Seen them all

This morning we saw 2 more of the animals on my list: the wildebeest and the rhino.  Neither one of my pictures is very good.  In order to protect the land, the rangers cannot drive off road unless it is an exceptionally rare animal.  

Wildebeest

White Rhino. It's hard to see but this is a group of 5 female white rhinos.

The white rhino is the more common but still endangered rhino.  The black rhino is very rare.  Some of the game preserves have started to cut the horns off the rhinos in an attempt to protect them from poachers.  It is a difficult problem because Kruger National Park is over 6 million acres (bigger than Connecticut) and shares a border with Mozambique.  Botswana has done a much better job of fighting poachers since they have a much smaller human population and have a shoot to kill policy against poachers.

The only remaining animal on my list is a hyena.

The guides are really great about asking which animals you'd like to see and then going out to find those animals. Our group includes 2 very pleasant couples from the north east of the US.  They are much better than Know-It-All Claude and his wife Smug Christine from the Botswana trip.

I also forgot to mention that we saw the other male leopard in the area at the end of last night's game drive.  Another interesting fact: a leopard carries its kill up into a tree for eating in order to protect it from the other animals. 

At the end of this morning's game drive, we had breakfast out in the bush 

Last night, we had dinner outside in a large area enclosed by a high metal fence. You need the fence to protect you from the animals.  No fence offers any protection from the monkeys.  A monkey stole Angela's loaf of bread at lunch.  I had impala for dinner last night. 

The lodge includes a score board where you get points for the animals that you see.  Rare animals = more points.

They don't even have Honey Badger on the board and everyone was very impressed to hear that we saw one in Botswana.  

We have 2 more game drives and then we start the long trip home.  The length of this trip has been perfect.  We've seen lots of things and are ready to go home.  My only complaint about this trip is that it is not very active.  We did a lot of flying and sitting in the trucks during the game drives.  It was nice to have that half day of walking at Victoria Falls.  You can't really walk around much at the game lodges because of the dangerous animals in the area.  

More videos

Wild Dogs

Leopard Walking