Invasion of the Lions!

Over the last few weeks we have been invaded by lions not only in taking over our camp, drinking from the pool but also keeping us awake at night with their roaring. Samurai (the male in the pictures below) was on the floodplain in front of camp yesterday with a young female from the Santawani Pride. That night the other male who he prowls the area with, joined him and they continued to keep most of us awake the whole night with their shouting. It appears that with added males in the area towards Moremi has caused these males to spend more time in our area and may also have led to an increase in roaring, which has thus led to less sleep!!

Samurai gazing at the sky, looking for vultures! Love it when they look up at the sky scanning for raptors.

A paw shot of Samurai while he was passed out in the heat.

There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!

Yesterday Sven decided to go over his safety procedures in the Cessna and I went along for the ride. I wanted to share these pictures with you as I was amazed at how much the water levels have gone down recently and it shows just how dry it is here at the moment! We eagerly await the rain and respite from this draining heat...

The floodplains still have water but a much decreased amount. However, where there was water is perfect grazing land for the wildlife.

This shot shows the incredible contrast between the vegetation away from the river and around the old floodplains that were recently covered in a substantial amount of water.

One of the pans near the airstrip that hasnt seen a drop of water in quite a while.

Day 3 - Ive succumbed to stalking birds?!

Today was quite an uneventful transect. We did however see a number of new birds such as the Golden-breasted Bunting, a nesting Brubru and a Red-headed Weaver. The mopane transect is by far the hardest of the transects as it is the thickest vegetation in the area and includes some serious offroad driving. We also had to contend with quite a hefty wind which of course does not help with the spotting of small birds. However, it was still great to be out in the bush and we thoroughly enjoyed stalking birds through the thick mopane.

A breeding male Red-headed Weaver making a nest in a mopane tree.

Day 2 - Its Still Rock and Roll To Me...

After a serious swotting session of the bird book and bird calls, we were ready to rock this morning at 5:30am when we set out for our 2nd bird transect for BirdLife Botswana's bird population monitoring programme. After crashing through thick islands of Northern Lala Palms that line the river and not seeing much, we finally broke through onto some old floodplains. Here we were able to actually see the birds instead of relying on our hurendous bird call identification abilities! A treat today was seeing a Purple Roller (Coracias naevius - the least common roller in the roller family) and a pair of Broad-billed Rollers (Eurystomus glaucurus - smallest in the roller family), which I have never seen before and are incredibly pretty birds. These rollers are migrant birds and only occur here during the summer months. The female, identified by the bald patch on her stomach from incubating eggs, was spotted in an old palm tree cavity. We were able to have a look and found two small white eggs in the nest about the size of dove eggs. We were very excited as we have not seen these birds in the area before and finding a nest was an added bonus.

The female Broad-billed Roller, in the palm tree cavity. In this photo you can clearly see her bald patch from incubating the eggs.

Taking flight from the tree cavity. The Broad-billed Rollers are the only rollers with a yellow bill and are the only breeding migrants in the family.

The breeding pair sitting in a tree watching us check out their nest. Was such a special sighting and always nice to see new birds.

We were also able to locate new raptor nests which we have been looking for, for the last few months although they do not appear to be active. Additionally, we were able catch up on our breeding pair of African Hawk Eagles, who now appear to be incubating eggs in their nest after a couple weeks of no activity which is great news.

DAY 1 – They should be called Stupid Little Brown Things (SLBJ's)

LBJ’s (little brown jobs) is a great name for all those small brown birds that look exactly the same, yet are many different species. In case that didn’t make the job of identifying them difficult they also like to hide in dense bushes and shout away, letting you know that they are there. So instead of having to page through a bird book for hours comparing all the different LBJ’s, now you also have to also listen to all their calls and attempt to distinguish between a “krak-krak-krak” and a “tsee-tsee-tsee”, when really they all sound the same. It is amazing how after a few transects you just don’t hear them anymore and suddenly only hear the ones that you can identify. In addition, birds like the “tsee tsee tsee” start appearing on the species list…Needless to say the bird book has been thoroughly studied and dissected so that tomorrow does not prove as difficult…time will tell and so will the LBJ’s.

An Arrow-marked Babbler - love their bright orange eyes, so striking!