Wednesday, March 14 – Late Morning

We traveled over paved and gravel roads as we wound our way through part of Kruger National Park.

We would have had to stay many more days to drive over each road in the almost 5 million acre park.

This was one of the places where we could get out of the van.

I think this is a hooded crane

I did a double-take when I looked at this picture. I thought it was a turtle (terrapin) – and it is. 🙂 The white tooth-like things surprised me.

I checked the internet to see if any terrapin matched that head – and found this – a Serrated Hinged Terrapin.

We never tired of watching giraffes.

Not sure if it has some neck damage – or if I just got the picture when it was making a strange movement.

If this is the same one, it looks like it might have escaped an animal attack.

Elephants enjoying the water

Impala up close

There’s that McDonald’s M again.

Phil said, “There’s another Kori Bustard. I thought you guys were lucky to see one – now you’ve seen two.”

If you read my previous posts, you will remember that this is the world’s largest flying bird. This one is smaller than the one we saw the day before

These dead trees are part of the landscape in many areas. Some of the damage is from elephants.

Ostrich

Josh and Jana recorded each species of the birds and animals we saw.

After taking the previous picture, I thought, “I need to include Jana because she was very much involved in this project.”

This was not a normal sight on the road, so we knew there was an animal around that is rare to see.

We checked to see which direction people were looking, and before long Phil said, “Well, folks, I found your leopard. Look through the leaves on the left.

Now we had seen each of The Big Five in the wild – lion, leopard, cape buffalo, rhino, and elephant.

This is a bit more how we saw it (without much zoom) as it walked to the other side of the tree.

It was fully aware of the many onlookers.

It decided to relax until we were all finished looking.

Phil couldn’t believe his eyes! “There is another Kori Bustard!”

Wildebeest

Continued tomorrow night…