Greetings folks. Neil’s hard at work on processing the photos from the trip and today’s post includes the first full day morning boat ride. Turns out that the Chobe River is what one would call a target rich environment so Ima gonna have to split day in half (more or less). I don’t know for sure if that will continue every day or just busier days…it was a little slower out at Camp Kanana in the Okavango Delta region about day 4 or 5 so perhaps there will be some single post days coming up…stay tuned.

On the home front…we’re into September now and the weather is starting to cool off a bit. We’re still running the A/C but within a week or so we expect to be able to open up for at least a few hours most days. We much prefer having the windows open for the breeze rather than being cooped up inside. Connie’s got her radiation treatments scheduled 5 days a week for 3 weeks starting on the 22nd. She’s about over the surgery aftereffects…she is still itchy near the incision as the glue they used to close it contains starch it turns out and she is allergic to starch…so she’s taking antihistamines (Allegra) for the time being and Neil keeps scrubbing the area with alcohol to help get it off.

It’s getting into concert season and we’re adding a couple new orchestras to our Sarasota Philharmonic subscription. One is the Florida Philharmonic which performs at a church over in Burnt Store…they’re a pretty new group. The second is a local concert series with differing groups…they seemed interesting so we’re going to try them out as well. 

And that’s about it for the home front.

I forgot to mention last time Neil’s report on how irritating the porters at the airport in Johannesburg are. They’re like leeches…and there are hundreds of them all trying to carry your luggage or take you to the counter or point you to the gates…for just a small tip. While he appreciates that they need to make a living…they really don’t like to take no for an answer and give you lines like “I’ll get fired by my boss if you don’t let me do it and pay me”. Luggage carts are free in the airport and one can take them right across the street to the IHG hotel he was staying it so he didn’t need them to push it. And showing me where the check in line is or where the gates are when both are clearly labeled makes no sense. He had to tell dozens of them no in his 4 trips through the airport and after the first time he stopped arguing with them…just politely said No Thanks and kept moving. They actually try to take the luggage cart away from you and are really aggressive about tips. Perhaps this is the norm elsewhere but he’s never seen anything like it.

OK, let’s get onto images. Schedule wise…things just kept repeating every day. Early breakfast followed by a morning boat ride or game drive depending on location from just after dawn until 1100 or so then back to the lodge/camp/houseboat for more breakfast, some image reviews, and rest followed about 1430 or so afternoon tea then another drive from 1500 until after sunset arriving back about 1830 or so followed by dinner, backing up images, and charging camera batteries. Then sleep, get up early and repeat.

Here’s the boat we were using. About 25-30 feet long with 8 seats aligned fore and aft, each with a gimbal to mount the long lens on. Steve stayed in the front (he’s the one standing with the green jacket) and Rose took the back seat with the 6 clients in between and rotating forward one seat every drive. As you can see…early morning was pretty chilly…in the 40s most days but it was in the 70s to 80s for the afternoon drive and we were all in short sleeves then…at least until sundown because the temperature fell pretty quickly after sunset and it was a windy drive/ride back home.

Pretty early on after leaving the dock we encountered a large group of Black Skimmers. These are exactly the same bird as we have in the US with one difference. US ones dip their beaks to catch prey for much longer times as they fly low but African ones stay low but only dip when they see something edible.

You can see in this first one how close their wingtips get to the water on the downbeat without actually touching it.

There were also some hippos nearby.

And this one skimmed and dipped really, really close to that crocodile behind the bird.

Drat…missed.

And sometimes even after a success your friends try to come and steal your breakfast.

Here’s the croc they kept skimming by…it basically ignored the birds.

Moving on after a half hour or so with the skimmers we found this Little Egret which we would call a Snowy Egret (same bird) here. It’s the Little Egret to differentiate it from the Great Egret (which is the same bird as a Great Egret here).

Departing after a fish splashed in front and startled it.

