Ngorongoro

After almost two weeks and about 25 to 30 hours of riding in safari vehicles between various stops, we got to our final destination of this vacation, Tanzania's Ngorongoro Crater. Earlier in the trip, at Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya, we'd come across what the members of our party referred to as our first "Jurassic Park moment". On the way to our lodge the one night we stayed in that Park, we saw an open grassy plain with multiple species of animals moving in herds toward some unseen destination and it reminded us of the scene in the movie where Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler see the recreated dinosaurs for the first time. Ngorongoro blew away Lake Nakuru in Jurassic Park-ness. For me, Ngorongoro was Jurassic Park. Without the dinosaurs, of course.

The Crater, a 100 square mile circle which sits within the larger Ngorongoro Conservation Area, was formed between two and three million years ago when an active volcano exploded and then collapsed in on itself. It is the largest intact extinct volcanic caldera in the world, a site made most impressive to me because of its near perfectly level floor and rim elevations. It looks like a lush green bowl 2,000 feet deep stocked with wildlife that are for the most part captured within.

There is a road which leads roughly around the perimeter of the Crater offering glimpses to the floor below every so often. We first saw the entire Crater on a pitstop en route to the Serengeti National Park. I took the photograph above to memorialize the occasion. It is the most gorgeous national site I have ever seen (albeit with perhaps limited experience). I cannot think of a single place that filled me with more wonder, and that includes the Grand Canyon. Maybe it was the picture perfect day we had on our restroom and scenic view stop but I think this place is simply spectacular. It got more amazing when we descended into the place a couple of days later.

Wildebeest and zebra dotting the floor of Ngorongoro Crater.

To get down to the floor of the Crater, you have to take a twisty, turny, one-way road that seems not wide enough or stable enough at some points. Sit on the left side of the vehicle you are traveling in if you want the best, but sometimes breathtaking in a good and not-so-good way, view as you descend. The dark dots which are the wildebeest, lions, zebra, ostriches, gazelle and other animals get more defined as you get closer to the bottom. Maybe it was the day we visited but in my view the wildlife was more spread out than in the other places we had visited rather than gathered together in small or large groups. When you hit the bottom, you are faced with an almost flat landscape to explore before you take the similarly but different twisty, turny, one-way road out at the end of the day. The way out is the same road used by the elephants to get in and out. It might be a long drive if you have to wait behind a herd of elephants.

Over the two weeks in East Africa before Ngorongoro, we got the best look at cats in Masai Mara; the best look at rhinos at Lake Nakuru; the best elephant sightings at Amboseli; the most intimate extended experience with any animal (giraffe) at Lake Manyara; and a sense of what the great wildebeest migration might be like at the Serengeti National Park. Ngorongoro didn't top any of those individual experiences, but for me, Ngorongoro completed the entire safari. It filled in the little gaps that the other five parks together, for all the amazing sightings, missed. And where it duplicated an experience from another park, I was able to focus on the periphery of the event rather than the main attraction.

On the simplest of levels, Ngorongoro did two things: (1) it got us our best look at one of the animals that was on my top 10 never seen in the wild list (ostrich was number six on that list) and (2) it checked the last box for sure on my personal Big Five list. The picture above showing two male and two female ostriches is one of my favorite of the trip. I love the different poses, the spacing between the birds and the way some are looking right at the camera and others are not. We were close to the edge of the Crater at the time we saw these four so the wall of the collapsed caldera behind forms a back canvas to fill in the background of the shot. My only regret with ostriches on this trip is that we didn't get closer than maybe 100 feet or so but I'm glad Ngorongoro got me this picture.

The Big Five is a name traditionally given by big game hunters to describe the five species of African animals that are the most difficult to hunt on foot. They are not the largest five animals on the continent (sorry, hippo and giraffe). In our first trip to sub-Saharan Africa in 2015, we managed to lay eyes on the African elephant, lion and African buffalo but came home missing the last two spots. Earlier on this trip, we checked the leopard off that list in Masai Mara and Serengeti. That left only the black rhinoceros unseen. Our Kenyan guide, Joe, insisted that one of the rhinos we saw at Lake Nakuru was a black rhinoceros but it was so far away and disappeared so soon after we saw it that we didn't get any chance for a good look.

