Dreaming of Africa

I’ve been home a week and a half or so and am definitely back to work and back to my normal life. However, I find my mind wandering back to Africa every chance it gets. I think it is fair to say it will take a while for it to all sink in and settle out but in the meantime I thought I’d share some photos to give you a bit of an idea as to what we saw.

One of the first things we saw were these two white rhinos…

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In this reserve, many of the rhinos have had their horns cut off, at least partially, which makes them much less attractive to poachers.

036One of the birds I really wanted to see on this trip was an ostrich. Lucky me, because I saw more than a few!

041We even saw this one on her nest with three babies. The eggs you can see will probably never hatch and have been abandoned. Sometimes more than one female lays eggs in a nest. In this case these eggs may have belonged to another female. As they used to say on Facebook, it’s complicated.

060Not long after, we saw our first meerkat, a mama to be, standing guard, rubbing her belly.

063One of the most beautiful and exciting birds we saw was this African hoopoe. It pretty much posed for us.

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We saw our first giraffe and were wowed by the grace and nobility…

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and then we saw our first elephants!

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This is just a little sampling of how the trip began…I’ll be posting more so check back in when you can.

South African dreams…

After what felt like months of planning and anticipation I finally made my way to South Africa for a birding trip with Julie Zickefoose and Leon Marais of Lawson’s Birding and Wildlife Tours, put together by Holbrook Travel. The trip was about 10 days long, not including the long travel times to and from and was one of the most wonderful trips I’ve ever taken.

Most of the trip felt like a dream–and it was, my dream come true.

The landscapes of South Africa are varied and breathtaking. I will be adding many posts about the birds and animals we saw but I wanted to begin with the beauty that is in the landscapes….

Leaving Johannesburg, it looked like this….

  Up in the hill country of Mount Sheba we walked in an escarpment forest….
  Many rivers and lakes are almost dried up due to drought but we still found running water…  Blyde Canyon is the third largest canyon in the world and certainly one of the most beautiful….especially at sunset….
  There are waterfalls that are as magical as any found anywhere….  And rivers filled with rocks and reeds, hippos and birds. Yes, there are hippos in this photo….
    The savanna was dry but still beautiful…
  There were big rocks and really big rocks….  Flat hazy land with distant mountains….
  And marshlands…. South Africa is a truly amazing and beautiful land. Stay tuned for more posts from my trip….