Dulini – Day 20 continued
Day 20 Continued: Afternoon/Evening
(see pics here)
Another sunny, beautiful day of lounging between safari drives. Per, Dylan and Kyle came over to ‘our place’ and Jim and Kyle amused themselves (and us) by doing cannonballs into our plunge pool. I’m sure the pool was not built for this purpose, but they had fun making waves and displacing all the water everywhere other than the pool.
While Kristin watched the boys being silly, she felt an irritation on her toe. Thinking it was a fly or something that had flown on her, she instinctively brushed at it. However, it did not brush off, and upon further inspection, she realized that had a TICK attached to her big toe! Dumbfounded at first that it was her that got a tick and not Jim (if you recall from previous trips, it is usually Jim who attracts ticks) she took a picture (it is actually a very pretty tick), then retrieved the tweezers. Jim did the ‘surgery’, and the head and mouth parts appeared to come out together. It likely had not been attached long and there will probably be no effects from it. Here’s hoping.
4:30pm – safari drive! First off, we heard about a male lion in the area. We found him lying down in a dense thicket, with no desire to get up. We stayed for a while, watching his chest raise and fall with breath and every once in a while open his eyes for a peek at his surroundings. We let him be, thinking we may see him again later.
Patrick and Tyrone planned to take us to a section of the land where we had not been before on a search for Zebra (that is ZEBra, not ZEEbra). Although we had seen some wild Zebra while in part of Table Mountain National Park near the Cape of Good Hope, they are a different species (Mountain Zebra) than what is found here (Plains Zebra, aka Burchell’s Zebra). It was during this drive that Patrick and Tyrone taught us the language of how to describe groups of certain animals here. For example, you don’t say a ‘herd’ of zebra. The correct term is a ‘dazzle of zebra’. Similarly, it is a ‘journey of giraffes’, a ‘crush of rhinos’, and a ‘leap of leopards’. How interesting.
Success – we found a dazzle of zebra. Beautiful animals – surreal to watch. This species of zebra is different from the one we saw in the Cape in a few ways: has stripes that continue onto the belly, stripes that are not visible down it’s legs (seem to fade into white ‘socks’) and they have shadow stripes – brown faded stripes that are between the black and white stripes. We lucked out and saw another dazzle a couple of minutes later – Patrick joked that this group was ‘black on white striped’ zebra and the other was ‘white on black striped’ zebra.
Another group we came across: a crash of 3 rhinos. The rhino here are white rhino (instead of the black rhino that live more west), and are huge! A male can weigh up to 2300kg!!!
As the dusk was turning to dark, Jim’s ‘eagle eyes’ spotted a jackal (a black-backed jackal to be exact) lying in the grasses. This spotting by Jim was pretty amazing, as the jackal blended in so well with his surroundings, and all that was really visible was it’s head and ears. They are canids, and somewhat resemble foxes….they are opportunistic feeders and scavengers.
The night was not over yet though….we came upon a spotted eagle-owl perched in a tree. They somewhat resemble our horned owl, but are smaller.
Wow, another very successful evening!
Kristin
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