Afternoon Game Drive

Monday, August 29, 2005

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.

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.

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 and grazing by the roadside.

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. It is amazing how quickly one's eyes become accustomed to the fantastic!

We stop to watch a baboon family for a while. They are large olive baboons, perhaps fifteen of them, and there are several young ones leaping about and playing, while the more sedate adults relax on their haunches and pick at each others' fur. To our delight, we see two infant baboons, one clinging almost unseen to her mother's belly fur and the other riding piggy-back style on another.

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".

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.

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. As dusk approached we began to search for less obvious wildlife.

Nakuru Park is known for a fairly large, relatively speaking, leopard population and so we constantly scanned the trees for one. This was the best time of day to see a leopard sitting in a tree because leopards hunt early and then find a convenient limb to snooze on. They blend in easily with the branches though and it was best to look for a tail hanging down.

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.