WILDLIFE BLOG

We are lucky to have regular sightings of these beautiful cats. During the last few days of the dry season, when water is in really short supply, a bit of time spent at a popular lagoon will usually result in a visit from one of the locals! This big male is well-known to us and usually announces his presence with a throaty call which carries for several kilometers.

Nightjars are a group of birds which feed on insects during the hours of darkness. In the Luangwa, we have several species most of which are mottled brown to provide camouflage during the day. Male Pennant-winged Nightjars grow extra long primary feathers during their breeding season as a way of attracting a mate. I have yet to catch an image of one of these ghostly kite-like birds in flight, but I found one sitting on the [...]

I had a very interesting encounter with a pack of 18 Wild Dogs recently. By this time of year, this pack's activities are often centred around a salt spring in the back country away from the river. Whenever dogs can find a water source in a marginal area away from areas of high prey density, they choose to live and hunt around there to avoid confrontations with lions. Death by lions is the single largest cause [...]

We recently found this hyaena while out on a morning safari. It was a hot morning even though it was still early (it's always hot in October!) so he was lying in the shade. When we approached, he got up and posed for a while before skulking off as if he had done something wrong!

I was watching a hyaena early in the morning yesterday, and when I lowered my binos, I found that a group of Kudu had emerged silently from the Leadwood trees nearby. When I turned to look at them, most fled, but one female remained for a few seconds before following the rest.

Some days, you can vainly scour the skies in search of Vultures and other large birds of prey, and other days it's as if there's a raptor in every tree. Yesterday, I was out with some guests and there wasn't much going on on the ground, so we started to look up and into the trees. On an open area of dead mopane woodland, we found this Yellow-billed Kite and nearby a Tawny Eagle which has [...]

The light was very poor when we found a pride of lions on the sand yesterday. I switched to black and white on my camera, and tried to capture the mood of the lionesses; calm contemplation, and the contented feeling of being top of the food-chain!

Out in the park yesterday, I saw a pair of Little Bee-eaters sitting on a low bush. They didn't move away initially which made me think that they might be nesting nearby. One of the pair flew off as we got closer, but sure enough, it dropped down to a little hole right next to the road that I had never noticed before. It wasn't carrying anything, but the presence of an egg-shell outside the nest-hole [...]

I've been trying for the last 4 years (off and on, not full-time, of course!) to get a photo of a Lilac-Breasted Roller in flight. I've always managed to get good shots of them sitting in bushes with nice backgrounds, but then they fly off when I'm not ready, or they fly out of the back of the bush! Luckily, I was recently with some guests who wanted to try and capture the same thing! They [...]

'A leopard in a tree' is probably highest on visitors' wish lists when you ask them what they most want to see! While it's never a guarantee, Luangwa leopards are often very obliging in this respect. Leopards climb trees to escape the heat and the flies, and to stash their kill away from other predators such as hyaenas which would happily steal it from them. We found this female leopard up in a tree early in [...]

The famous Pel's Fishing Owl, which bird-enthusiasts put right at the top of their Africa lists, are found at most large lagoons during the Luangwa's dry season. What's more unusual is to see them during the daytime - I found this one at a local lagoon while on morning safari yesterday!

I was out on safari the other day, and it was one of those mornings where there's not much going on....any activity from the night before has gone quiet and it all seems calm on the plains and in the thickets. We found this group of giraffe milling around on the sand at the water's edge. It's a place where giraffes and elephants often cross the water since it's very shallow and there's little risk of [...]