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Goodbye Machaba Camp.

Hello Duba Camp.

While Machaba was wet, it was nothing compared to Duba, which was in the middle of a flood plain, which was more or less flooded. The animals (as well as the humans) basically lived on islands surrounded by large rivers as well as swamps. The trucks at Duba were set up much higher off the ground, to make it through the deep water, as well as open to the sides, so the water could drain out when it came into the back, which was fairly regularly.

When you picture Africa, you don’t imagine large swamps, usually, and certainly not lions living in those swamps, but that’s exactly what you get at Duba.

I’ll start out with animals from Duba this week, but it’s going to be tough; there are tons of good pictures from there, but deciding which ones really stand out is taking time. I’m going to try and not let it drag on too long, though.

The next evening, though, I was just a bit south, at Duba Camp, where it was all about the lions, and I’ve certainly got pictures of them. I’m going to try and sort through those this weekend, so I can start in next week with those pics.

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#botswana #machaba #leopard

Something about this cat, when he was up on the branch, seemed very, well, “cat-like.” Something about the way he rested, groomed his paw, and just watched the world around him. He was a majestic animal, all in all, in some ways up there with the lions we’ll see shortly, at Duba camp. In some ways, in fact, he was more majestic: the lions majesty is partly their prides, but this fellow was all on his own.

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#botswana #machaba #leopard

The leopard treed himself. He actually spent quite a while up in the tree, watching the happenings below him. Unfortunately, during the time we were there, there really wasn’t much to draw his attention around; the birds had been calling warning signals for quite a while, so virtually anything which should be worried about him was long gone. He just sat there, though, occasionally checking us out, occasionally catching some small motion and facing it, but in the end, not a lot really happened.

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#botswana #machaba #leopard

I don’t normally post pics of the backs of animals; it seems like you’re posting an animal walking away from you, which isn’t interesting. There was something about this leopard, though, which really struck me. In some of the pictures of him looking away, you could really see the focus in his posture. Something clearly had caught his eyes, and he wanted to know what it was.

I was never really able to get a good shot of both him and whatever it was that he was watching. In fact, most of the time, I didn’t actually pick up whatever had his focus.

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#botswana #machaba #leopard

We’re about to wrap up the time in Machaba Camp, and it was a strong finish. The morning before I boarded the plane to head over to Duba Camp we saw a small cluster of trees where the birds were in constant threat calls. Us and another truck from the same camp descended upon the trees to see what was going on.

It took a while to spot this fellow, but soon enough, he came out into the open for us to get a good view of. This isn’t the same leopard we saw before, for one most obvious reason: this one is male, the one before was female. He also seemed a bit more comfortable around the trucks than she did, not really avoiding us at all.

There are a lot of pictures of him coming, so this is just the initial sampler. He was among the most photogenic animals I saw during the entire trip.

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#botswana #machaba #leopard

The baboons, like many of the animals, had given birth not long before I was there. As we watched them up in the trees, there were quite a few places where mothers were tending to their young. This particular pair I got a fair number of pictures of, mainly because of their location and visibility, but there were many, many more, mostly hidden in the branches.

More than just about any of the other animals, the baboons kept a really close watch on us as we parked near their tree. They seemed to be among the most suspicious, cautious animals we encountered.

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#machaba #botswana #baboon

The day when we were following the Wild Dog tracks, we never found Wild Dogs. We did, however, find something else: a large tree full of baboons. These were some of the most challenging photos to take of the entire trip, for a couple of reasons

First was the height and distance. This was one case where the very long lens really came in helpful, as most of these were taken with the animals quite a distance away, both in terms of how close we could get to the base of the tree and how high up in the tree they were.

Second was the light. As we arrived, the sun was already dropping low on the horizon. This, combined with the distance, made it really hard to get images both exposed correctly and held still enough at this focal length to remain a sharp image.

Overall, happy with these images, and the next set will be more of the baboons.

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#botswana #machaba #baboons

Too long of a hiatus

It’s been WAY too long since I’ve posted any more Botswana pictures, and I intend to fix that over the next few weeks. I’ve got a few more sets from Machaba Camp left to post and, once I’ve wrapped that up, I’ll move on to Duba Camp, which is lion central. Lots to see from there, and I really want to get them posted.

I think I know why I’ve been so slow posting: It feels like reliving the trip to go through the pictures, and I think when I’m done, it’s going to feel like the trip is over... again. It’s still both amazing to think that I managed to make this trip, and amazingly sad that it’s over, even months later.

