Kruger Birds

The first three times I visited sub-Saharan Africa, I went with a wish list of creatures to see. For the most part, those lists consisted entirely or mostly of mammals. Maybe there was a reptile in there once or twice and there may have been a bird or two, particularly on the Uganda list. But mostly, it was mammals.

This year, I also made a list. But this year, my list was mostly birds. And by that I mean I had a list of 12 species I wanted to see and only two of them were mammals. This shift in priorities was born of two things: (1) a genuine and blossoming love of birds and birdwatching and (2) we are honestly just running out of exciting new mammals to see in the wild in Africa. I was super excited to spend as much time seeing birds in South Africa in general and Kruger National Park in particular. And Kruger delivered. Not my whole list. But enough plus some things I didn't even know existed and some old favorites.

This year's list of mammals by the way...painted dogs and springboks. That's it. Our great hope for this trip in the wildlife department was that we would finally lay eyes on some African wild dogs and we did that. I figured springboks were a gimme. I mean it's like the national animal of South Africa. Their rugby team is named after that antelope. Didn't see any springboks. Apparently they don't like ticks. And Kruger, I guess, is tick-y. 

Oh well. We still have a reason to go back to Africa, I guess. Our next trip might be springbok focused. Kidding. Possibly. Probably.

Lilac-breasted roller. Kruger day 2. On this year's list.

Unless you manage to book a private safari vehicle (and we have never done that), any safari experience is bound to be a bit of a democracy. And by that I mean that what you search for; what you stop for; and how long you linger at a sighting is likely to be a group decision which at one time or another is bound to be flawed to deeply flawed for some people in the car. 

Safari vehicles are typically packed to capacity. More people per vehicle theoretically means fewer vehicles in the Park and more revenue per car or both (probably the latter is driving that issue). Fewer cars in the Park is a good thing. But more people per vehicle might also mean a little bit of push and pull over what the entire group gets to see. If one person in the car is tired of elephants and the rest of the car keeps asking the guide to stop for elephants, eventually it will come out. Same for any other sort of species. 

We eventually had an issue on this trip.

My impression of younger, first-time safari goers is that there is a distinct preference among that demographic to see mammals while on safari. The bigger, the better. I guess they are easier to see and watch and remember. Heck, my first safari wish list was all mammals so it's totally understandable. But we (and did some others in our vehicle) wanted to see lots of birds. Not just birds. Birds and mammals. But definitely birds.

Eventually, frustration around too many stops for birds boiled over a bit on day two. Nothing serious. We'd seen it worse in Uganda and it was around the exact same issue. Some people just don't like birds so much.

Southern yellow-billed hornbill. Kruger day 1. On this year's list.

I have to say I don't exactly get people's dismissal of birds in Africa. If we were stopping for doves or sparrows or starlings (although there are actually some gorgeous starlings in Africa) or something like that, I'd get it. Who cares about tiny not-vibrantly-colored birds which move around a lot? But Africa has some seriously impressive birdlife, including some absolutely giant top-of-the-food-chain predator types. You are interested in passing on species like secretary birds or different types of storks or fish eagles or sunbirds and bee-eaters? No way. Not me. I want to spend as much time watching these birds as possible. And that includes the starlings.

So before safari day three in Kruger, some of us approached our lead guide, Celeste, with a request: take the three or so non-birders out of our vehicle and swap in two avid birders from the second car. And despite the paperwork required to be re-filed at the Kruger gate, she made it happen. Day three would have a Tweety Car (for birders) and a Sylvester Car (for the rest of our tour group who would be looking specifically for cats).

And OK, I do care about tiny birds which move around a lot regardless of color.

African fish eagles. Adult (top); Kruger day 1. Juvenile (bottom); Kruger day 2. 

So did our Tweety Car stop for only birds and nothing else? Actually, by no means. I mean, of course not. Why would we do that? We spent a lot of time looking at all sorts of mammals, including all four of the Big Five that we saw in Kruger over the four full days we spent in the Park. And in a twist of irony, the Tweety Car actually got the best leopard sighting of the entire trip for our tour group. Go figure. 

