Inside Mopani Rest Camp in the Kruger National Park grows a most impressive specimen of a Baobab, which has now been selected as a nesting site by a pair of barn owls. During the day they remain well hidden, but during a night-time walkabout we were thrilled to see one of the pair pluck a thick-knee out of the air in mid-flight!
The Kruger National Park has a list just short of 500 bird species recorded there. Many of these are summer migrants, while a few others are rare vagrants to these parts. Even in winter however, the Park abounds with feathered life, and here’s just a few of the 115 species we managed to tick in our recent eight day visit to the Satara and Mopani areas of the Park.
When out and about in the Kruger National Park, even in winter, there’s always a chance of spying some cold-blooded creatures, many of them extremely dangerous to humans!
Our winter visit to the Kruger National Park, suffering through one of the worst droughts to hit it in recorded history, provided several excellent sightings of some of the predators for which the Park is renowned. While many of the herbivores are finding survival difficult now with limited water and grazing, the predators are having a royal time, as the movement of prey revolves predictably around the remaining water sources where they can be easily ambushed.
The Satara area of the Park is well known for excellent predator sightings, and the guided night drive we took part in there delivered lions, hyenas, black-backed and side-striped jackals and two leopard sightings!
Even just walking around the fenceline at Satara could provide close encounters with dangerous predators, though 99.9% of the time seperated by an electrified fence. Spotted hyenas are to be found on most nights, as visitors often feed them scraps from their evening meals. The reason why this is illegal is because the animals become very bold beggars, which often ends in tragedy for the hyenas and sometimes also for the human visitors, as evidenced by a hyena attacking a teenager when it somehow found its way into Crocodile Bridge recently. We therefore expected to find hyenas on our evening walkabouts and weren’t disappointed, but the leopard that unexpectedly appeared in the glare of our spotlight near Satara’s entrance gate, safely on the other side of the fence, caused us great excitement!
With the Kruger National Park in the drought’s firm grip, we weren’t surprised that the majority of our sightings of Plains Zebra during our recent winter visit to the Satara and Mopani areas were near or at some of the artificial water holes maintained by the Park’s staff. The most spectacular congregations were at the Mooiplaas waterhole, where hundreds of zebras (if not more) milled around the water during the midday hours, kicking up dust (often further exacerbated by strong winds) and getting on each other’s nerves.
Probably due to the prevailing drought, we encountered very few buffalo in the five days we spent around Satara during our winter visit to the Kruger National Park. However, that all changed when we moved northwards to Mopani, where better winter grazing seems to have attracted even more of the huge herds of these bulky beasts than we would normally have expected to see in that region.
Before we get to some of the more dramatic stuff, let’s share a few funny shots taken during our recent winter visit to Satara and Mopani in the Kruger National Park.
We thought we’d start the report back on our recent (winter 2016) visit to Satara and Mopani in the Kruger National Park by sharing a few of photos of some of the cute babies we encountered on our drives.
I think this sad spotted hyena mimicked our own facial expressions as we passed her on the way from Mopani Rest Camp to Phalaborwa Gate this morning.
We’ve returned to Pretoria with thousands of photos from our latest trip to the Kruger National Park, and of course we’ll be selecting the best of those to share with our friends here at de Wets Wild in the coming weeks.
Kruger’s aristocratic elephant bulls are as thrilling to watch as any of the big cats!
DeWetsWild 