Maasai Mara Safari 2011 Day Two

If you haven't read about them already, you might want to start with Day Zero or Day One.

Sunday, 25 September 2011
Sunday provided a beautiful dawn and we stopped for sunrise shots at around 6:30am having left camp at about 6:15.  It's possibly a bit cliched, but no one's visit to the Mara is complete without a shot of a Balanites aegyptica against the sunrise, in this case with the addition of a Lappet-faced Vulture

 who subsequently obliged with a lazy fly-by:

Sunrise is also the cue for the Mara's many hot air balloon operators to take to the skies, and they appeared on the eastern horizon as the sun's first direct rays flooded the sea of grass and zebras:

While the light was still golden we spent a few minutes with a very lethargic lioness and a somewhat more purposeful Black-bellied Bustard before we were overflown by the morning's flight of 8 balloons.

The morning's next exposure challenge was a male Ostrich in breeding plumage - hence the bright pink blush.  Next to Kenyan ostriches, South African Ostriches are seriously puny - the East African ones are more muscular, much taller and look a whole bunch meaner.

The local waterbuck are different from ours too.  When I was a kid my grandparents used to delight in telling me how our waterbuck in Kruger had acquired the white rings around their bottoms by sitting on a freshly painted toilet seat.  Clearly the Kenyan waterbuck must have sat on something more solid than a toilet seat, or dipped their entire posteriors in the paint tin because their white area is more than just a ring.

Our next sighting was the famous triumvirate of three cheetah brothers who've dominated the Mara for the past 8 or 9 years.

Soon after we arrived they got up and started walking.  They were on the move constantly, pausing only to spray-mark the occasional tree.

After climbing up onto a dead tree to scan the surrounding area they then decided to give us the slip by crossing the Talek River.  Sadly, one of these three brothers was killed by a snake two weeks after we saw them.

Soon after the cheetahs we found a Steppe Eagle atop a tree...

Annoyingly, I anticipated the take-off but still managed not to zoom out in time and so ended up with yet another shot of a raptor with a slightly truncated wing.

And, just since no one can resist a Lilac-breasted Roller, I had to include this guy:

With the time heading for 9am it was time to find a shady tree to breakfast under, but en route there we encountered a small family of elephants...

...one of whom has clearly developed a taste for human fashions. Here she's sporting a little black number from the house of cable ties:
Moving on from the ellies we found a suitable tree and all our vehicles rendezvoused for our first picnic breakfast in the Mara.

After breakfast the sun was already pretty high in a cloudless sky and with less activity on the plains I didn't get many shots of note on the way back to camp. Practising pole-camming on the move.

Black-headed Heron, caught with its tongue out.

Yellow-throated Longclaw

After lunch we took a stroll, accompanied by a pair of Maasai Askaris, down to a gnu crossing point on the Mara River between Entim main camp and our smaller private camp.  The rocks here along the river have a very high Mica content which makes them very shiny, and they're quite soft so they tend to powder down to little bits of glitter.
After lunch we had a slow start to the afternoon drive, starting with a bit of landscape photography and fairly close sightings of a Green Sandpiper and a Superb Starling.

Green Sandpiper. 

The superbly named Superb Starling.

The first highlight of the afternoon was a cheetah with her Thomson's Gazelle kill.  When we arrived she had just finished off one side of the gazelle and was already beginning to look full but cheetahs are often chased off their kills by bigger cats or hyenas so they tend to gorge themselves, eating as much as they can of a kill in a short space of time.  Fortunately for this cheetah, she didn't have to share her kill, and she had time to carefully turn it over...

... and began to eat her fill from the other side of the carcass...

All the while the vultures and Marabous were arriving.  With the wind towards us they generally had their backs to us on landing, like this one showing off its eponymous white back.

The differing attitudes of the various scavenger species was quite fun to observe. The vultures and Marabous all kept their distance at first, but crept closer and closer to the cheetah whenever her back was turned. The advance was led by the White-backed vultures, with the Marabous mostly standing about like respectful undertakers feigning disinterest in between occasional surreptitious steps towards the carcass.  The most genuinely relaxed and patient of the vultures were the Lappet-faced crowd who sat down well away from their cousins to settle in for the yawn-inducing wait...

The grisly undertaker of the Mara

By 5:20pm, about 40 minutes after we'd arrived, the cheetah had just about finished off the second side of the gazelle...

... and she was looking far from a lean mean sprinting machine ...

A few minutes later, between the combined pressures of a full stomach and the continually encroaching vultures who were now just a few metres away, she'd had enough...

and she abandoned the carcass to the scavengers...

In the course of the eight minutes of this video they reduced the carcass to scraps.  Amongst the vultures, the Lappet-faces ruled supreme.  Usually puffing up the breast feathers and a half-hearted wing spread was enough to keep competitors away...

