30. 12. 2018

Again we started at 6:30 with Caleb for our early morning drive. The sky was overcast again, but we found a small group of giraffes posing for us before dawn, which resulted in some nice shots like the following:

Junge Giraffe in der Morgendämmerung
Joung giraffe in the dusk

A little later Caleb heard over the radio that a leopard had been sighted. He told us to hold on and stepped on the gas. After a few minutes at the speed of the Paris-Dakkar rally we already saw a large collection of safari vehicles

Safarifahrzeuge.jpg
Leopard sighting

and discovered the leopard, which at first sat very unphotogenic and far away in a ditch. The park rangers (the white pickup truck in the picture above) were already there to prevent the leopard from being disturbed even further by off-road vehicles. But all in all, the Leopard seemed to be not very impressed by the vehicle armada and finally started to move between the vehicles. Again Caleb had the right feeling and put us in pole position: The Leopard finally stood right next to our jeep and looked at the passengers very interested. Among other shots, I managed to get the following picture, one of my favourite pictures of this wonderful trip:

Leopardenportrait 2
Portrait of a leopard

The closeness and eye contact were incredible. Altogether we followed the beautiful cat for a good 30 minutes until she disappeared in the dense bushes. But we found her again 3 days later.

Later we observed a lioness with very young cubs:

Löwenbaby
Lion cub
Löwenbaby mit Mutter
Cub with mother

Also some birds showed themselves to us on this day:

Another crown crane:

Kronenkranich 3
Crown Crane

A woolly-necked stork, which we had never been able to discover on our previous trips:

Wollhalsstorch 1
Woolly-necked Stork
Wollhalsstorch 3

This time I caught a lilac breasted roller in flight. Unfortunately the picture did not become completely sharp despite a short exposure time of 1/2000 sec, but nevertheless I find it worth to be seen:

Kenia2018-1890.jpg

A saddle-billed stork ran through the grass and then flew away:

Sattelstorch
Sattelstorch im Flug

For some time we also observed a very large group of baboons with certainly more than 40 animals, including many juveniles, which were doing all kinds of nonsense. One of them "rode" on its mother's back and looked at us critically:

Pavian Mutter mit Nachwuchs 2
Pavian Mutter mit Nachwuchs 1

A pond was almost completely covered on the surface with green floating plants, which set off the hippos in it very nicely:

Flusspferd im Tümpel

All in all the day was again very impressive. Unfortunately the sky was overcast again in the evening, so we drove back to camp without sunset photos. Below is a photo of our open air dining area with the improvised Christmas tree:

"Weihnachtsbaum" im Camp
Christmas spirit at Mara Bush Camp

The further course of the evening was as usual: Showers/ securing pictures, drinks at the campfire, dinner, then fall asleep at 10:00 pm deadly tired…