But we did spend a lot of time in the Tweety Car in one spot in particular for about an hour watching a rattling cisticola and then a tawny-flanked prinia with a cameo by a chinspot batis in the middle of all that. Two of these three birds are pretty much brown from head to toe and all three are no bigger than a starling. And really the first two are like wren-sized. If wren-sized doesn't mean that much to you, think about something a little smaller than a house sparrow.  

Why was this so awesome? Because this is what we do when we birdwatch. We don't spend a couple of minutes with one species and then move on to try to find some other type of bird. We stop. We wait for it (or them) to appear and re-appear between hiding in bushes or trees or making trips to a nest or whatever. Birdwatching takes patience and perseverance. Stand or sit and focus and let time slip away. We can spend 30 minutes to an hour trying to see something like a single warbler or a kinglet in a bush or tree on a typical birdwatching outing at home.

Safari is not birdwatching at home. This was really the only time in Africa, we have ever done this sort of thing on safari. We've seen some incredible birdlife on past trips to Africa. But there's always been some sort of urgency to get going to find something different. This wasn't like that. This felt like the right thing to do. And we saw some birds that we never would have seen if this wasn't a bird-focused car. 

By the way, if you had asked me what a batis, a prinia or a cisticola was before we started Kruger Day 3, there's no way I would have even been able to tell you what any of these birds looked like. Or even identify these terms as species of birds even. 

The call of the rattling cisticola is fantastic. Just thought it was important to add that last bit.

Travel. Broadens this mind in all sorts of ways.

Top to bottom: rattling cisticola; tawny-flanked prinia; and chinspot batis. All Kruger day 3. The batis was at a distance.

So being able to stop for whatever birds we wanted for as long as we wanted got us the best look at birds for the whole trip, right? 

Nope. Not exactly. But yes, in the sense that I've never seen a cisticola before. Nature doesn't work that way. Birds and other creatures in the Park don't pose or come close to vehicles when requested by tourists. There are no cages or enclosures (thank God!!!) and you can't go off the road to chase stuff. So the quality of wildlife sightings you will get as a safari tourist will involve a lot of luck. 

Wildlife sightings are also heavily weather-dependent which can affect the activity of the animals (particularly birds since some don't like to fly much in the rain) and lighting a ton. Our Tweety Car day was quite possibly the worst weather we experienced in the Park, with a good amount of rain and grey skies. 

From a quality standpoint, I actually thought the first day was our best bird photography day. I love the bird head photographs I got on that day and I've posted a few here. I am in love with African fish eagles (my favorite eagle seen in the wild so far) and I also love hornbills so I was super excited to find a southern yellow-billed hornbill close to the car in the early hours of that day. But quite possibly some of my favorite pictures of the whole trip are those that I took of a hooded vulture (it's the cover picture of this post but there's another below). I'd never seen one of those before and the lighting on its head and feathers was about as perfect as it could have been. I'm not sure if this bird is completely ugly or supremely beautiful. The feathers are gorgeous.

Hooded vulture. Kruger day 1.

I'm not sure how many birds we saw in Kruger or South Africa as a whole. I'm still plugging them into ebird almost a month after we got home. My guess would be about 80 to 90 total species with maybe half to two thirds of that number in Kruger. For the purposes of this post, it doesn't particularly matter. This post is not supposed to be a complete record of every avian species we laid eyes on over four days.

Of the ten birds on my South Africa list, I saw nine, although admittedly the only Goliath heron I saw was on a live video feed at a lunch spot and I couldn't really figure out well enough where the camera was pointed to go have a look for myself. I got seven of the nine at Kruger, including the Goliath heron on TV. The only species I missed entirely in South Africa was a golden-breasted bunting. I think that's pretty good, particularly because I was pleasantly surprised by some birds that were not on my list, notably that hooded vulture. 

