Africa Wild

Hey Guys,

It’s time to start our April 2017 TT.

This was the first trip to KNP this year for Bushcraft, The Cow, Hawkeyes, Bushpig and Albert and we decided on April primarily because we couldn’t get in for the July school holidays even though the Cow was on the phone to various Sanparks branches from 7:30am to 9:30am which is when she finally got through and everything was already booked up.

After sulking for a month I looked at the April holidays and was surprised to find plenty accommodation still available, so it’s obviously not as popular and managed to put the trip below together.

6th and 7th Lower Sabie
8th Biyamiti (Was Satara but we changed it while in the park)
9th and 10th Satara
11th Biyamiti
12th, 13th and 14th Skukuza

This is the 5th time we have been to the park in April, but I soon realised why people were ducking this April as we have never seen the park with grass this long. The park was still busy in the south though which was expected in school holidays especially with the suspect day visitor gate quotas, so we ducked a few sightings due to the crowd.

I once again hit a small medical speed wobble which will pop up during the TT and the weather was very weird with a mixed bag of rain, extreme heat and a storm that was rather vicious for us KZN locals.

We stuffed up plenty photo opportunities and I always moan about it, but our kit is tired, we don’t really know what we are doing and the clan all have point and shoot cameras so I got rather lazy at times and left it up to them, which actually saved the day on a few occasions.

We found more juniors of a particular mammal than normal which had our teeth hanging out however the “tenseness” of one of these sightings ruined it a little.
We had a brief, but cool forum meet at Satara and we got to meet a few new wildies and caught up with some familiar wildies.

The rhino population is a concern for me as we didn’t spot any north of Tshokwane and they were missing from many of the usual spots, however we did find 7 together in one area which gave me hope, but I’m going to omit all the rhino sightings as most routes are obvious, not that I think it makes a difference and if I make a major balls up with the birds then please step in and help with the correct ID.

In summary, the trip was probably one of our worst sighting wise and it did feel like a mission on some days to find something to get the excitement going, but hang around as there are a few things of interest.

To be continued

6th Home to Lower Sabie

Our car packing mission started later than normal and I couldn’t seem to really get my starter motor going for some reason, so we hit some of the Richards Bay rush hour and I started to feel weird at the Swazi border.

Around 20km into Swaziland I had to pull over and the Cow took over the driving. I had stupidly eaten a curry bunny with my staff the day before as they had purchased it for me and I didn’t want to seem rude, therefore the darn stomach ulcer had now decided it was time to poison my system again, so I was “out of it”. A 35km section of road in Swaziland was also worse than we have ever seen it, so the Cow had to navigate potholes at 30km/h and as a result we arrived much later than normal in Komatipoort, hence I was starting to worry about the time.

We eventually arrived at Croc Bridge gate just after 3pm, fuelled up and headed straight for Lower Sabie up the S28.

The weather was looking suspect, we were running out of time and the S28 was rather quiet, but we stopped for a few of the usual S28 locals.







As we hit the H4-2 we spotted few cars stopped on the Bridge and I immediately started squealing because it’s a known leopard hot spot and I knew they were going to be a mission to find with the grass so long.

It took us around 30 seconds to spot him in the bush, but it felt like hours and the Cow was the first to pick him up

“There, he’s lying in the grass”

“Where! Just take a $%& pic in case he starts to move”

This only distracted the Cow and she started to chastise me, but seconds later I found him in my viewfinder and snapped a quick pic.



He was fairly relaxed though and seemed to be battling with the intense humidity as we were, so we had a chance to get a little closer for more pics.



He parked off for around 15 minutes before deciding it was time to move on and then disappeared into the grass.



We decided to hang around a few minutes just in case, but it started to pour down, so I moved on.



We stopped again 50m up the road however as there was something in a tree next to the road and to our shock it was a leopard cub, but it was definitely dead which gave Albert a major pelican and she wanted to move on, so I took a quick pic, taking care not to get my camera wet and continued on towards Lower Sabie. I couldn’t help but wonder if the male we had just spotted was the responsible party.



We stopped next for a tortoise which was the first of at least fifty we found this trip and then the H10 Bridge produced a woodland kingfisher, some terrapin and the normal bridge locals.







We booked into our 2 x EH3 huts and it was just after 5:20pm so decided to cruise back to the S28/H4-2 intersection in case the male leopard had appeared again, but instead we found a scallywag cruising around.





I’m not into the Lower Sabie hut arrangement as one is on top of your neighbour, but fortunately ours were relatively quiet, so we enjoyed our first peaceful braai of the trip, but the fruit bats arrived later and started their normal alarm clock squawking and I was still feeling stuffed so the ears got stuffed with cotton wool and we crashed for the night.

To be continued

Wow, leopard as soon as you got into the park...awesome!! We really battled on our first three days to find anything good!

Aha!

Ag shame again, only 1.5 leopards on your first morning!

Nice pics, though, I like the scallywag!

As always a more than successful start, Bushcraft,

and as I know how high the grass was this year you already found a Leopard during the first hours in - So you definitely cannot complain

Interesting start again BC.....

Very famous leopard spot that

Flutterby wrote:Wow, leopard as soon as you got into the park...awesome!! We really battled on our first three days to find anything good!

Thanks Flutts, yes the leopard pressure was off thank goodness We also battled a fair bit and I'm not sure about doing a late summer trip again

Yep, not a good time for sightings.

Richprins wrote:Aha!

Ag shame again, only 1.5 leopards on your first morning!

Nice pics, though, I like the scalywag!

Not the same this trip RP, we missioned for leopard (at stages) Scalywag has 2 "L"'s

Pumbaa wrote:As always a more than successful start, Bushcraft,

and as I know how high the grass was this year you already found a Leopard during the first hours in - So you definitely cannot complain

Thanks Pumbaa, it was a lucky start The grass was crazy high in places