Nearby a mated pair of Pied Kingfishers…the male is to the left and the female is to his right and slightly behind him. Genders are differentiated by the chest markings…2 black bands on the male and a separated single more brownish one on the female. These are about 2-3 times the size of the Belted Kingfishers we have here. Perspective being what it is…she actually looks closer but her bill disappears behind his back and the females are slightly larger (as they are in most bird species due to having to deliver eggs).

Cormorant…same bird as a Double Crested Cormorant but with varied local names depending on country.

Brown Hooded Kingfisher…smaller than the Pied and a bit bigger than a Belted. This is…we think…a male.

Baboon.

African Darter…even though it’s the same bird as an Anhinga here.

Close up of the baboon…if you look close you can see the shadows of his fur in the eyes.

This one was watching the youngster above and then turned to look at the boat.

Water Thick-Knee…a very common shore bird there.

And another in a long list of very similar birds…this is a Gray Heron which is pretty much the same as a Great Blue Heron.

They then next happened on a rookery for White Fronted Bee-Eaters. They nest in holes they did in vertical river banks in large groups and mostly eat insects that they catch mid-air. With these…and a lot of the kingfishers in flight shots you’ll see…Neil had to use a relatively new capability in his bodies called Precapture shooting. While modern bodies all have automatic exposure, focus, and subject detection they don’t actually (until recently) take a picture until you press the shutter and then they take 20 frames per second as long as the shutter down. The problem is that human reaction time is about 1/4 of a second to see the launch and press the shutter and the birds launch faster than that…so waiting until you see movement almost inevitably resulted in blank frames of the perch with perhaps the tail of the bird as it disappears from the frame. So…enter precapture. As long as one is engaging autofocus (and most wildlife shooters use a button on the back for this and not the half press of the shutter button that’s the default) the body is continuing to buffer images without storing them for whatever duration one sets…typically 0.3 seconds or so) Then when you see movement in the viewfinder you press the shutter and it saves the last 0.3 seconds worth of images (about 7 of them for 20 frames per second) and then saves 20 per second until you release. Simultaneously with shutter press one tries to pan to keep the bird in the frame but this is typically a hit or miss proposition unless you keep the bird small in the frame which is detrimental to the idea of filling the frame for maximum quality. The upshot of precapture is that you get the whole launch sequence…the downsides are that it gives you a lot of essentially wasted frames to review and it forces you into using JPEG image format instead of the higher quality RAW format but in good light with proper exposure the benefits of RAW are mostly diminished.

This section of bank is about 10 feet high from the river and pretty vertical and about 20 yards long. There were probably 200 of these birds there, all doing the same things. The boat was nosed into the bank about 10 feet from them and we mostly shot the ones right in front of us.

This is a mated pair…male to the left and his mate frequently came out to complain at him that he wasn’t helping dig the nest.

She would fly into the partly dug nest, toss out some dirt, then fly out, perch for a few second, and repeat. You can see the dirt coming out from the nest behind her and they emerge from the next and fly so quickly that without precapture he would have no shots of them like this.

And here she is complaining at him.

Moving on…we found a Little Bee-Eater…they are about 1/3 the size of the White Fronted ones and are much more solitary along with hanging out in more wooded areas. This one flew off the wrong direction (behind the tree) so getting launch shots didn’t work as they were all obscured.

Another male Pied Kingfisher. His mate was perched alongside but he didn’t export it for me…the extremely narrow depth of field of his 600mm lens of about 3 inches at the less than 10 yards distance prevented having both of them in focus and even stopping the lens down would not have helped the depth of field enough. Kingfishers have a nictating eyelid that goes over their eye when they hit the water to protect it but still allow sight…I think he got one that has it visible. I’ll get him to export that one if he has it so you can see the difference…and I’ll get him to export the shot with the female as well so you can see the depth of field issue. While there are ways to work around that…basically taking two photos with one bird shape in each and merging them…it’s almost impossible to do it from a moving photo platform since the two shots don’t match up very well.

And that does it for most of the morning ride. He’ll finish up that and the evening one processing today hopefully and I can post more. 

Interesting things found on the net.

C’mon…really?

Cyas.