World Cruise--Safari, The Birds And More

Our game drives during our safari time didn’t just include the big animals. There was much more to see than that in the sky as well. Our safari mates in the Landcruiser were from Germany and were ardent birdwatchers so Sheldon our guide, whose knowledge of so many birds was amazing, pointed out many.

It was a tree full of vultures that led us to our lion find. The vultures were huge and a lot different than the turkey vultures we see in Florida. They were interested in meat, not the rubber on the car windshields in the Everglades parking lot.

One of the most amazing finds was on a small part of the river. Two brightly colored storks.

Another bird near the water was a kingfisher.

On the ship we’d had guinea hen for dinner a couple of times. Tasty. And now we saw them running down the road in front of us. Crazy birds, zig zagging in front of the vehicle and not jumping aside or flying up until we were almost upon them. They were quite colorful as well, kind of a bluish gray with a brightly colored eye.

Upon our arrival at the park, just inside the gate, I had seen a spectacular deep blue colored bird that almost sparkled in the sun. He flew out of the tree and was gone in a flash of blue before I could capture a photo. I thought it was a parrot although I didn’t remember parrots from our first visit ten years prior. Eventually during our game drives, I had opportunity to see one again. Sheldon explained that it was a blue starling. After that we saw several more but they were all too quick for the camera. The memory will have to hold it.

Of course there was also the hornbill that we saw several times adding to our list of Lion King characters. The only character we did not see was a baboon but we did have a monkey who loved to wake me up in the morning with his chatter on top of our roof. 

As I sat on our deck the last morning waiting for breakfast (we’d passed on the morning game drive because of our pickup time) I caught him jumping from our roof to the nearby tree. I shook my finger at him as he scrambled across a branch and jumped onto the roof of the bungalow beside us. He was unfazed and just chattered on.

Besides birds, there were also some interesting insects. A bright green grasshopper rode with us for a time but the truly unusual one was the dung beetle. We had seen dung beetles on display at the zoo back home but this encounter was in the middle of the road with fresh elephant dung.

The beetle had rolled some of the dung into the size of a golf ball and was rolling it down the road. Sheldon said that in doing so, the dung would be coated enough that it wouldn’t stick when he took it to his nest. It was fascinating to watch.

The impalas were seen everywhere. They are a little like our white tailed deer but with horns, and boy can they jump! If you’ve ever seen the Chevy Impala emblem, you have seen exactly what they look like. They can jump six feet off the ground and land as far as 30 feet away. In doing so their body stretches out in a straight line. A little hard to photograph but I tried.

It was also mating season and the young males were strutting their stuff and showing off to whatever female would pay attention. We watched them from our deck as we waited for our ride to the airport to fly to Cape Town and meet the ship again. They were growling and grunting at each other and butting heads. I wished them luck. After all, their prodigy would be the food supply for the hungry in the park.

That’s another takeaway I have from our experience. The symbiosis of nature. Elephants ate the grass and bushes, defecated (it always seemed in the roadway), which fed insects like the dung beetle and some birds who pecked the seeds that weren’t digested. Other birds sat on the back of furry animals and picked the tics off of them which gave them some relief and fed the birds. Of course there were the vultures and hyenas who cleaned up the leftovers from lions’ and leopards’ meals.

All of that led me to wonder how much is man helping nature? Where are we fitting in? For that matter how much are we helping each other? Too much to think about at the moment.

Our ride to the airport was much shorter with no traffic hinderance and we had time to eat lunch before taking off for our two hour flight to Cape Town where we arrived and managed to work our way past all the hassle of taxi and “uber” drivers who wanted to give us a ride. If you are arriving in Cape Town beware of those just outside the airport that wear uber tags. One passenger used them and they claimed the uber app wasn’t working and charged them $100 for the ride to the ship. Our uber driver was arranged through the app and we were able to follow a map on the app that led us to the pick area and to our driver who got us safely back to the ship in time for dinner.

I am sure I left out many other things we saw on safari. It was a perfect trip that came at a perfect time for me to be distracted from the pain of grief I was feeling if only temporarily. Peace was found in the most amazing sunsets on the afternoon game drives. The colors in the sky were a 360 degree picture—like being in one of those IMAX theaters. God is good.