Ngorongoro fixed that. Black rhinos are scarcer than their white cousins that we saw at Nakuru. While there about 20,000 white rhinos in the wild, there are just 5,000 black rhinos. There can't be many of these animals in Ngorongoro but we were able to spot two and get a photograph or two of one of them. In marked contrast to the ostrich picture above, the photograph we managed to get of the fifth of the Big Five is not a spectacular picture because it was taken at a distance that stretched our camera's range. But we got him (or her). This was a big thing for us.

A solitary black rhinoceros. The last of the Big Five we saw on this trip.

Ngorongoro also gave us glimpses at the entire cycle of life. We saw what was probably the youngest animal we'd seen on our trip even before we'd finished the descent down into the Crater. On the right side of the road we were traveling down was a Grant's gazelle with its mother and it can't have been much more than an hour old and maybe that's on the high side of its age. It was so wobbly on its legs that the location where it was walking on a bit of a hill far away really from any other animals made sense from a keeping safe from predators standpoint.

That baby Grant's was not the only calf we saw. We also found a lot of baby wildebeest (February is birthing season for wildebeest) that we'd been hoping to see in all the parks we'd visited but which until Ngorongoro had largely avoided us. The wildebeest occupies a not so celebrated spot on the unofficial Ugly Five list (along with the lappet-faced vulture, warthog, marabou stork and striped hyena) for its less than pleasing appearance and is sometimes referred to as the "spare parts animal" because it seems to be made up of different not so attractive parts from other animals.

But the wildebeest babies? Well, not so ugly. In fact, they might be called cute. The beige coat looks way better than the grey-brown color the adults sport; the hunched back has not yet set in nor has the hair on the neck grown out; the awkward looking horns haven't shown up (I guess childbirth could be painful if the babies came with horns); and the tail works way better with the short hair. These things were plentiful at Ngorongoro, always sticking close to mom. Hopefully most of them survive until adulthood.

Mom and what was probably the youngest animal we saw on our trip trailing gingerly behind.

Baby and mom. Cute, right? 

Speaking of survival, we saw some death at Ngorongoro just like we did at Serengeti. And just like Serengeti, we didn't see the deed done but instead came upon the aftermath which involved a hyena and a whole lot of vultures. Our guide's opinion was that the African buffalo that was the object of all the attention here died from more natural causes rather than having been taken down by a single enterprising hyena. The idea of one hyena killing an animal as large as a buffalo didn't make sense, even if it could enlist the assistance of the two black-backed jackals hanging around the site to feed when they got the chance.

Since we'd seen a sight like this one just a couple of days earlier, I tried to focus on the behavior and flight of the vultures which kept descending and taking off again and again as the hyena chased them away. I think I'm fairly satisfied with the resulting photographs that get me a decent capture of these ugly birds in flight.

Vultures being chased from the kill site by the hyena...

and pouncing on the carcass after the hyena left the scene.

In between birth and death? A whole lot of conflict, right? Whether you are a human or any other sort of creature on this planet, conflict and fighting is inevitable. We'd seen a couple of zebra sparring at Lake Manyara earlier in the week before we got to Ngorongoro but that was at a good distance. Ngorongoro managed to get us some better looks at a spat or two.

I'm not sure if the Grant's gazelles (shown below) we saw locking horns right after we entered the Crater were fighting for real or just practicing, but the proximity to our car and the careful way they engaged one another was a sight to see. They almost seemed civilized in their fighting. I mean here's this animal with these sharp horns going at another member of his same species and instead of going right for the jugular, they keep the fight confined to their headgear only. Seems like a very gentlemanly way to go about establishing dominance over a fellow gazelle.

