Expedition Serengeti Post 2 of 5

Hamjambo I say!

DAY 2

Today we spent 10 hours in the car game drive and working on two field exercises. The first exercise was examining giraffe browsing behavior and identifying individuals. The second exercise was all about profiling elephant families and observing behavior. We also had a bird identification practice exercise in which we had to identify 30+ African birds. Definitely got better at it by the end.

Driving around the Serengeti for a day was also a dream come true. We saw tons and tons of wildlife, including a couple of female lions we affectionately named Mary Kate and Ashley (Amazing, put a bunch of girls heads together for twin sister names and...). They were a great pair of lions to observe and it definitely got me interested in their family history. Maybe they were part of the same pride we had seen yesterday.. But the goal was to see a cheetah or leopard, so we trekked ever onward. At around noon, we stopped for lunch at Maasai Rock and the Maasai Paints. It was pretty interesting to see the paintings from hundreds of years ago, when the Maasai were living there. The Rock also gave us a spectacular view of the area, and a bunch of good photo opps.

After lunch, we continued our game drive. Species association sheets were being filled as we saw wildlife left and right, but still no leopard or cheetah. We patrolled a forest line for about an hour searching for a leopard, but there was just no sighting. Our driver, Ninah, was a riot though, and this particular group passed the time pretty well. On the way back to camp, we encountered the swarm again, this time it was even worse. I killed like 30 flies after we closed the windows and the hatches. The rest of the car eliminated them as well, but there were so many it took like 15 minutes. Ridiculousness.


Once we got back to camp, we checked our watches and saw that we still had about an hour of game driving left, so we begged Ninah to take us out again. He obliged and we sped back into the Serengeti. We saw the girls again in the same spot. It was actually exciting this time because one of their colleagues had joined them, and they were watching some wildebeest in the distance. If I had an hour I would have sat and watched the hunt, but we didn't have that kind of time. We sped away, passing a group of hippos we had seen earlier, but this time with a twist. One of the hippos had died and was floating belly up. It was a funny sight, and we all joked that even though we hadn't seen a cheetah or leopard, that it was still worth it to see the dead hippo.

As we sped back to camp once again, I spotted a lion standing up out of the grass. SO proud of that sighting because even though she was pretty close to the road, no one else had seen her. WE of course stopped, and upon looking harder, I spotted a tiny lion cub in a tree. And two more on the ground. Score! They were really tiny. I 'm guessing that she hadn't even introduced the three of them to the pride. I took a pretty nice video of the event; mother had been calling to him/her, but the baby just couldn't find the footing or the courage to jump down. Yeah it was a short tree, but not for a baby lion. After about a minute, he/she leaped down from the fork, and we all cheered. It was worth not seeing a cheetah, I can tell you that much.

TO BE CONTINUED...

SWOD: hamna which means "nothing"

-Ian