Africa: Post #4...Hippo Lakes-- The Wild Fauna

This post will be a sampler, rather than a gallery, of photos of the variety of wildlife we encountered on the safari. I am not a very skillful photographer of subjects which move. Animals & humans are not favorite subjects for my cameras,

I can make decent product shots of my jewelry or bells because they are not running around, but stabilized in a light-box with plenty of time to make numerous images in as many exposures as necessary to show their details & surfaces. 

I have a Nikon SLR but I no longer travel with it given its weight & complications.  My iPhone's remarkable  possibilities are inevitably a better choice for travel.

 Even-so, my eye/hand coordination is at an age-related deficit. So I don't expect more than "happy accident" results as I now simply dance with my luck, because 'most any travel can keep my brain & eyes busy most all the time, the film of my mind becomes my memory's better source. 

Because I also write [50 years of fairly regular hand-written journal pages] in order to attempt recording sharing my impressions, this blog of a dozen+ years has constructed a useful form for my personal & creative life. Its combination of several media remains a bit of a passion I cherish... knowing it will no doubt become a headache for someone else!

With that said I feel happy with my attempts as a photographer being great fun... my thrill as being a 

"big game hunter", except my animals are free to choose coming back for another shot... unless they've become some other being's dinner! All must live as they can... except humans with guns rarely play fair! even when some will query about "What was your favorite?".  My answer is that I prefer to celebrate the rich variety of differences as well as similarities, in a broader appreciation.  Still I can happily point to temporary favorites, without moving one to some permanent pinnacle over another.

I found the Zebra to be unexpectedly lovely... especially in motion. I've had a long love affair with black & white, but Zebras (we learned to pronounce that with a short "e" rather than the usual long one) have numerous subtle warm tones in the camouflage of their unique stripes, which is sensible to the warm colors of the grass they feed on... in the highly contrasting light & dark shade. I loved learning the term for a group of them a "dazzle"! Which you can sense viewing a group of them... a puzzle of heads & tails side views into some sort of blossoming.

 

 

They are handsome in the singular as well... 

Wildebeest is a name so descriptive as to obvious in the visual department... quite interesting curious if not exactly lovely. 

Giraffes are so graceful but MJ pointed out some their not so obvious vulnerabilities, like that they must sleep during short naps lest the blood rushing to their brain in a prone position could be fatal. 

Her stories weave... perhaps conjuring a sighting in the dotted camouflage along a road...  

 Shadowed dots blended into the woods' dark... contrasting with the bright out of which we had slowed in approach... I must assume that MJ's eyes had seen it first... Giraffe!

But then we see her baby... double Giraffe sighting!

As single individual is logically called a tower... 

These Weaver Birds' nests are indeed incredible woven basket-like sculptural constructions of beautiful engineering which we saw bordering the lake,   are . We were told that the males build them as part of the mating ritual to attract a mate, but if she doesn't like its qualities, she may tear it apart & force him to build another!

This was the lake where where we regularly saw hippos standing in the shallows, with only their eyes & nostrils showing,

 I cropped & enlarged my "best" shot of the hippos we drove past several times a day... never catching them on their rare walks ashore out of the. 

[We did see Hippos, much closer, on the Zambezi River. I write about that in the upcoming post  onVictoria Falls.]

A single sighting of Alligator was made by sharper eyes than mine, who had to be carefully coached to discern its camouflage... not just because it was not very large!

 

Ostrich is common, even in the US, while continuing to look both stately as well as quite humorous.

We caught or, were caught by a lady in her bath... a  dusty ritual in a rut.

 

 The were a wide variety of grazing herds, 

so numerous I never learned them well, but included Bush Bok & several types of Antelope...

Stripes, spots & butt coloration, like one of the antelope species looking like they sat on a freshly painted toilet seat... 

 

Sunset brought us to be happily ready to return to camp with our appetites honed 

for more than just drinks & dinner...  mostly for the sharing of our still exclamatory stories of the day's sightings.

Like the fleeting moments startling a rare band of elusive Bush Babies on our wayhome... quickly disappearing back up into the trees.

 

 

This scarab beetle had tucked itself into a fold of the upholstery when I got out of my seat, collecting a weird sample of flora...