The hippos we saw tussling in the water later on that day? Not so gentlemanly. Ignoring the fact that these two animals appear to our human eyes to have huge smiles on their faces, the scratches on the skin and particularly the gash on the hippo on the right makes me think these big beasts are fighting in a little less friendly way than the Grant's gazelles. There were three or four pairs of hippos engaged in this same kind of display in the pool as we watched so I'm really not sure if this was a serious contest or just the start of something more serious to come. I believe either animal had the capability to do great harm to the other with those huge tusks in their mouths. Hippos continue for me to be the scariest African animal out there.

The almost civilized contest between two Grant's gazelle.

The less civilized hippo battle.

But after the best sightings of some species ever, the completion of my own personal Big Five list, birth, death and some fighting in between, I'll remember Ngorongoro as the closest I've ever come to an adult male lion and the way it made me feel.

Most of the animals in the parks we visited in our two weeks on continent are pretty immune to being concerned about the cars us tourists drive around in. Every so often, you'll hear about an elephant or rhino charging a car that got too close or a cheetah getting inside one of the open-topped cars that are everywhere (including both of the vehicles we used on this trip) but for the most part, the animals don't care about the humans. Unless you are an elephant, the cars are generally bigger than you and they never hurt you so the park residents just ignore them. Which sometimes allows us to get really really close to the wildlife.

After having seen most of what I've written about above, we came across a few vehicles stopped dead in the road. This sort of scene generally means something more exciting than a zebra or mongoose. In this case, there was a male and female adult lion slowly walking down the road in between lying down sessions. Since off roading in the Crater is prohibited, the only way to get this close to a lion is to find one right by the side of the road. This was an opportunity that we couldn't pass up.

We'd seen lots of cats on this trip and even found lions on the roads in other parks and followed them at a distance while they hunted (without results) but none of those lions was an adult male. This was going to be a different sort of lion encounter. Neither the male nor the lioness in this encounter seemed to show the slightest bit of interest in moving off the road although they did seem eager to walk around all the cars, including ours. And very very close.

In the two weeks we'd been on safari, we'd only twice been asked to close the windows in our car. Once due to the dust that was kicked up by our vehicle and other vehicles passing in the opposite direction and once when we were following a lion on a hunt and she (or he) decided to slow down a little. In Ngorongoro, the request came strongly and swiftly from our guide. The fact that our driver had already closed his window quickly made this request pretty real.

The male lion stopped on our right side near the back of our vehicle, closest to the seat I was sitting in. There were maybe three feet between my eyes and his and he was looking straight at me. I've never felt any real danger in a wheeled vehicle in a park in Africa (boats are a different story) including in the open-sided vehicles that we used in Botswana a couple of years ago, but I have to tell you I was wondering how high these animals could jump. Remember we are in a car with an open top. Yes the roof is popped up so it's not like there's a huge hole in the top of the car but there is about 18" or two feet of space that something can crawl through. Is that big enough for a lion to fit? I thought it might be for a lioness.

I will not soon forget those orange eyes looking into mine as if wondering what kind of a meal I would make. It honestly paralyzed me a bit despite the admittedly flimsy single pane of glass in between him and me to such a degree that I didn't take a picture of how close we were to each other. This is remarkable because all I'd been doing the entire trip was taking as many pictures I could of the animals. Now I get closer to the most feared cat on Earth and all I can do is stare back? What can I say, sometimes the moment takes over. I'll have to settle for the picture above taken by placing the camera part way out of the top of our safari vehicle. I didn't want to tempt the lion, after all.

Lions in Ngorongoro Crater. These ones stayed away from the car.

Shortly after our closeup lion encounter, we ate a late lunch out of the boxes of food we'd brought from the hotel that morning. We stayed in the car to eat because we'd been warned by our guide, Filbert, about eating outside with black-tailed kites hanging around. We'd actually seen what might happen to someone who was not sufficiently warned or ignored the warning (we weren't sure which) earlier in the week when one of these birds of prey had snatched some food along with a bit of finger from an unsuspecting tourist. 

