Jess and I spent two nights at Mkhuze. It’s looking very dry and animals were few and far between. Still, we saw lots of the usual dependables: giraffe, zebra, impala, hippo, nyala, wildebeest and – at last! – one elephant. A young bull right next to the road. Jess, who watches too much youtube of eles goring and flipping cars, and had a scare in Tembe Elephant Park ‘thanks’ to bad behaviour by a senior ranger, did not want to hang around, so we drove past him.
Also one band of Banded and two individual Slender Mongooses.
But lots of birds. I won’t give the boring – to me exciting – list (78 species) but I will tell this story. In Mantuma camp – here:
I went looking for pinkspots (pink-throated twinspots). Like this:
I followed their high-pitched trilling cricket-like sound and found them and more! There they were, in a bird party in the grass! Blue waxbills, green-winged pytilias, grey-headed sparrows, yellow-throated petronias, yellow-fronted canaries, red-billed firefinches pecked alongside the pinkspots on the sandy soil. And in the tree directly above them a small flock of red-billed wood hoopoes, a dark-backed weaver and a golden-tailed woodpecker. Just that one bird party made the whole trip worthwhile. I stood twenty metres from them and watched through my Zeiss’ for ages. ‘Saturation Views’!
On my way back to the chalet I watched a black cuckoo-shrike give a full, relaxed display all round me. I didn’t know this jet-black bird could be so BLUE! In the sunlight his ‘black’ shone a beautiful cobalt blue. This picture I found on ethiobirds is the only one that captures it well. See the difference!
Jess was our chief photographer:
~~oo0oo~~