The rest of this post is a photo dump highlighting my most favorite bird photos I took in Kruger which haven't been posted earlier in this post. I'm separating the photos by day. Every day we spent birding in Kruger was special. The Tweety Car day will stick out in my memory as super-special because we spent it with kindred spirits from Australia and Oregon who enhanced our appreciation of birds. These moments on vacations can be memorable and this one certainly was. 

Kruger Day One

Top to bottom: Brown snake-eagle; white-headed vulture (left) and white-backed vulture (right). The brown snake-eagle was the first bird we saw in Kruger proper just after 6 o'clock in the morning. Early starts are essential on safari. But lighting sometimes is not great at that time of day.

Kruger Day Two

Top to bottom: Yellow-billed oxpecker; southern red-billed hornbill; crested barbet; Burchell's starling (two pics); common myna; southern ground-hornbill; southern white-faced owl; white-backed vulture. Told you there were some awesome starlings in Africa. We will forever refer to these birds as virtual starlings, by the way, based on us mis-hearing the initial identification from one of our traveling companions.

Kruger Day Three (Tweety Car Day)

Top to bottom: Tawny eagle; blacksmith lapwing.

Kruger Day Four

Top to Bottom: saddle-billed stork; southern masked-weaver; purple-crested turaco. 

Two comments here. First, I love weavers (like LOVE!!!). We saw southern masked-weavers, grosbeak weavers and cape weavers on this trip and every time I find the nest engineering by these birds just fascinating, maybe because it's completely out in the open. 

Second, the turacos were Kruger's parting gift to us. We saw six to eight of these birds in the treetops right before we exited the Park on our last day. Under normal circumstances, I would have passed on including this photograph based on the lighting but turacos are incredible-looking birds and I totally didn't expect to see them in South Africa. For what it's worth, both times I have seen Turacos (we saw some great blue turacos in Uganda), the lighting has been awful.

Serengeti

Before I start this post for real, let me say that Toto got it way wrong. Kilimanjaro does not rise like Olympus (or anything else for that matter) above the Serengeti. Mount Kilimanjaro is about 200 miles, give or take 10 or 20, from the closest point to the Serengeti National Park. It's impossible to see the Mountain from the park, no matter how clear the day might be. Glad I could clear that up.

With that said, welcome to park number five in this blog. I'm sure if you've read all the other posts about our two week trip to Kenya and Tanzania that you must be thinking I can't possibly have any new stories to tell. I mean haven't I by this point seen and written about pretty much everything there is to see in East Africa? Nope. Not yet.

Serengeti National Park is one of the most famous game reserves in East Africa, if not the world. It's also massive. We were awed by the size of Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya at 580 square miles in size. Serengeti is ten times as big as Masai Mara. It's bigger than the state of Connecticut. Go ahead if you must and make fun of the size of my home state but I'm telling you a park devoted to wild animals (and maybe a few Masai as well) that size is pretty darned huge. Serengeti is enormous. There's no way in two days we could cover anything near the whole area of this Park. But we spent the maximum amount of time that we could giving it a shot.

Leopard chilling in a tree.

Serengeti, which means "endless plain" in the Masai language, was established in 1951 as a haven for the area's cats, elephants, giraffe, African buffalo and any other species of animal or bird in the area. Its boundaries preserve about half of the Serengeti plain's total area as an undeveloped environment which bears an uncanny resemblance to the Masai Mara Reserve we were driving around just a week prior to our stay in the Serengeti. There's a really good reason for that: they are the same place. Masai Mara lies north of the Kenya / Tanzania border; Serengeti is just south of the border.

