We woke up pretty bleary eyed this morning. We were going all day yesterday and we didn’t get back until bed time basically. But we got moving and we were going to start the day off with the meerkats. On the way there, we got a call that the wild dogs might be in the area which is pretty surprising given that they were many kilometers away yesterday when we saw them. Sure enough, here they were pretty close to the lodge, and better yet, they were on the move. They were definitely on the hunt for something, but they hadn’t found anything specific yet. We got to see them darting off in different directions looking for something, and then stopping to look around, listen and smell, then dart off in some direction again. It was great to see them moving around as a pack.
Just like yesterday, it was three individuals, the alpha female and two males. The fourth member of the pack is presumably back at the den with the pups. We got to followed them around for quite a while, and they were slowing going in the direction of the giraffe carcass from the other day. They didn’t have any urgency to what they were doing so it didn’t seem like they were aware of it, but we were hoping they’d stumble across it. Unfortunately, while they got pretty close, they stayed upwind of it and never noticed it. We followed up them until they disappeared into the hills.
Another truck joined us just as they were disappearing that was filming for a Wild Earth live safari, which is broadcast live (or probably live-ish) on the goo-tubes. It looks like this is the video.
We drove off and made it to the meerkats after our wild dog diversion. We got to hang out near their den with a family and three or four week old pups. The pups were happily rolling around and playing with the parents were on the look out for predators and doing a bit of scavenging for bugs.
After our morning coffee we heard over the radio that the live safari truck had spotted the cheetahs from yesterday near a watering hole that the wild dogs had taken us by a bunch of times this morning already. It sounded like they got some good video of that, so might be worth checking out that link, I think these cheetahs are the headline shot from the video. So we made our way back over there and got to see the cheetah brothers walking around trying to find a good place to nap for the day. We followed them along for a while and got to see them moving around before they did indeed find a nice shady tree to sleep under.
For the afternoon drive, we went way into the lion side, looking for the big male lions. We were actually mostly setting down tracks so that it would be easier to find them the next day. Basically we were making clean Land Rover (“landy”) tracks, so we’d be able to tell if tracks on top of them were fresh. While we were doing this, we came across some nice zebra. Rather impressively we also stumbled across a rhino. He was off in the bush a bit, but we got some nice views of him.
After we got back, dinner was a nice “feast” with pork belly and roast chicken. Pretty tasty all around. We headed for the room a bit early so we could pack up to finish up our morning game drive at the air strip.
5/9/21