The Follies of Big Birds

I was looking through my pictures and I realized there was a few more things from the Masi Mara that I wanted to share.

First of all, Ostriches make bad parents. This is a group of young ostrich siblings. (One hen can lay over 4 dozen eggs at a time). Our driver informed us that normally the parents are with the young ostriches, but if they sense danger, they'll just run off leaving their kids to fend for themselves. Fortunately we didn't see any predator attacking them, but I felt bad for them anyway.
Here are the irresponsible, cold hearted parents.
And we got pretty close to some vultures...nasty.

More Serengeti Pics

Isn't this a cool looking bird?
This lioness is pregnant. She's posing for a belly picture.

Aren't Warthogs Ugly?

I LOVE this giraffe picture.
This was the smallest elephant we saw.
As we were watching the baby elephant, Bart was looking at something in a bush by the car...I wrote it off as him taking another scenery picture. Nope, he was looking at a bat.

The Serengeti

Okay, now we're in the Serengeti again. So right after we saw the alleged black mamba, we were driving and the driver saw a snake on the road. It was an Adder! That brought up our poisonous snake count up to three...if you count the black mamba that we actually did see on the way out of the park. And our guide said we wouldn't see any...Silly guide. :o) (That's a tick on it's head...gross huh?)

And now that I think about it, I don't think I told you about the first snake. It was our last day in the Masi Mara. We were driving back to our lodge and the driver slammed on his brakes and yelled, "Cobra!" Sure enough, a HUGE cobra was slithering across the road.
The Serengeti was much flatter than the Masi Mara, but it had these huge rock formations all over. You can totally see where the inspiration for Pride Rock in the Lion King came from.

I can't think of any especially unique stories from the rest of the Serengeti, so I'll just post a bunch of the pictures we got.

Our lodge was basically built into one of those rock formations I was telling you about, and there were tons of Rock Hyraxes all around the Lodge Grounds. And as a side note, the closest living relative to these small, rodent-looking creatures is the elephant. I can see it, can't you?We also had to be careful because there were vervet monkeys everywhere. If you gave them the chance, they'd run right into your room.
I have more pictures, but I haven't uploaded them yet, so you'll have to wait until my next post.

The Olduvai Gorge

Okay, so I realized this too came before we got into the Serengeti. On our way there, we stopped by the Olduvai Gorge, often referred to as the cradle of mankind. It's where they found the first specimens of Homo habilis, dating back to about 2.5 million years ago. I didn't realize we were going there. When I was in elementary school, I LOVED learning about Lucy and all the remains they found of man's early ancestors. It was neat to actually be there.

The Elephant Mud Bath

Our first day in Tanzania we went to Lake Manyara. The coolest thing we saw there was an elephant mud bath. The poor elephant was in so deep we thought he was stuck. He really looked like he was struggling for a while, but then he got up and walked away. It was pretty impressive.This was also the first place we saw the blue monkey.

The Black Mamba

Okay, so this post is a little out of order. I forgot that we went to Lake Manyara before we got to the Serengeti...but I didn't want to have to go get all the pictures again, so you'll have to live with it. :0)
As we were traveling into the Serengeti we stopped at a look out point to eat. We ate at the bottom of a hill, and then hiked up to the top to see a beautiful view of the Serengeti. As we were coming back down Bart noticed a snake trying to get into a hole in the side of the path. I was worried it was a poisonous snake, so I stayed back and encouraged Bart to do the same. Bart said, "I think it's just a garter snake," He thought the snake must be hunting, so he got out his camera to take pictures. But it wasn't a small animal the snake pulled out of the hole, it was another snake! The snakes started wrapping around each other. They were mating! I decided they probably wouldn't strike while they were mating, so I pulled out the video camera and got some video of it too.

Right after I turned off the video camera, there was a loud popping noise and one of the snakes just disappeared! It was so crazy. I blinked and he was gone! I finally persuaded Bart to come down the mountain with me (I didn't want to risk finding out unwittingly where the other snake was).

