Ok, I’ve changed my mind…Ima gonna post these by day and depending on how many images I have it might be in 2 parts…and I’ll try to post some every other day. Sorry about the somewhat overload of safari images…but I wanted to give you a nice selection of shots from Neil’s trip to peruse since he may or may not ever go there again. He’s contemplating doing another one in 2025 if Steve/Rose run trips to Botswana next year…it’s a different environment with far fewer lions, more likelihood of leopards, and some trips on the river to get those sorts of wildlife.

On the home front…nothing really new to report. Neil ordered himself the next size bigger camera backpack since with his newly arrived 180-600mm lens the smaller one isn’t big enough for it, the 600mm prime, and 2 bodies along with all the other assorted goodies. He’ll give the smaller one to Connie…that way she can help schlep some of his stuff to Costa Rica for him when they go there over the summer. 

It’s been pretty hot and humid the past few days so we’ve had the A/C running…we’re all hoping it dies off a bit so we can at least open up in the morning for part of the say…we all prefer open windows to closed ones but summer is rapidly coming and we’ll be stuck with full time A/C pretty soon. 

Anyways…on to images.

Hot air balloons and zebras at sunrise. Apparently the balloon industry is basically unregulated there and our drivers reported that many people are killed or injured every year in crashes.

Nicely backlit zebra with rim light in its mane.

Wildebeest at dawn.

Closeup of one of the balloons with the burner ignited.

Hyena.

Backlit lioness…normally this would have been a throwaway since she is facing way…but the light on her was so nice I kept it anyway.

One of the better roads they were on.

The lioness’s mate.

Then he looked at them and walked towards the vehicle…I’m unsure which of these two poses I like better.

Tawny Eagle.

Wildebeest you can actually see some detail in.

Another shot of the same male lion above.

White Rumped Shrikes.

Rufous Naped Lark.

Hyena.

Wildebeest and zebra herd…they gather together a lot apparently as we saw this sort of thing aplenty.

Lilac Breasted Roller in flight.

And sticking the landing.

Superb Starling…much more vividly colored than the black (to human eyes) starlings we have in the US.

But on the other hand…birds have eyes that see in ultraviolet and this is what our black (to human eyes) starlings look like to them.

Pheasant Coucal.

Singing Bushlark.

Black Winged Lapwing.

Lion propositioning his mate.

Because they immediately went to this…third time in 40 minutes, she looks like “just get it over with already”…luckily for her it’s pretty quick. We actually stayed around an extra 20 minutes so the woman in the vehicle could get a video with sounds of the mating only (he roars)…the rest of us had to “be very quiet, we’re hunting wabbits”.

Hartebeest up on a rock…they want to get higher to see potential predators on the way.

White Bellied Bustard…sort of a crane/hawk combo.

Speke’s Weaver…there are dozens of weaver varieties…Neil liked the “what the heck you lookin’ at” expression on its face.

Interesting things found on the internet (or rather in this case Neil’s reading material).

He was rereading James Michener’s Alaska recently and in one of the sections there was a description of some scientists who lived or awhile out on an ice floe in the Arctic Ocean…at one point one of them pulled a dog eared map of the Arctic Ocean out of her pocket and it was described as something she pulled out of a 1960something National Geographic. Neil immediately realized that his was a reference to the same map he used on one of his submarine deployments. Normally if one is going way north you get a special allotment of charts…but he ended up there on sort of an unscheduled thing so none of the normal “the ship is going to the Arctic” things happened…resulting in getting to the far north end of the most northern most chart they had on board. The skipper asked him how he was going to navigate in the absence of charts…one of the quartermasters on the ship found this same referenced map in the crews mess library and he showed the captain this chart. It revealed that the Arctic Ocean was generally speaking deep, flat, and devoid of seamounts. Adding in that even if they had charts of the far north area…that part of the world is always ice covered and hence impassable to surface ships…which meant that even official charts had few to no soundings of how deep the water was. Typically you’ll see a sounding on a chart every couple of inches which depending on the scale of the chart might be 10 to 100 miles apart…but one gets a generalized idea of how deep the water is and if there are any seamounts that a sounding ship happened to drive over. Arctic charts however…are essentially devoid of soundings, there may be a single line of them in some parts of the chart but since it’s ice covered all one can say is that sometime in the past some submarine of an unknown owner passed along that line. So…essentially no soundings are available on the charts and the depth sounder is disabled on deployment as it makes noise if you use it…so the ship just used a sheet of blank tracing paper and navigated on that until they eventually got back onto a chart they actually had on board.

Cyas.