buffalo grazing alongside zebra, and the now almost-familiar sight of giraffes grazing among the acacia trees.
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We stop to watch a baboon family for a while. They are large olive baboons,
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There are many birds: long-striding secretary birds (named for the old-fashioned black "pen" quills atop their heads), tiny bee-eaters, lilac-breasted rollers, guinea fowl, hoopoes, hawks, and even a owl, blinking in the daylight.
We also spot a lone jackal loping along in the distance, and strive in vain to photograph a warthog--they are always trotting along in the opposite direction with their wiry tails held straight up in the air.
The highlight of the afternoon for me was stopping on a grassy plain near a group of seven white rhinos, grazing peacefully like cows wearing tank-armour.
"Those aren't animals", somebody whispered in an impressed whisper. "Those are boulders with legs".
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We were also lucky enough to come upon another group of three rhinos, and this time one of them was a boulder-like baby suckling its mother. It was young and it was cute, but that was one solid-looking baby. Unfortunately we weren't very close to them and binoculars came in handy.
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As the shadows lengthened with the passing afternoon, the light changed from bright white sunshine to a warm orangey mellow glow. The red-brown coats of the gazelle took on a gorgeous colour in this new light.
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I looked in vain, staring and staring into the passing golden-lit trees until it seemed that I saw a big cat in every tree. I had to rub my eyes and blink. The leopards stubbornly refused to appear. Perhaps we would have better luck tomorrow morning.
1 Comments:
I spotted the antelope..I DID!! I DID!!!
do I win something?
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