Honestly, the final Machaba sets I think are some if the best pictures I’ve ever taken, so really look forward to posting those.

So, more posts soon!

Pumbaa!

It was a while at Machaba before we saw any warthogs, other than at a distance. We stumbled upon this small family one afternoon toward the end of my stay at that camp. I think this was about the only time at Machaba we got a decent look at these animals.

Of course, once I got to Duba (which is coming up soon, just a few more sets from Machaba), they were everywhere; you almost couldn’t go out onto the field without running into them. That actually surprised me; as you’ll eventually see, Duba is all about the lions, and these seem like easy prey for the big cats.

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#botswana #machaba #warthog #pumbaa #wherestimon #givenallthelionsaroundprobablynotagoodquestiontoask

Happy April Fools Day!

Part 2, in which not everything goes quite as planned.

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Happy April Fools Day!

Part 1, in which we learn, beyond any doubt, I was in a vehicle.

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This is a Waterbok, one of the more common prey species in Botswana. Back when we were looking at the two lions and their cub, the animal they killed was one of these. They are reasonably large animals and not quite as common as some (like the Red Lychee are, especially when we get to Duba), but also not hard to find at all.

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We never did run into either the pack of Wild Dogs or the pack of Hyena which are known to frequent the area around Machaba, but we did run into straggler hyenas now and then. This was actually close to the Hyena’s known nesting ground where we found one individual checking it out.

With all the rain they’d gotten while and before I was there, the den was flooded out, so the animals had to move on elsewhere to find somewhere to stay. Every now and then, one of the pack would make a trek to the den to see if it had dried out, but during my stay, it remained very muddy and marsh-like in that area.

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We spent an entire drive basically following paw-prints of African Wild Dogs, trying to find the pack. We never did. It was an amazing experience, though, tracking the animals, with a similar feel to when people were out hunting the animals.

I suppose, in a way, that’s exactly what we were doing, but I was shooting them with a very different tool than a gun. The fact that we had to do this, that we had to go search for the animals, to work to find them, made it all the more special when we did. All in all, it was amazing to just go through that search.

Now, I’m no master tracker, but from my memory of what the guide said, only one of the tracks above is from a wild dog. The other two would be from lions, more than likely.

Which one is from the canine? The one where you can see the claws, up at the top. Cats can retract their claws but dogs can’t, so if the track has claws, it’s from one of the canines, not felines.

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#botswana #machaba #pawprints

For the most part, I didn’t get a lot out of the 150-600mm lens; most things were actually close enough the 55-300 was long enough. This is a case where the 600mm was really necessary to get the shot.

We were stopped one evening for tea, having some snacks out on the field. All the way across the lake, the guide spotted a sleeping crocodile. These two images were taken of him from that distance, with the 600mm lens all the way zoomed in. The camera uses an ACS sensor, which is smaller than 35mm, so from the days of 35mm cameras, that 600mm lens would be the same as a 900mm then.

Even with that, I was only able to get this close in the images; he was a long way away.

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#botswana #machaba #crocodile

Hello, little DangerNoodle.

One of the key things I found down in Botswana when taking pictures was to always keep your eyes open. One morning as we finished the morning drive, I was heading back to my tent to drop off the camera gear before lunch was served. A slight motion caught my eye ahead on the path, and when I stopped to look, this fellow was keeping his eyes on me.

This is a hatchling African Spitting Cobra. It is NOT an animal you want to get bitten by; I’d probably have a better chance of surviving a bite from one of the lions than this snake, all in all. I put on the 300mm lens and knelt down around 2 to 2.5 meters away from him and took this series of shots.

For some reason, I had the camera’s ISO set a bit high, so they came out a bit grainy. In order to make these a bit more presentable, I applied a noise reduction filter in Lightroom for this particular set. (The rest, with the exception of some exposure and white balance correction as well as occasional slight rotation to make the horizon horizontal are generally untouched.)

And before anyone asks, yes, I kept a safe distance. I was watching constantly for any s-curve in the body suggesting he was making ready to strike, and you can see that you don’t see that at all in these images. I was both wearing sunglasses and had the camera between myself and him should he try to spit, and was always at least 2m away, so never closed in enough to really have him go into full defensive mode.

That being said, this was, all in all, probably the single most dangerous encounter I had during the entire trip, and I was very aware of that at the time, so worked to minimize that danger in terms of my positioning and actions.

This is more or less what he’ll look like as an adult.

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#machaba #botswana #cobra #snake #DANGERnoodle!

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