That lunch was the last meal we'd eat in a park together on this trip. It wrapped a week in Tanzania with four fellow tourists and our Tanzanian guide, Filbert, and driver, Samson, after a week in Kenya with three of the four tourists and our Kenyan guide, Joe, and driver, Peter. We'd made it to the end and it was too soon at the same time. I couldn't have been happier with the company on this trip. There were no disagreements, everyone showed up on time each morning and we shared with each other. I think we were lucky and I was glad to have such compatible companions. Getting the wrong group could have been a disaster.

We came back to Africa this year to see elephants. We ended up getting something a lot different than we did the last time we visited the Dark Continent including not really getting the same quality sighting of elephants we got back in 2015. If we had done the exact same things we did last time it honestly wouldn't have been as good an experience. These two weeks in Kenya and Tanzania was the trip of a lifetime (so far) and certainly the signature trip of this five year long (for now) blog.

But as we ate our last lunch in Ngorongoro, we were treated to a family of elephants making their way slowly towards our stopped vehicle. It was a true family, complete with matriarch, dominant bull and mothers, juveniles and babies, including a couple of younger males involved in some fighting that was eventually stopped by the matriarch. Everyone in the car got out to watch despite the proximity to the herd and the very real possibility of being charged if the mood of one of the elephants turned (we left the doors open just in case we needed to flee). In the end, we got what we came back to Africa to see because of that last lunch. That show over a meal and indeed the whole two week adventure should tide us over for a while or at least for a couple of years. Then I'm sure we'll find our way back to Africa again. To resist would seem to be futile.

Six crazy kids and their guides. Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania.

Lunchtime entertainment. The baboon eventually moved. Everything moves for elephants.

Lake Nakuru

The last time we were in Africa, we failed to see a rhinoceros. If there was a place where we thought we stood a good chance of seeing one or two of those animals up close on this year's trip, it was Lake Nakuru National Park in Kenya, the second stop on our six park tour in Kenya and Tanzania. On our last morning at our camp outside Masai Mara National Reserve, we found out that Simon, our server at mealtimes, was from Nakuru. We asked him if we would see rhinos at Lake Nakuru. 

His response: "Yes. It's a fenced park." 

He's right. Nakuru is fenced.

It took us six and a half hours to get from Nairobi to Masai Mara, including the last 2-1/2 hours on a dirt road in the process of being converted to a paved road. We went out the same way we went in, meaning for the second time in three days, we'd get a two plus hours long African massage thrown into our vacation package for free. Score!

If we thought our ride to Masai Mara was long, we were unfortunately in for a slightly longer one to Lake Nakuru. If you ever make the same trip we did to Kenya, be prepared for a lot of sitting in cars. The trip to Nakuru took us about nine hours, albeit with a planned stop for lunch and an unplanned stop to change a flat tire somewhere on the 2-1/2 hour long dirt road portion. Luckily we had two spares. We stood within about 100 feet of some dude chopping trees on the side of the road with an axe in the middle of nowhere while our driver and guide took care of the flat. After maybe 15 minutes we were off again.

The edge of Lake Nakuru with the dead trees killed by the rising water levels.

Lake Nakuru National Park is a totally different sort of environment from the one we found at Masai Mara. No endless plains of grass here. Instead we found a lot of the same sort of African bush type landscape that we found in Botswana along with some more densely forested parts. It's also a lot smaller than Masai Mara; at just 73 square miles it's only about 15% of the total size of the endless savannah we saw from ground level and aloft just a couple of days prior. Oh, and there's a saltwater lake too. A big one. Hence the name.

Saltwater lake meant one thing to us: flamingos!!! In case you are not familiar with our history with flamingos in the wild, let me bring you up to speed. A little more than three years ago, we took a December trip down to the Florida Keys and the Everglades. We saw a ton of alligators but zero flamingos. Turns out we planned poorly and went to the wrong part. But that miss (and the associated accompanying regret) affected us. We were determined to see flamingos in the wild from that moment.

