Sunday bird blogging

As one gray day follows another in the waning of the year, here's a flashback to brighter, more tropical days -- a pied kingfisher by the Chobe River in Botswana.

Sunday bird blogging

Here is the Don King of the African aviary, the go-away bird.

They're named after their cry, kind of a kway! kway! that does sound like they're telling you to go away. This one was telling me to get lost in Botswana, and in my haste to comply, I didn't get a great picture.

Still, I can't resist that face, or that crazy gray tuft on top of its head.

Sunday bird blogging

A wire-tailed swallow hitching a ride on a riverboat in Botswana. There were huge flocks of swallows swooping over the Chobe and the Zambezi in dizzying wave formations, but this is the only one that paused for a closeup.

Sunday bird blogging

Instead of a closeup of a single bird, for a change here's a flock, white-faced ducks flying low over the grassy islands in the Chobe River in Botswana.

Sunday bird blogging

This pretty creature is a yellow-bellied greenbul, taken near the Chobe River by our lodge in Botswana. No long tail, no insect in his mouth, but at least he sat on an open branch where he could actually be seen, and admired.

Sunday bird blogging

Helmeted guineafowl in Chobe National Park. 

They looked so odd sitting up in a tree that I had to take a picture; usually you see them in big flocks on the ground, running in panicky unison then whipping around and running in the opposite direction. They're beautiful in their ungainly, silly, wobbly way, but not creatures you expect to make it off the ground for very far or very long. 

But I imagine that in Africa every creature that can learn how to climb a tree does, no matter how foolish they might look in the process. 

Sunday bird blogging

A sacred ibis, on the banks of the Chobe River in Botswana.

Sunday bird blogging

In which we acknowledge the ones that got away.

This is a paradise flycatcher, in Botswana, a bird with an unbelievably long red tail that stubbornly refused to move into better light so I could get a good clear picture of it. (And the large insect it caught for its lunch.)

The biggest disappointment was that I never got a remotely good picture of a lilac-breasted roller -- the best one is below. This is the national bird of Botswana, a combination of at least five completely unlikely colors in one bird .

Sunday bird blogging

An osprey, a rare visitor to the Chobe River.

Sunday bird blogging

And we now resume our regular blogging schedule, even as I am starting to think that it will be weeks before I have the African story sorted out and that "catching up" is not something I may be able to do.

I can post the pictures, but explaining them, conveying what it was like to be there, is turning out to be extraordinarily difficult.

Anyway, here's a dark-capped bulbul. I saw a lot of them around the hotel in Johannesburg, and at first their behavior puzzled me. Several of them sat in a leafless tree, and periodically one would take off, fly in a small circle, and return to the same branch. My impression was that they were aimless and not very bright; I finally realized that they were catching insects so small I couldn't see them, so smoothly I couldn't even catch them in the act.

This bulbul, behind our lodge in Botswana, has something a little more exciting to show for his efforts.

Safari canopy

Last night in Botswana.

This is turndown service at the safari lodge -- arranging the mosquito nets around the bed.

It can be quite tricky to disentangle yourself for bathroom visits in the middle of the night.

More birds of Chobe

A black heron, striding along the river banks. The combination of the squat body, long legs and big bright yellow feet make it look like a likely winner in the Dorkiest Bird on the Planet competition.

But when it stops and stands up straight to look around, suddenly it's lovely and elegant, if a little overdone -- as if Cher were a bird. And when it's fishing, it makes its wings into a big umbrella to hide itself from the world. Three very different looks, one bird, all in the space of a few minutes.

Birds of Chobe

A blacksmith lapwing on the banks of the river.

I'm realizing that I'm not going to be getting great pictures of most of the birds I'm seeing. The foliage is too thick and the opportunities too fleeting. But by the river everything is open and you can actually see the birds, in all their brightness and surprise, as Robert Hass would say.




























There are great white egrets, herons, white-faced ducks, Egyptian geese, and even a dove that I think is a cape turtledove. The closeup of the white-faced ducks, above, wasn't very clear, but I stylized it a little and I love how it looks now, almost more Japanese than African.

Nursery

I have to be very selective in choosing which of my literally hundreds of elephant shots I'm going to post, but this one is an easy winner: a very young elephant nursing.

Kudu

A young male kudu on the riverbank.

One more animal I would never be able to eat. (Kudu sausage is a staple at the breakfast buffet.)

Fish eagle

An African fish eagle looking out over the river from a treetop, with an intensity that makes you understand why we say "eagle-eyed."

Below,  another bird enjoying his lunch down by the water.

And a closeup of the eagle's formidable claws.

River, Day Two

This afternoon, we're sailing on the river again. Here's a particularly contented looking hippo, maybe one of the sunbathers from this morning.

Hippo Island

On the way back to the lodge we stopped on a road high above the river and spent a few minutes just enjoying the beautiful morning. Someone remarked that that group of rocks over there looked almost like hippos. Someone else said that they were hippos, and we debated for a couple of minutes until it occurred to us that we all had binoculars and could just check.

And that is in fact a couple dozen hippos. (Click on the photo to enlarge and see them for yourself.) Since hippos don't like sunlight and mostly stay under water during the day, it's rare to see so much hippo skin on display, and to actually get a sense of the variations in size.  The two at the top of the picture are just enormous, while some of the others are practically anorexic by comparison. (Or just young.)

And if you encountered them later in the middle of the river, you'd never be able to tell which was which.

Is that an oxpecker on your back or are you just glad to see me?

Oxpeckers are odd-looking birds with very sharp claws that they use to cling to large mammals -- there's a ring of yellow skin around their eyes that make them look like they have huge bulging eyes, and I've seen animals with a dozen birds hanging off them like decorations on a Christmas tree.

Their appearance isn't nearly as startling as their behavior, eating not just insects from the animal's skin, but also any bodily fluids they may happen to find.

Like mother like child

I love the matching expressions on these two, as the calf is obviously learning how to act like a grown-up buffalo.

Well, most of the time.