Back to Kruger

January is mid-summer in South Africa's Kruger National Park — hot, with highs near 100 degrees, and lush, with grass taller than me. This combination made it tricky to find wildlife. But I still managed to have some fun encounters, like watching this baby vervet mimicking her mom by pretending to eat leaves. Vervets eat solid food starting at about 8 months.

This poor hyena I found at first light looked like he wanted to go back to bed. Many predators embrace nocturnal habits to avoid the heat of the day, so last night might have been a long one.

Dung beetles comically roll their dung ball down a dirt road. They collaborate, sort of, to roll the nutrient-rich dung to a hole they have dug where the female deposits her eggs before covering it up.

Zebras in Kruger are especially skittish and often shy away whenever I try to photograph them. But they are a favorite! I was lucky to spend a lot of time with them this trip.

A baby elephant's trunk has a mind of its own at this age. But eventually she will have amazing dexterity. 

A matriarch leads her herd away from a waterhole where they enjoyed an evening soak.

A white-throated monitor lizard finds a cozy nook in a tree to spend the day. I saw three monitor lizards on the trip, including the seven-foot rock monitor and the colorful water monitor.

A pretty waterbuck settles down in the tall grass to chew her cud in the shade of a Mopani tree. 

An older lioness enjoys a long yawn while napping away a hot afternoon in Satara. She had a tracking collar around her neck. I was in the park five whole days before I saw my first lion. Never easy to find, lions were especially hard to find on this trip. The excessive heat drove the lions to deep cover early in the morning where they stayed for most of the day.

Spotted hyenas were far easier to find. They routinely visited my campsite at Satara and Malelane (safely behind a fence). I saw them almost every day.

A painted dog wakes from a morning nap, ready to begin a long hunt.

Not in front of the photographer, mom! A painted dog cleans the face of her growing baby. The pups are nearly full grown, but you can still see a size difference.

The family of dogs hunted both sides of a dirt road. Intermittently, they would jump up on their hind legs to see over the tall grass. Some would dart off into the underbrush to investigate a sound or smell before returning to the road. 

I was able to follow the family for a couple kilometers. At one point, an adult warthog thundered past me with two pups in hot pursuit. But while they are nearly fully grown, they are still too inexperienced to take on an adult warthog and gave up the chase quickly.

I got a quick shot of this pretty dog while they investigated a smell in the road. They were busy hunting. I had to keep up.

One pup started tugging on a branch of this fallen log and soon the other pups wanted a stick, too.

It's easy to see why painted dogs are my favorite animals. This might be my favorite pic from the trip.

A slender mongoose poses for a quick photo while hunting a dirt road. 

I owe a big thanks to one of the caretakers at the Malelane Campground for pointing out the home of this lesser bushbaby high in the trunk of a tree. I had never seen one before. Later that night, this little bushbaby visited my campsite. Its eyes looked like fireworks in the glow of my headlamp as it hopped 15 feet at a leap from the tree above my tent to the fence.

Kruger is home to just five primates, including two species of bushbaby, this lesser and the cat-sized brushtailed bushbaby.

A jackal disappears in the tall grass in Lower Sabie.

A beautiful lion in profile.

A wildebeest rests among the wildflowers. Summer is a time of plenty. 

Young stallions play fight in the tall grass outside Crocodile Bridge.

I went out of my way to avoid confrontations with elephants. On one occasion a bull elephant walking toward me on the road prompted me to back up 100 yards at a time for about 45 minutes. He wasn't aggressive and never charged my car. But every time I would disappear around a corner, he would keep coming as if to see I was still there. This went on for about two miles until he finally got bored or hungry and ventured far enough off the road to let me pass. 

Poaching has decimated the park's rhino population, but I did see these two beautiful white rhinos one night. Rangers sheared off their horns to make them less of a target for poachers, who sell rhino horn to morons who think keratin is curative. Just chew your fingernails and leave the rhinos alone.

I read that Satara is home to a resident African wildcat, an animal I had never seen before. So of course I had to ask everyone I met at Satara where I might find her. The receptionist mentioned that she had just gotten into one of the guest huts that week and that a ranger had to be summoned to evict her. (Naturally, she was sleeping on top of the refrigerator.) After a night game drive, I went back to my tent to grab a couple flashlights to go on a wildcat hunt. But when I turned around, she was sitting right there at my campsite! Wildcats are the wild forebears of domestic cats. And this one is habituated to people. Hey, I was just looking for you!

A waterbuck rests in the tall grass. I love their corrugated horns. 

A hippo opens its maw in a dominance display in nice evening light.

Two sleepy zebras relax on a park road. Beautiful.

A shaggy nyala has vivid white facial markings. Kruger is home to nearly two-dozen species of antelope, including several like roan and sable in the northern reaches that I still have never seen.

Two baby dwarf mongooses wrestle like bear cubs. They are fun to watch.

I recognized this insect as soon as I saw it scurrying down the railing of a bird blind even though I had never before seen one. The velvet ant is not an ant but a wingless wasp. And its sting is considered one of the most painful in nature, four out of four on the Schmidt Pain Index.

Kruger's rest camps have lots of little skinks and geckos running around, including this rainbow-colored one.

Cape buffalo took over a park road and I suddenly found myself surrounded by the herd. They were relaxed, so I tried to enjoy this rare opportunity to get a closer look at one of Kruger's more dangerous animals.

This is what a charging bull elephant looks like from the back of a fleeing safari truck.

This agro bull wouldn't let vehicles pass on the tar road during an evening game drive. We waited patiently for about an hour, but the stubborn bull defended the road.

At one point a hapless tourist coming the other way wandered toward us, oblivious to the danger. The bull charged the tiny vehicle. It could have sent the compact car flying into Mozambique but pulled up just short of the driver's side window.

Our guide decided to put an end to the roadblock for the sake of everyone's safety and revved the diesel engine of our enormous deuce-and-a-half truck. Several delivery trucks behind us were trying to get out of the park before sundown. The bull grudgingly ceded the road and we all inched past. But after traffic cleared, the cheeky guide stopped just beyond the elephant so guests could get photos. I had a hunch the bull would take that as a provocation.

The elephant spun around and shook his massive head. Game on.

"He's coming!" we shouted.

The bull lowered his head and charged and the driver gunned the engine and veered nearly off the road to shake the pursuing bull, who gave up the chase as we pulled away.

Was the guide teasing the elephant? Maybe. But it was mostly in good fun. Anyway, the elephant seemed to be in on the joke. We laughed while we recovered from the surge of adrenaline.

Wildebeest walk single-file across the wooded savanna. 

I spied another antelope that eluded me on my two previous visits: klipspringer! These little goat-like antelope live in the rocky escarpments north of Malelane. They're small and elusive. I had glassed every rocky outcrop with my binoculars for two weeks looking for any without luck so I was stoked to finally see one.

On a night game drive, a guest told me how hyenas in Kruger sometimes bite rubber tires and how one even gave her a flat. So I had that story buzzing in my head the next morning when I stopped to photograph two tiny newborn baby hyenas that were nursing from their mom just off a park road.


But every time I pulled up to photograph them, their older cousin — this little troublemaker — would hop up and make a beeline for my front tire! And I was worried that even a little hyena might have skull-crushing power in their jaws.


I tried clapping, thumping the door and even sternly shouting, "No!" But this little hyena had me figured out. He knew I had nothing.


I had no choice but to drive away. I really did not want to change a tire next to a clan of hyenas. I didn't get any pics of the newborns. But I did photograph this mischievous little farker. And I'm OK with that.