Fast forward about a year and a half to the Galapagos Islands in Ecuador. On our last full day in the Islands (after not seeing any in Africa the first time between those two trips I might add) we managed to watch two flamingos feeding in a lagoon for 30 to 45 minutes. I wrote at that time that seeing these two at sunset almost made up for the misses in Florida in 2014 and Africa in 2015. I lied. I still wanted more. So in what seemed like a sure thing, last January we made our way down to the Rio Lagartos Biosphere in the Yucatan in Mexico. They are supposed to have 50,000 non-migratory flamingos there. We saw less than 50. Not less than 50,000. Less than 50!

Lake Nakuru had the potential to make up for all that. But we got some discouraging news when we arrived. Over the last couple of years, increased rainfall and snow runoff due to climate change has irreversibly changed Lake Nakuru. As the Lake has absorbed more water, the salinity level has decreased and the water level has risen. Neither is good for the flamingos and the rising water level is especially not good for the trees that used to be by the side of the Lake but are now dead in what is now the edge of the Lake. They need freshwater; they can't survive in the saltwater. The scene (shown above) is eerie, especially in the light of a coming storm that we saw in our first hour or so driving around in the Park.

Despite the climate changed Lake, we did see flamingos at Nakuru. A lot of flamingos. But we didn't see them close enough to make out individuals and they weren't blanketing the Lake in the thousands like we heard they used to. I saw some fuzzy glimpses of the strange parading mating dances they engage in through my camera but not enough to even get a good picture of them with a line of pelicans in the foreground. The flamingo quest would go on. These things are elusive. This didn't satisfy my need to see them in the wild.

The best flamingo pic of the trip. The quest to see these things up close in large numbers continues.

We got a lot luckier with Nakuru's other famous residents. Simon was right. We did see rhinos. A lot of rhinos. And up close too.

There are two species of rhino living in Africa, the black rhino and the white rhino. They are distinguished from one another in a variety of ways, including how they walk with their young and the shape of their body. But the easiest way for me to tell black from white (because both are grey in color) is by the shape of their mouth. White rhinos are called white rhinos because of an English speaking misinterpretation of the original name given to these creatures; they were originally called "weit" which is an Afrikaans word meaning wide because the white rhino has a wide mouth. The black rhino, which was called black because there was a white one already out there I guess, has a hook shaped lip. Granted, this type of identification only really works up close, although the white rhino tends to graze on grass while the black tends to eat leaves off shrubs so if they are eating, you may be able to name one from afar.

Both species are endangered. There are approximately 5,000 black rhinos in the world today. 95% of these can be found in Kenya, Namibia, South Africa and Zimbabwe. White rhinos are a little more plentiful, although only in the southern subspecies. There are approximately 20,000 southern white rhinos out there in the wild and they, like their black cousins, are also most frequently found in Kenya, Namibia, South African and Zimbabwe. We were in a good spot to find both black and southern white rhinos, if you consider looking for one of 5,000 or 20,000 individuals across more than one million square miles an easy task.

A couple of notes on the white rhino. The southern white rhino was thought to be extinct in the 19th century, a victim of poaching for trophies and their horns, which some cultures consider an aphrodisiac. Then in 1896 about 100 were found in the wild in South Africa and the conservation effort to save the southern white rhino started in earnest. This species clawing its way back from 100 to 20,000 is for sure a huge success story. Unfortunately, the same thing can't be said for the northern white rhino. As of the writing of this post, there are only three known members of this species alive in the world and I read the other day that one of the three is sick. They are all in captivity in Kenya.

We saw our first rhinos (yes, plural) almost as soon as we passed through the gates of Lake Nakuru National Park. Two single white rhinos and a mother and baby which our guide told us were black rhinos but which disappeared soon after we saw them. Yes, we lost sight of what would likely be a 2,000 pound animal and her baby on what was mostly a flat piece of land. Africa's like that sometimes.

In my first post about this trip, I described the difference between a National Park and a National Reserve. We enjoyed a lot of freedom in Masai Mara National Reserve to follow animals, mostly due to the vast network of established or semi-established roads or trails. We did not enjoy the same freedom in the Parks and we felt the effects of the more restricted rules almost as soon as we arrived at Nakuru. Yes, we saw four rhinos, but by the time we had driven down a one way road to get closer to the closest two in our view, the mother and baby were gone.

