Spring is in the air, the cold winter mornings are behind us, and even the evenings are warmer. All the animals, and us mere humans, are enjoying the warmer weather. That’s why safari holidays are so popular at this time of year: The beautiful South African spring sets in as Europe and America go into autumn.
Along with the changing weather comes a rejuvenation off all that surrounds us. All the animals are getting close to having their young.
This brings me to one of those very special moments on Safari. We have been discussing the Wild dogs lately, or more to the fact the lack of the Wild dogs. We’ve not seen them for almost three months and we hoped that they were denning somewhere on the game reserve. We’ve been speculating that if they had indeed been denning, that if all goes well, we should start seeing them some time in spring.
So back to the Safari in question, Friday 2nd September 2011! Arran and Warren were out on Safari having a great time with their guests. They’d already stopped for Sun downers enjoying another beautiful African sunset.
They were all very upbeat and slowly making there way back to Vuyani Safari Lodge. As they rounded a corner their spotlight caught a Wild dog in its beam. Pandemonium set in, everyone got very excited. They had spoken about the Wild dogs shortly before, over sun downers. To now actually see one was even more exciting!
It wasn’t over yet though. As the tracker panned the light to the left, there were lots of little eyes. PUPPIES and there were eight of them with three adult dogs with them. How fantastic, we were all over the moon. Being night time we didn’t really want to view them under spotlight as it can cause temporary blindness.
Back to Vuyani we went to enjoy dinner, all excited and hoping to see the Wild dog puppies again the next morning.
And we did. We’ve been seeing them almost every day since then on our safari drives. We are most definitely being spoilt right now.
Keep reading about the Wild dogs, I’ll be posting the history about where they came from and their story until now.
Henry Parsons
Was fantastic seeing them!