@awesomemeerkat told me about some nesting owls at Kirstenbosch and a friend helped locate them. My dad and I went and took some pictures and just enjoyed being so close to wild owls. I didn’t get any good ones of the chick. But we’ll go back.
Karooveld
Not too much call for mowing the lawn in camp at The Karoo National Park. This is a big old Mountain Tortoise about the size of a medicine ball. It let me take a few pics before it started to feel it was infra dig, hissed at me and then trundled off to continue harvesting.
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.
Kruger is about landscape as well as beasts, birds, and trees.
The prettiest kitty. Dozing on a branch over the Sabie just like her ancestors have probably done for thousands of years.
The smallest hyena I’ve ever seen. Its ma is obsessed with it.
Three days on the road and now we get to relax. We’re not going to be go-getters tomorrow. We had to go through the park pretty swiftly from Malelane Gate to Kruger Gate and, although we saw tons of great stuff, I only took a handful of pics. A Steenbok is the most delightful little animal. And those terrapins are showing us the way - basking on top of a fully alive but very sleepy hippo.
First getaway in about 18 months. Sorely needed and graciously offered. @sophdex and @ezlemoen have been putting us up in Brenton on Sea. It’s just been lazy nonsense - building stupid hard jigsaw puzzles, eating and drinking and visiting the free living primates at Monkey Land.
My dad playing the role of 🍌 for scale next to a big tree. Most of the oaks in Cape Town are in bad shape when they reach this age because their health suffers from not getting the months of dormant cold they’re evolved to expect. But apparently the care of the gardeners in Kirstenbosch kept this old stick in good nick. Can they also save it from the shot-borer beetle that’s going to wipe out the rest of Cape Town’s oaks?