When we got down, and showed the pictures to our guide and asked him what kind of snake it was. He said, "WHERE DID YOU SEE THAT?!?! IT'S A BLACK MAMBA!" Garter snake my foot!!! I was so mad at Bart. We both felt very unnerved at our close brush with such a poisonous snake.

Later we asked our guide if we could see one of his books that had some snakes in it. We looked up the picture of the black mamba...yeah, we're pretty sure the snake we saw wasn't the black mamba. We think it was an African Sand Snake. I wish I could have found a picture on the Internet, but it looks exactly like the picture in the book.

On our way out of the park we had lunch at the same look out point again. One of the girls on our trip wanted to see where we had seen the snake. We went up to the top to show her. On our way down we saw another snake...fortunately much further away this time. That snake, however, looked exactly like the picture of the black mamba in the book. Bart's camera was in it's case, so he wasn't able to get it out quick enough for a picture. Oh well.

Zebras in the River

We went to this area by the river where a bunch of Zebras were crossing. They were very jumpy because I guess lions will sit in the grass by the river and attack the zebras. So whenever they heard the grass moving they would book it out of the water. Then when they realized it was a false alarm, they would go back to the water. Bart didn't really get any pictures, so I decided to just post some of the video I took, so here you go.

A Close Encounter

We had a close encounter of the elephant kind with this big guy. We came around a corner and this huge elephant was standing right on the side of the road. You would think that since elephants are so big it would be hard to miss one before you are right next to it, but believe it or not, such is not the case.
We stopped the car and watched him, amazed at how close he was. Our driver informed us that he was not very happy. I guess that elephants will continue eating and doing whatever it is that they are doing when they are happy, but if they're not happy, they'll stop and wait to see what you will do. This guy was just sitting there. He would take a few steps in our general direction, but not directly at the car, then stop and wait again. He started getting so close that we were all a little nervous. All of the sudden, in what seemed like slow motion, he turned his huge head and looked directly at us, and slowly took a step directly in our direction. Our driver immediately started the car and took off. Our hearts were pounding so hard! It was pretty exciting. Bart snapped this picture as he walked away.
And here are some more random animals we saw.

Masi Mara

We spent the next three days in the Masi Mara. The sunsets in the Masi Mara were beautiful. The sky was huge. I'm so used to having Mountains cutting off the sky on at least one side. It was amazing how open it was when there were only rolling hills to cut off the sky.

The Migration of the animals to the Masi Mara was in progress when we got there. There were thousands of Zebra and Wildebeest everywhere. The zebra have really good eyesight, but a poor sense of smell. The Wildebeest have a very good sense of smell, but poor eyesight, so they migrate together. We saw Zebras fighting several times. We saw a ton of animals here, so I'm just going to post a bunch of pictures.

There are more, I just haven't had a chance to get them onto flickr yet, so you will have to wait for another day.

Lake Naivasha

Our second night we stayed at the Elsamere Conservation Centre on Lake Naivasha. This sign greeted us as we walked into our room:

Apparently Hippos kill more people in Africa every year than any other animal. Who would have thought? They look so docile. But if you get between them and the water, you're in trouble! At night we had dinner in the main building. We stayed and talked with the other guests until after dark. When we finally went back to our rooms (after dark) they had men with flashlights and big sticks escort us.


We got to go on a boat ride to see all the hippos on the lake (they don't feel threatened in the water, so they're not dangerous...or so they told us).
Our boat driver brought a few fish with him. As we were riding, we saw an African Fish Eagle on top of a tree. He put the fish on a stick, held it high in the air, and whistled at the bird. When the bird saw the fish, he took it off the stick and threw it into the lake. The bird flew down and grabbed it. It was pretty cool.
After our boat ride we went on a nature walk and got to see tons of beautiful plants and birds.
At the end of the nature walk, we got to see some tortoises they were taking care of. Our favorite was the tiny baby tortoise.