As you might expect, a great deal of the wildlife we saw was very similar to what we found in Kenya. We got some amazing looks at cats in Masai Mara and we did exactly the same in Serengeti. The lions were more active, the leopards were less active and we got an incredible closeup view of a cheetah which was doing little more (although enough, really) than the five we saw earlier in our trip at Masai Mara. We saw two more failed lion hunts (targeting zebra this time), some leopards in trees thanks to our eagle-eyed guide Filbert and a pride of lions so stuffed after gorging on a recent kill that I exclaimed that one female must be about to give birth she was so pregnant. But then again, so were the others, including the males. Lions can eat I guess. A lot.

Lion on the hunt. Failed, again.

The best cheetah pic we got on the trip. May have strayed off the path here. Thanks, Filbert and Samson.

We also stayed in our first ever unfenced camp which happened to be located smack dab in the center of the Park where I suppose buffalo, impala and, yes, lions and leopards might roam. Concerned about that at all? Don't be. After all, we are staying in a tent made of fabric. Why would we be worried about any noises we hear at night after being walked to our tent by a Masai with a flashlight and being directed not to leave the tent at night without calling on our walkie-talkie?

To make matters worse, we ended up in the very last tent. Not the last free one available. The last one in the row. Meaning closest to the grassland and potential lions or herds of stampeding elephants that would surely flatten a tent quickly. That walk to our tent at night was long, even with our Masai with flashlight (and nothing else) leading the way. Because surely a flashlight will help a lot. Although if it acts like a laser pointer with a house cat, maybe it would be just what we needed to fend off a lion attack.

The camp had its lovable perks and quirks. We got a wakeup call each morning with our prearranged hot shower, they had the best bar on the trip (an open tent facing the savannah with plentiful Kilimanjaro and Safari beers) and the tents were each named in Swahili after African animals. The shower had to be prearranged because they had to boil the water to get it hot; the wakeup call was a dude shouting through the tent "your shower is ready!"; and for what it's worth our tent's name was Pimbi, which means "rock hyrax" in Swahili. Other people got Twiga (giraffe) or Chui (leopard); we got rock hyrax. Cool!

Our row of tents taken from our morning stroll to breakfast hoping there were no lions behind us.

Pimbi, or rock hyrax. Fearsome, no?

But enough about awesome cat sightings and lying in bed wide-eyed with fear of attack from some predatory or territorial animal. I said Serengeti had it's own story and it did. And it wasn't about rock hyrax, although admittedly it was the only park where we saw these creatures. Let's talk about the real story, shall we? The sleep I got at Serengeti was, by the way, at no time restless. After a week hearing hippo, hyena and other sorts of noises, I wasn't concerned, even if we were told the noise that we heard one night were lions.

Serengeti National Park is home to one of the world's great spectacles. Each July through September it is host to the great wildebeest migration, the annual 1,000 mile trek north by between 1.5 and 2 million wildebeest accompanied by almost half a million Thomson's gazelle, just more than a quarter of a million zebra and some other hangers-on. If you can afford to go to Tanzania and Kenya in the summer months to see it, and can stand the crowds of tourists while you are there, it's apparently one of the most spectacular sights on our planet.

We didn't go in July through September so we didn't expect to see huge herds of wildebeest on our trip. In fact, I think we only saw two wildebeest in our first two days of the trip when we were in Masai Mara and those two were on our way out of the Reserve. That's about what I expected to see.

What I hoped to see wildebeest-wise on that later parts of this trip were babies, since February is generally the calving month for this species. I expected those in Ngorongoro Crater, which was our stop after the Serengeti National Park. At Serengeti I was focused on hoping for some kind of lion or cheetah or leopard or hyena or something killing something else. 

Then we came around a bend on our dirt trail and saw the scene below.

That's a whole lot of wildebeest in a field. And they were moving as a herd along with slightly fewer (but not much fewer) zebra.

We'd seen herds of wildebeest and zebra before on this trip. But I'd say at most we'd seen groups of 20 maximum at any one time in either Amboseli or Lake Manyara. Nothing like the hundreds and hundreds of animals that we saw in our first view out over the open field shown above.

