After game drives each day, we
returned to our tents and to some surprisingly
wonderful meals prepared in the field by the camp staff.
And yeah, the Serengeti is a noisy place at night but we all slept well anyway.
Our campsite was also populated
by a large number of babboons -- I counted
on the order of twenty-some individuals from our dining tent one
afternoon.
On one of our game drives, we
encountered packs of hyenas running across the savannah
converging on an unseen point. It was exciting to see so many packs
coming from so many directions --
all making bee-lines for a single fresh kill site.
It was if klaxon alarms were going off all over the Serengeti.
It wasn't too hard to find the
kill site. Dozens of hyenas were fighting over the carcass.
Some folk commented on how shark-like the hyenas' behavior
was.
As usual, the hyenas ignored
the presence of all the converging vehicles (a kill site being more
popular than
a lion sighting) until I climbed up on the roof of our minivan to get
a better angle on this scene.
Several of the hyenas were a bit surprised and upset at my appearance
and howled at me.
Not that I was terribly interested in stealing what was left of that
wildebeast.
It wasn't long before the vultures were descending on the remains.
There's a heck of a lot of
interesting birds to be seen in the Serengeti
like this big ol' "secretary bird" pictured on the right
above.
I've never been much into birds, but there's such an amazing variety to be found here.
+
There are massive creatures
like eagles, vultures, ostrich and storks
and beautiful blazing color in birds like the "superb starling"
(never did get a good shot of
its brilliant blue wing span).
Ohhh, another magnificant cat... the cheetah.
Hey, check out the blue-balled monkeys!
Okay, well actually, they're
vervets or "green monkeys" but the males
do have very bright blue balls!
There are so many more
creatures running around this place that I haven't even mentioned
yet:
turtles, foxes, mongoose, elephant, leopards, hunting dogs,
bongo, jackals, genet, civet, mambas, chameleons....
I'll feature some of these in
the Ngorongoro Crater segment
but it's not like I got pictures of everything that
lives here...
So how about some giraffe instead?
That's a long way up.
On our last day in the
Serengeti, as we were driving to Oldupai Gorge,
our driver somehow managed to spot this serval cat.
This wild cat is about the size of and looks very much like a typical
domesticated cat.
