Mike and Uyai have sent in so many photos of so many amazing sightings, I didn’t have enough time to post them all. So here a collection of the week’s most beautiful and striking sightings. There were many more, and the week’s blog posts show them as well. Consider these photos the “week’s best of”.
Hats off to Uyai, he has managed to capture some real gems!
First off, 4 days ago, our guests wished to see rhinos, and Mike performed! Here they are. Our guests got close up to these giants of the bush. They were very relaxed, and we had plenty of time to capture some amazing footage of them. You can see that most of their horn is de-horned, which has been done to protect them from poaching. They are about to be de-horned again, so as to keep their black market value as low as only possible.
We then also had yet another beautiful lion sighting 2 days ago. The entire pride was resting in an area we call the “cotton field”. I am amazed, I haven’t seen the male myself in quite a while, and I am astonished by how much his mane has grown. And he is really, really big now! Mind that lions can weigh up to 500 pounds, so you can imagine. This cat is a lot bigger than it looks on the photos. Seeing them up-close, in wild nature, is a once in a lifetime experience, and it should really be on absolutely everyone’s bucket list.
And then, again, the piece de resistance, two male cheetahs (they are brothers)! We see cheetahs more often here than pretty much any reserve, so this is becoming increasingly something we are famous for. We now see cheetahs on a quasi weekly basis, and often more frequently, and given that only a few hundred of them still live in the wild in South Africa (a country twice the size of France!), that is something to be very proud of. The two cheetahs are used to seeing game drivers, so it was amazing for our guests to observe these immensely rare and beautiful animals in their natural habitat. This is the dream sighting of any African safari!
Uyai and Mike have very keen eyes for the small things in nature, that only the very well trained eye can spot. Chameleons! Here is one we saw this week, much to the amusement of our guests. When we find one of them, our guests have the opportunity to hold one on their hand and see them from very close. Unique!
This concludes this week’s review, it has been an excellent one indeed. I am looking forward to all the things that our rangers and tracker will find for our guests next week. There is always something special going on.