When we first laid eyes on these animals, all we could see was that they were in a part of the Park on the other side of a river. But as we drove on, it was apparent that they weren't just on the other side of the river but were on our side too. And there were many many more wildebeest and zebra than we first saw. They were everywhere. On both sides of the river and on both sides of our vehicle. They were almost in perpetual motion, pouring down the river banks and across the water that appeared to me to be not a whole heck of a lot different than where they had come from so who knows why they thought they needed to cross at all.

When they weren't in motion, they looked nervous as they stood still, as if they were determined to determine where they needed to go next before doing the whole thing over again. There were black and white stripes and hoofs and horns and beards seemingly as far as the eye could see and as close to the car as about ten feet away. There was no other kind of animal in sight and it was impossible to not be fixated on the hundreds and hundreds of skittish looking prey milling about so close to where we were.

It kept on going. And it got more chaotic as it did. After the scene above we headed down to the bank of a saltwater lake and watched wildebeest and zebra cross from left to right in what seemed like a panicked rush. When they'd finished crossing the shallows of the lake, kicking up water and mud by young and old creatures alike they headed up a small hill at the other side of the lake and up on to the savannah. 

Then, and for a reason not entirely discernible to us, they all headed back the way they had come, a torrent of hoofs pouring down to the lake again and then rushing two by two or in threes or single file back to where they had just came from. Bulls. Cows. Calves. All for no obvious reason now running back in front of us from right to left. No prey followed the end of the herd. They just went back to where they had come from just some maybe 15 or 20 minutes earlier.

I don't know exactly how many wildebeest and zebra we saw that afternoon because it's just difficult to estimate numbers when they are in such herds but let's say it was maybe 30,000 animals and even that seems too high to me. I can't imagine what a herd of more than two million animals would look like. It was exhausting watching this hurried parade for maybe close to an hour. I can't imagine how many animals would be in a herd of the sizes they can get to in the summer months. Our guide told us in July or August the herd of wildebeest would be kilometers long. I just can't believe how spectacular it would be to experience that number of animals flying by at top speed. It must be staggering.

I had absolutely no expectations that we would see something like this so to find what I can only refer to here as a dress rehearsal for the summer months was such a treat. These animals are not social in the way elephants or cats are. I would imagine this parade of thousands is about as spectacular as it gets with zebra and wildebeest. 

Zebra and wildebeest streaming down the hill single file (mostly).

Running in a pack. Not sure where to but there was lots of running.

Single zebra in full gallop. My best wildebeest pic is the cover photo of this post.

At least one zebra didn't make it though.

I don't know if the zebra and wildebeest we saw that afternoon running in large herds were on the run from predators but shortly after we left the shore of the lake where we watched our zebra crossing scene we got a very real reminder that predators are out there. No, we didn't see a kill like we'd been hoping to see but we didn't miss it by much.

What we found was a dead zebra presided over by a single hyena and at least 20 or so vultures. It was a scene not for the faint of heart necessarily but we were far enough away that we couldn't see much of the details or smell any of the smells. Our new super duper camera served as both our binoculars and as a recorder of the event for the better part of the next hour.

When a lion or cheetah or leopard kills its prey, the death will be fairly clean and fairly quick. They'll generally go for the jugular (literally) and make it a last as little time as it can last. Then they can get on with the eating the way they want to. Dogs, like African wild dogs, jackals or hyena, are not so efficient, probably because they lack the size and agility of the cats. They may take several bites at an animal to weaken it or even might use their nails on their paws to slash at the stomach area. Sometimes this last strategy might not kill the target of the hunt but might debilitate the animal almost completely. In this case, the hunters might actually start eating their prey before the animal is even dead.

What I've just described is typical of a pack hunt, where a number of pack members might be attacking a single animal. I'm not sure how the hyena we came across actually killed the zebra we saw it with, but I can tell you what it did after we came upon the scene.

The hyena with the kill. I guess the zebra behind are making sure they keep an eye on him.

