Our little Hooded Vulture. The smallest of the magnificent team that pulls the mortal remains of the dead straight back into the upper food chain. And like so many other vultures in this dark night of the biosphere, it’s in big trouble. This one and its mates though were first where they are usually last - on a huge giraffe carcass that the lions had to eat in shifts as appetite returned. It was an all-you-can-eat deal for these little guys, although they’re too small to get through the tough hide like the biggest vultures and had to work the edges of the lion hole.

A Dwarf Mongoose who lives with its family in an old termite mound.

When we were approaching the end of the Heks River Valley it looked like the Cape Peninsula was being held in perpetual winter by the power of some dark sorcerer - to judge by the vortex of black clouds over the land like a bad 1980s special effect.

I’ve developed an elephant size scale out of twelve - with the smallest baby I’ve ever seen (likely born that week) at a half, and the utterly titanic bulls at a twelve. This guy was a ten and his buddy, over a foot taller again, was an eleven. It amuses me to appraise.

Smol hippo.

Another hopefully atmospheric bushveld scene. Buffalo and a Sabie River wild fig tree. I like this kind of pic to remind me of the experience of being on that river road when it’s very far away.

Sunset Impalas. We’re on our way home and have been having some patchy wifi. It was a really good time in the park. We finally saw a pack of painted wolves about half an hour before we drove out of Malelane Gate.

Tiny critters in a big landscape. Almost every pile of boulders (ancient magma chambers exposed by erosion and then crumbled by weather, plants, and time) has a pair of resident klipspringers (rock-hoppers) - an adorable, agile, and feisty little antelope. These plaques on the rocks are the kind of memorialising that used to be de rigueur in the old days. Now such things are usually confined to camps and gates rather than forced onto the landscape.

A White-Fronted Bee-Eater. I’ll hopefully post a compilation for fellow bird-nerds before too long. I’ve seen some cool stuff and some that’s really new to me or photographed ok by me for the first time.

Scratching post.