... but every now and then a cheeky White-backed Vulture would forget its place and need to be reminded who was boss:

The Lappet-faced Vultures may be kings of vulture hierarchy, but they don't always have everything their own way.  This one lost the tug of war over the bulk of the gazelle's skin with a Marabou Stork, who looked a bit surprised to come away with the prize:
For a sensible Marabou the most effective way to ensure you get your meal is try and sneak off with it before your competitors can get their bills on it (or on you). Even when you think you've found yourself a nice safe bush to hide behind while you attempt to swallow your bounty...
... you're still subject to surprise attacks, so it's best to practice swallowing on the run:

Of course, the Marabous' size isn't always enough to secure them their meals.  The final episode of our Marabou soap opera begins with Marabou A trying to get away with a whole leg of the gazelle - femur, tibia and fibula.   Under pressure from Marabou B, Marabou A drops the bone...
and Marabou B picks it up, only to be pursued by a Lappet-faced Vulture:
Rather than take on the vulture in the air, Marabou B lands, only to be attacked by Marabou A, who's come back to fight for what was his just a minute ago:
Marabou A succeeds in getting B to drop the leg, but in the ensuing melee, who should come away with the prize?  Why, it's the Vulture of course.  (Tune in next week for the next dramatic episode of The Maras of Our Lives).

With the last of the scraps of gazelle now dispersed and in the crops, stomaches or at least possession of new owners, the vultures began to settle down a bit.  Here are just a couple more vulture pics before we leave them.  First, a portrait of a handsome Rüppel's Vulture:

And here's a juvenile White-backed Vulture, striding along in his natty pin-striped suit:

And, finally, another Rüppel's with all that remained of the gazelle eighteen minutes after the cheetah left it:

Spending 45 minutes with the cheetah while she finished her meal, and another 20 watching the frenzy of the vultures' clean-up operation was quite intense and I felt we'd already had a great afternoon, so I wasn't too disappointed when we started heading slowly back in the direction of camp.  Our first encounter on the way back was a clan of hyaena, whose matriach was wearing a radio collar:

It looked like the best photo op was going to be to catch the hyaenas back-lit, but as it happened we turned around and headed off away from camp again before we had a chance to reposition, so the back-lighting was reserved for C4's organisational maven, Minette van ben Berg, who was in our vehicle for the day.  I hadn't heard the radio exchange that led to us leaving the hyaenas, so when we passed a family of Southern Ground Hornbills I asked Julius, our driver, to stop for them.  

Julius indulged me for a few minutes before asking if I didn't want to see mating leopards!  Once we knew where we were heading, there was no holding back.  Julius put the pedal to the metal and we were off on a Ferrari safari to the site of the leopard sighting.  When we arrived it was clear that the female leopard really wanted to mate.  She was continually rubbing up against him and trying to coax him into action.  He, on the other hand, was having none of it!  His reluctance wasn't caused by safari vehicles now encircling them - as always the Maasai drivers had shown great understanding of, and respect for their local wildlife, so they'd kept a generous distance between us and the leopards.  What was troubling him was a jackal, standing about 50 metres behind us and barking brazenly at them.  I've seen jackals heckling larger predators before, and it's generally been clear to everyone that it's just part of the instinctive dog vs cat ritual.  The cats know the jackal is harmless, though somewhat annoying, and he's far enough away that it's not worth expending energy on showing him who's boss.  The jackal in turn knows that the cats aren't threatened, but feels compelled to bark at them anyway, from a safe distance of course, just in case he needs to make a swift exit.  I'm not sure if a male leopard would normally develop stage fright and ignore the advances of a super-amorous female when faced with a heckling jackal, but in this case the jackal had backup.  Another 100 metres back was a young male lion.  For the moment, the lion was content to let the jackal do the talking, but it was clear that the leopard, or the male at least, had his eyes on the real threat.  The female leopard may have been aware of the threat too, but it seemed she was only dimly aware of it in her hormone-fueled daze.  The following sequence probably speaks for itself, but I couldn't help but indulge in a little anthropomorphic commentary:

She: "Miaaaow, Big Boy, I dig your spots."
He: "Seriously!? How am I supposed to keep that jackal at bay with your tail wrapped around my face?"

She: "Argh, men! Why do I have to work so hard for his attention?"
He: "Bugger off, Jackal. My teeth are bigger than yours."

She: "Purrr... Hey, Big Boy, feel that?  That's my tail. Focus on my tail."
He: "Must. Focus. On. Insolent. Jackal!. Must. Ignore. Tail."

She: "Look, it's just a pesky jackal"
He: "No, look beyond him, there's a lion there too!"

She: "May I remind that I'm ready to make beautiful blue-eyed spotted cubs with you?"
He: "Mmmm...  tail.  Must. Focus. On. Lion."

She: "Wanna get yourself some of this, Big Boy?"
He: "Huh? What? Not now! They're coming closer"

He: "Now you're making me really angry!"

He: "Oh, crap. The lion's running this way. It's time to leave"

She: "Hey, wait for me, Big Boy."

At that point, both leopards made a dash for the nearest patch of dense bush, followed by the jackal and, at a more leisurely pace, the lion:

The female leopard didn't run far and, as the sun's last rays dipped below the horizon, we located her safely ensconced in a tree.

By now it was 6:30pm and we were far from camp, so there followed another mad dash to get back before the curfew of nightfall.  We made it back safely, though it might have been a stretch to say we didn't need the headlights we had switch on for the last few kilometres! And, just to put a cherry on top of an already awesome day of predator sightings, we spotted another leopard close to camp.  It was fairly fleeting,  but it was enough to bring our count up to 5 leopards in 4 sightings in 2 days.  Another great day in the Mara was over.


Have you read about the earlier days of the trip yet?  If not, you might want to go back to Day One.  But first, don't forget to leave feedback using the form below: