Kabecoo Botswana

Kabecoo

This post concludes this series on the animals of Botswana. It has been quite fun searching the photos and putting these together, and I’m glad folks have enjoyed them.

About half way through our trip, we camped one night in an area with wifi. Also, I took a painkiller that night, forgetting that it would keep me awake.

I still hike and backpack as much as I can, so I read a few posts on a backpacking bulletin board. One post included photos of a pack of wolves hunting a deer, and there was some negative reaction. (I was also listening to the footsteps of something wandering through our campsite, hoping that it wasn’t a carnivore. The sound of grass tearing told me that it was an elephant.)

But the food chain was obvious every day in Botswana. Seemed that every animal except the pure herbivores were hunting something, and some of those herbivores were still quite dangerous.

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Kabecoo

With the possible exception of the crocodile, it seemed that every animal showed us some form of family or group structure.

We were five tourists thrown together for 17 days. Two members of the group were a delightful Dutch couple with whom we are still in touch. The value of having young, sharp eyes became evident on Day 2, when one of them spied a set of “Mickey Mouse” ears in the distance.

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Kabecoo

This is the seventh post of Botswana’s animals. Today it’s elephants.

My first question to our guide was breathtakingly foolish: “Will we see any elephants up close?” His response was a silent smile. He well knew that by the end of the trip we would have seen hundreds, many within spitting distance. For the most part, they tended to ignore us entirely, focusing on the task at hand: eating.

Elephants only sleep a few hours per day. The rest of the time is spent in search of food and water. They stay cool by getting wet in Botswana’s many rivers and pools, including a few that are maintained by pumps. When sleeping, younger elephants will lie down. Older ones often lean against something to partially support themselves, such as a tree.

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It’s Baby Bird Monday!  Then we have the last 3 installments in Botswana from Kabecoo before Benw finishes out the week by taking us somewhere I have never heard of!  (In case you want to refresh your memory of the rest of the trip, just click on Kabecoo to see all of the Botswana installments.)  I am sad that this Botswana set is ending!

The second week of baby birds is here! And, if you want to see the images at their original size so that some of these subtle plumage details are visible, there is a link for that in every caption. As before, young birds are at left and adult birds at right in the images below.

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Kabecoo

Our Botswana travels began in the Central Kalahari, a “semi-arid desert” according to our guide. We saw almost no surface water there; as a result, we saw no large animals that depended heavily on daily water, such as elephants, hippos and buffalo. But as soon as we entered the Okavango Delta, streams and water holes were stunningly popular places to witness the routines of these wonderful creatures. We continued north through the Moremi reserve and Chobe National Park. Water was available everywhere.

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