GAME DRIVE 3

 In between the Friday morning drive and the afternoon, we spotted these guys on the roof of our lodge.  

They've warned us that we must lock our doors or the monkeys will open the doors and ransack the room, as they know that there are Pringles and other snacks in the room, courtesy of the Inyati staff.  Since they are in every room, the monkeys prowl the grounds, hoping for a negligent guest and an open door.  So far, we've not forgotten and our room is the tidier for it.  After locking up, we headed out for GAME DRIVE 3.

Friday afternoon began slowly, but built to a nice conclusion.

We were looking for rhino, but finding

Warthogs, best kept at a distance

Not just because their tusks are fearsome, but seriously, isn't that a good enough reason?

Wildebeest

Apparently and hopefully we will see thousands of these guys in Kenya.  They are no longer numerous in South Africa.  Kind of a sad story.  Evidently, years ago a cattle disease prompted the government to put up fences to stop the roaming of animals and preserve the cattle industry.  The fences stopped . . . and therefore killed . . . the migrating wildebeest.  150,000 wildebeest died against the fences and brought the herd sizes down to the point that they no longer migrate.  Only Kenya has sufficient numbers now to merit and require a migration.  

It seems to me that we saw more animals than this, but my memory of things is being thrown off by the fact that my camera is date stamping pictures with Pacific Standard Time.  Its messing me up, as my searches aren't really accurate.  And I don't want to reset the time.  I should do it, but I don't want to.

Anyway, I do know that we saw these two owls.  The first, the Verreaux Eagle-Owl is the biggest owl in Africa and Gabriel was quite excited to see it, as they aren't often spotted.  Certainly I rarely ever see an owl of any sort and especially not "the big one".  You'll see in the second picture that the owl has pink eyelids.  No idea why a bird that hunts in the dark needs or wants pink eyelids, but it makes them just that little bit more interesting.

Then, from there we passed (but only very briefly) a hyena.  We hope to see more later, as this fellow wasn't inclined to slow down.

And finally, in the dark Cliff (our tracker) somehow spotted this little owl, known as a Pearl Spotted Owl.  Probably only 6" tall.  Hard to tell for sure in the dark.

I'm writing this in between GAME DRIVES 4 & 5 on Saturday afternoon and so I'm a bit caught up with getting to GAME DRIVE 4.  Sorry to cut this one short, but that is what is going to happen.