Our journey to Maasailand
I hoped that my safari guests would appreciate what was to come - staying in a mobile camp in Maasailand.
The Rains Arrive in Northern Tanzania.
The short rains, which normally fall in Northern Tanzania in November, completely failed this year, leaving the mega-herd in a real dilemma. Short of grazing and surface water to drink, the herds split up and wandered to and fro moving between grazing and water. This commute often took two days ...
The crossing
Then another huge column of wildebeest appeared over the horizon and advanced towards the river, and once again they began to mass at the river's edge.
Toast the Blue Moon on New Years Eve 2009
Peter and Alice Redfield’s return to Tanzania after more than twenty years away, with their children, and their grand children, was quite a safari. Apart from the optical delights of lions, cheetahs and elephants, News Years Eve yielded a Blue Moon with a partial lunar eclipse. The Safari ...
Can we have some rain?
Tanzania was a dust bowl just before our safari started ...
A Lighter Shade of Pale.
Zebra are well known and very distinctive because of their bold black and white striped markings. Every individual has a unique stripe pattern, like a set of fingerprints in humans. Zebra are one of the most photogenic animals and are a must see on any savannah safari. While on safari ...
The Miracle of Birth
Many guests on safari have had their expectations of what they want to see on safari influenced by what they see on TV’s National Geographic and other wildlife channels. Because of these amazing wildlife documentaries, many people want to see large predators hunting and killing prey animals, but to see ...
Super Predator Interactions
In February while on safari with Bill Perkins and Evelyn Sandground, we had exceptional predator sightings... On our descent into Ngorongoro Crater, I decided to drive through Lerai forest to look for some of the Crater’s big tuskers. Instead the sight of three young lions trying to kill a big ...
Cheetahs in the Serengeti
Regular readers of our blog might find that the sightings mentioned in my article "Slim, Sleek, Slender and Spotted Sprinter" of March 2008 are either very rare or exaggerated. Well the cheetah sightings with Mathieson family that we enjoyed in December 2008 / January 2009 amounted to over 19 different ...
Mara River Crossing
We departed camp early and were almost immediately greeted by a herd of more than a thousand wildebeest. Lines of more wildebeest rolled in, and the restless herd moved up and down the northern bank of the Mara River, stopping at strategic places to assess whether it was safe or ...
Slim, Sleek, Slender and Spotted Sprinter
Safari guides Dave, Ole Kirimbai and I have just come back from another wonderful safari in the Serengeti with some great folks from western Canada. Although it was the "green season" it hadn't rained for a while so, while a lot of the game was out on the Plains or ...
An unusual hyaenid
While driving in the late afternoon from a camp just inside the woodland on the edge of the Serengeti Plains to a fly camp we had set up farther east, we spotted an unusual hyaenid feeding in the grassland. It was an aardwolf (Proteles cristatus), one of the most exciting ...
