Urikaruus, the final episode! (almost!)

As the morning dawned on our final day in this lovely little bush camp, we awoke to find a number of eagles visiting our small haven as they had at various times over the last few days. There was a tawny eagle far away on the other side of the watering hole, just too far for me to get a useful photo. We decided to go out on an early morning drive this morning, and not long after we left camp we saw this eagle with two fork-tailed drongos in attendance.

We had decided to head off in the direction of the lion kill we had seen the day before to see if perhaps there were now other predators or scavengers nosing around what the lions had left behind. Well we were in for a surprise, the lions were still there! This must have been close on 24 hours after they had originally made the kill. There were a number of jackals nosing around in the area, but they were giving the lions a very respectful wide berth. The wildebeest carcass had ben reduced now down to the head and some bones!

This was one of the every hopeful jackals that were patrolling the area.

As we had spent quite a bit of time with these lions the day before we decided to move on, and were rewarded only a few minutes later with the sighting of 3 secretary birds. Two of them were moving in an area quite close to each other and the third was 20 or 30 metres away from them.

As we were watching them one of the birds found something interesting in the grass.

Immediately the other bird rushed over and tried to claim the prize for itself. This started an amazing dance duel!

And just as it started it was over! In fact the time stamps on the three photos above show that each shot was taken one (1) second after the other! So three grand seconds of display and it was all done. Life returned to normal and they continued to forage as they had before.

A little further on we spotted a Namaqua Dove sitting in a tree quite close to the road. These a very pretty little doves (at least in my opinion!) and I had been wanting a decent shot of them for sometime. This was not too bad, but still I'd like to get a better one.

Later on we spotted another secretary bird, some large herds of springbok, one almost get bored with the springbok becuase you see so many. Then a juvenile martial eagle sitting in a tree.

After that we decided to head back to camp and make brunch, we had been out for about two hours and had some nice sightings. I'll leave this post here and wind up our Urikaruus stay in my next post, then we moved on to Nossob .... but that's another days post :-)

all the best

Ivan

http://www.andersen.co.za/

In and around Urikaruus

Whew, its been a mission getting back on-line after all the disruptions to our local internet services. Hopefully that's behind us now.

Urikaruus, a cute little camp as I said previously. We were treated to some very warm (not surprisingly) weather during our stay here. This was the first camp that we were to spend more than a single night at. It was great to settle in and feel that there was no pressure to move on again.

As I described in my previous post, the units faced out into what I suppose may have been an old river bed, long since dried-up, now with a man made watering hole put in place to provide the resident animals with some place to get a drink! And come and drink they did!

The main visitors were the blue wildebeest (Connochaetes taurinus) and springbok (Antidorcas marsupialis), and they came in numbers! Some of the herds were well over 100 animals strong. We also had giraffe (Giraffa camelopardalis), a number of different bird species, the Lanner Falcons (Falco biarmicus) were there daily catching either Namaqua doves (Oena capensis), Cape turtle doves (Streptopelia capicola) or Sandgrouse (Pterocles namaqua). Here are two lanner falcons that had just caught another bird and were eating it on a dead tree just to the right of our chalet.

The White-browed sparrow-weaver (Plocepasser mahali) and Cape Glossy starling (Lamprotornis nitens) were regular visitors on our veranda.

The sparrow-weaver and his wife and child and obviously become VERY habituated to the humans residing here, and vocally demanded to be fed on a regualr basis. They were so tame that I could touch them from time to time. We are strong believers in the fact that you MUST not feed the animals in the National Parks, so we would try to discourage these persistent little birds, but clearly others had been feeding them. Sad!

This little juvenile Laughing Dove Stigmatopelia senegalensis) had my daughters very concerned that it was too young to look after itself, but it seemed to be quite capable, and also very un-afraid of the human poking camera lenses in its face!

all the best
Ivan
http://www.andersen.co.za/