Surprise guest. @withoutaleaf found this bunny while shooting at Wynberg Park. It may have been born there among feral rabbits, but it’s super friendly, so it may have been abandoned. Luckily a person nearby us with an eight-year-old daughter is coming to take it to its forever home this afternoon.
The Boi in one of his brief spells of wakefulness. Watching lens reviews can sometimes be useful. I discovered this ttartisan 50mm f1.2 is quite a bit less sharp and contrasty focused at its minimum distance at f1.2. So stopping down to f2 makes quite a big difference when focused close like this.
Bun’s current top-favourite spot. We call it her tube.
Another perfect day in Africa.
The Lowveld in summer mist. This kind of landscape is generally called ‘savannah woodland’ as far as I know. It’s not the open savannah grassland you find in much of East Africa. Beautiful bushveld trees are everywhere - making up in perfection of form what they lack in height and girth. I see the potential to reverse the annihilation of natural spaces like this, done in the 19th and 20th centuries, as the population peaks this century and agriculture becomes denser and more efficient - allowing more and more land to be released back into a natural state. This is the flip side to the ecological doom that looms ahead. At this point we could go either way. If the people with the money decide, we know it will only go one way.
Little fruitbats dangling themselves to sleep in Satara restcamp. I think they’re probably Wahlberg’s Epauletted Fruitbats. They’re about the size of my fist. When they’re settling themselves down they look like someone struggling in a sack.
@jason66c at a show we went to for the day back on December 11. We gathered intel and experienced the rare Cape summer thunderstorm.
A new zebra. They’re fluffy and their stripes are rather brown at this age.
Our cancellation-surfing approach to staying in Kruger worked less well than in other years we’ve done it. We ended up pinballing between camps a fair bit. Who can say why? Are more people doing it now? Are there companies grabbing cancellations and reselling? Or is it just the ‘post’-pandemic situation? Hard to say. It makes it a less appealing prospect for future trips, for sure.
Two large, impressive vultures. The lower bird is a Lappet-Faced Vulture which sports the largest wingspan of any non-seabird in Southern Africa. A huge, powerful vulture that’s able to tear open carcasses to the benefit of slighltly smaller vultures like the White-Backed Vulture shown landing here.