We watched two things for what seemed like a very long time in this part of the park: (1) the hyena tugging at the carcass of the zebra as if it was looking for something specific and (2) the hyena vigilantly chasing away the encroaching vultures again and again and again. There's absolutely no way that hyena was letting those vultures anywhere near his meal, except maybe when they grabbed and fought over what was probably some entrails off to the left of the carcass, lending credibility to my theory about the hyena having slashed open the stomach of the zebra.

As far as I am aware, hyenas only have paws and a set of bone crunching jaws with which to open up an animal and get at what they want. But from afar, it seemed like the predator here was carefully peeling back the skin of the zebra to get at what it wanted. I'm not kidding, it appeared to be expertly skinning the animal (see the photo at the end of this post). Once the hide was separated from the rump of the zebra, we could see the ribcage of the animal and the hyena kept going. At this point, we began to speculate about what was likely a quest for some organ meat, right before the hyena emerged with what I can only assume was the liver of the zebra. It was bigger than the head of the hyena and when it had it between its jaws, it left the kill site to go feast. 

The final extraction all happened so fast that all I have to show for the this event is the picture below, which I debated including in this post because really the vultures are the only creatures in focus but ended up doing it because it shows the relative size of what the hyena was looking for all that time and it's just stunning to me still that this animal would get that size chunk of meat out of a zebra. Note some of the vultures are either enthralled by what the hyena has in its mouth or are actually just making sure that he's leaving the rest of the zebra for them.

What happened next represented the most voracious feeding frenzy I have ever seen in person. As soon as it was obvious that the hyena had abandoned the enormous fresh kill, about 20 or 30 vultures pounced on it with a kind of bloodlust that can only really be brought about by the opportunity to gorge on something while hungry knowing that the moment to get your fill would soon pass. The ferocity of the mass of feathers, beaks, necks and dust was shocking. It was every bird for itself and it didn't seem that they cared what they were tearing and jabbing at or what they were climbing over or stepping on to get at what might end up being a tiny scrap of food.

There were so many birds on top of the fresh zebra that you can barely see any tiny piece of what seconds earlier was a kill that had been touched only by the jaws and paws of a hyena. You can only just see a portion of the zebra's front legs in the photograph below and even then it is obscured by the dust that is being whipped up around the scene by flapping wings and talons tearing at anything they can get a hold of. The only vulture not focused on the carcass is the one in the foreground and that's because it clearly has a piece of zebra innards in its beak.

To see this happen live was impressive. I've never witnessed a scene so opportunistic as those vultures tearing at that zebra. It imparted in me a new kind of respect for these birds. Like a healthy respect that I don't ever want to go against a pack of these things in the wild. 

I'll say this: the vultures were right to act with the kind of urgency that they showed because pretty soon after the hyena had eaten just what he wanted out of the liver (or whatever it actually was), he was back chasing them off again, I guess back for seconds or to just hoard the kill for himself (or herself) for a while. We'd had enough. It was getting close to 6 p.m. and there was a Kilimanjaro or Safari beer (or both!) with my name on it back at our camp. We figured we'd seen all we could see in our time there and had to get back before dinner.

Five parks; five unique African experiences. Cats at Masai Mara; Rhinos at Lake Nakuru; Elephants and Kilimanjaro at Amboseli; birds and giraffes at Lake Manyara; and now a mini wildebeest migration, and the most gory kill site we'd seen to date, at Serengeti. This portion of the world is so rich in wildlife that I'm sure despite everything that we'd seen in the first five parks we visited in February, we haven't even scratched the surface. I know I could do this sort of thing every day for a month or more on end. I don't think I'd ever get tired of this place.  Unfortunately at this point, the end was in sight. One more park to go. After another night in our unprotected pimbi tent at the end of the row.

"Your shower is ready!"

Up and at 'em, a quick breakfast and off to Ngorongoro.

One last look at the hyena and its kill. Check out the way the skin is peeled back off the carcass.