For a first sighting of a rhino in the wild, having what looked to me to be a really good sized male walk slowly in front of our car and then graze leisurely about maybe 100 feet away was a thrill. These things are absolutely huge and they are like tanks. They are large like hippos (larger actually) but they don't look fat like hippos do. I'm confident if this animal decided to charge our car it could have easily capsized it. It's amazing they can survive and get this big just munching on grass all day.

We got to Nakuru just before 4:30 pm so couldn't linger too much around our first rhinos. We needed to make it to our lodge, which was located in the Park but a good distance away, before dark. So we left behind what we hoped wouldn't be our last rhino in the less than 24 hours that we had to spend in the Park.

Jurassic Park Moment No. 1. Late afternoon with Lake Nakuru in the background.

It wasn't. On the way to our lodge, we saw what our group referred to as our first "Jurassic Park moment" where we saw a number of different species of animals on the move together in pretty sizable herds, a reference to the first time Alan Grant and Ellie Sattler see the dinosaurs recreated in the movie for the first time. We had a similar experience in Namibia two and a half years ago when we looked out the front of our boat just after sitting down to lunch and saw what seemed to be hundreds of elephants walking and eating in large family groups. The scene at Nakuru, which featured African buffalo, zebra and seven white rhinos set between a gap in the trees with the edge of Lake Nakuru in the background, was no less awesome.

I had felt pretty confident that we'd see some rhinos at Lake Nakuru. It is, after all, what they are known for. But 11 in the first day? And on the move the way they were when we saw them? Nothing really set me up for a sighting this good.

A closer look at Jurassic Park Moment No. 1 showing three very large white rhinos.

The next morning, Nakuru would do better.

If there was any criticism to offer of our first day of rhino sightings, it would be that most of them were pretty elusive and the sky was kind of overcast. Sure we got an up close look at one as soon as we drove into the Park but after ambling in front of our car, he kept going away from us. I feel terrible even just writing these words. Most people would be lucky to see the kind of sight we saw that late afternoon and here I am complaining about it.

But then again, how does seeing two groups of rhino (both with babies) in the early morning sunlight with pretty much nobody else in the world around sound?

I wrote in my blog post about Masai Mara that I went to Africa this year with a top ten list of unseen species. Rhino was number one. The looks we got at a mother and baby and then two more adults and another baby were some of the best looks we got at any species on this trip.

There's a lot of value sometimes in getting up early for a game drive in Africa. There's also a lot of value in staying really near (or inside even) the park you are going to drive around in. Combine an early start with a camp really near some wildlife and you might get the kind of experience we had with these rhinos first thing in the morning. 

It is pretty difficult to appreciate just how big some animals on our planet are. You just have to get up close to them. For most large animals, that means you have to either get to a zoo somewhere or find a way to get to Africa. And zoos are in no way comparable to what you will find in the wild. There's no substitute for watching a large mammal free of captivity living without restraints or restrictions. It's amazing that there are people out there who want to kill these things just so they can say they killed one.

If you are a poacher, by the way, I don't really know how proud of yourself you can be for killing a rhino. These creatures are so gentle and docile that it doesn't seem like much of a challenge. We drove right up to the mother and baby shown above and watched them eat maybe 20 feet from our car. Sure, we were checked out by mom before she resumed tearing grass out of the ground (and it was so absolutely quiet that you could hear the sound of every bite) and went about paying like zero attention to us. It was the sound and the proximity that made this animal encounter perhaps the most intimate of the entire two week trip.

Three white rhino. You can see the wide mouth really clearly in the lead rhino in this picture.

Mother grazing.

Baby rhino. Maybe the best look we got at any baby of any species on the trip. And there were a lot.

Our rhino encounter in the early morning stillness wasn't the only incredible surprise we had on the way out of Lake Nakuru. I promised in my Masai Mara post that I would relate the details of any can't miss encounter with animals in any of the parks, even if those animals didn't fit into the major theme of the particular park. Nakuru's themes were definitely rhinos and another missed opportunity with flamingos. Before there were rhinos that morning, there were hyenas.

Depending on what species are around a kill, there's a pecking order to determine who gets a shot at the carcass in what order. Animals that can kill are the first to get their fill, followed by the scavengers, although animals that can kill other animals will happily slide into the scavenger spot if they are hungry enough or just feel like it. Hyenas can kill and they can scavenge. They can chase away the jackals and the birds and maybe even a cheetah and they are definitely no match for a lion. But after everyone has picked the skeleton clean, the hyenas are the only ones who can finish the job off. Because they can actually eat the bones.

Looking sneaky. They pretty much always do.

There are few animals with the jaw pressure of a hyena. And even those that have similar or superior jaw power, like crocodiles, don't eat the bones of animals quite the way hyenas do. They can survive on these things if they have to and have digestive systems powerful enough to draw nutrition from such a diet. If you are in the wilderness in Africa and come across some white poop, guaranteed it's from a hyena that's just eaten a meal of bones.

On the prettiness scale, the hyena has to be one of the ugliest animals out there. I've written in the last two weeks about the Big Five, the five most difficult animals to hunt on foot. The spotted hyena, which is the only species of hyena we saw, has the distinction of being one of Africa's Ugly Five, a far less notable and desirable list to occupy. Their sneaky, hunched nature combined with their scavenger's mentality and sometimes maniacal looking faces gets them on a list with the wildebeest, the lappet-faced vulture, the marabou stork and the warthog. Not exactly a great list to be on.

I was dying to see a lot of hyenas on this trip. I don't think they are that ugly but they are for sure one of the less noble looking animals we found. On our way down to Lake Nakuru that Wednesday morning, we came across maybe seven or eight of these animals moving through the yellowish grass that almost matched the color of their fur. We saw a lone hyena and then a group of two adults with a younger pup and then four more gathered around what had obviously been a kill site.

Although these hyenas were pretty close to our car and didn't scatter when we approached and stopped, it wasn't what we saw that morning that was notable, it was what we heard: the crunching of bones, a slow creaking of something solid followed by a crack as the skull of an animal gave way beneath the might of the hyena's teeth. If it was the late morning or afternoon, we likely wouldn't have seen these animals by the side of the road; it would have been too hot. But we for sure wouldn't have heard them breaking bones down into food; there would have been too many other noises, most likely from other vehicles with tourists like us in them. We got extremely lucky I think.

Breaking bones. Big bones. Look at the teeth!

After our encounter with the hyenas, some 30 minutes to an hour spent with rhinos as close as we could have wished for and another missed opportunity with the flamingos, it was time to say goodbye to Lake Nakuru. It produced an experience that was totally unlike Masai Mara in almost every way. It is almost unfair to compare the two places because they were so different. If Masai Mara was our favorite (and it was) our trip wouldn't have been anywhere near as good without Lake Nakuru. Oddly enough, we were able to say that about most of the parks we visited after Masai Mara. We'd never see another white rhino after Nakuru. It was a species totally unique to that location for us.

If you ever get lucky enough to see a rhino in the wild, you may see a little bird on each one seemingly inseparable from its large host. These birds (which you might also see on African buffalo) are red-billed oxpeckers, so named for their red bills although they also have yellow-rimmed eyes with red pupils which are pretty striking against their brown feathers. The cover picture of this blog post shows a closeup of the one we saw on the mother rhino in the early morning. These birds feed off the insects that they find on the hides of large herd animals, including rhinos. They will eat flies and maggots but their favorite food are ticks, which are typically filled with blood. I assumed that the oxpecker assumed a symbiotic relationship with the rhino, with the bird getting a moving cafeteria of sorts and the rhino getting rid of unwanted pests. Turns out that's not necessarily the case. The birds really want the blood and they have been known to keep wounds open on their hosts just so they can keep feeding on the food they love the most. 

Pretty macabre stuff. I'll leave you with that thought. On to Amboseli.