Anyone willing to share the Wild Waters of the Sabie River with this Nile Crocodile?
Come on – just look how much fun she’s having!?
One of the most compelling reasons when visiting the Kruger National Park (or any wildlife area really) to get up early and be one of the first vehicles through the gate in the early morning is that you exponentially improve your chances of having truly amazing wildlife encounters. We did just that while staying at Crocodile Bridge in September, and were rewarded with this incredible sighting of a clan of Spotted Hyenas on the move and reveling in the puddles of water on the road following a spring shower the night before.
In the Kruger Park‘s Lower Sabie Rest Camp, on the way to the reception office, there’s a bird bath and fountain well frequented by a wide variety of birds, including beautiful Greater Blue-eared Starlings like this one. But you’re not really supposed to get out of the bath looking worse than you did before getting in, are you!?
I have been visiting South Africa’s wild places for all my 40+ years, and yet there’s still many of their treasures I am yet to see. Following our September visit to the Kruger National Park I can now finally tick my first ever encounter with a leopard cub! We found the little one lazily watching the passing vehicles from a rocky outcrop along the main road between Tshokwane and Skukuza.
What luck!
The northern parts of the Kruger National Park harbours populations of antelope rarely seen in the wild elsewhere in South Africa, and of course the Wild de Wets just love going in search of these special creatures. Our recent visit during the winter school holidays, basing ourselves for nine nights at Shingwedzi Rest Camp, yielded wonderful encounters with Eland, Nyala, Sharpe’s Grysbok and Tsessebe (and we’ll just have to get back there soon to find the roan antelope, sable antelope, lichtenstein’s hartebeest and reedbuck that eluded us!)
The northern parts of the Kruger National Park suffers from an inaccurate perception that predators there are fewer and harder to find, and consequently that part of the Park sees far fewer visitors than the area south of the Olifants River. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy – fewer people looking for predators means fewer people finding predators – that suited us just fine when we visited the area around Shingwedzi Rest Camp during the winter holidays. We returned home bragging about several splendid encounters with lions, leopards, spotted hyenas and both side-striped and black-backed jackals and hardly ever having to share the experience with other visitors. Please don’t let the secret out though – we’re only telling you! 😉
This lioness was using the bridge outside Lower Sabie in the Kruger National Park as her own personal catwalk, settling down to give her adoring fans some close up views of her beauty – and I was lucky to get a front-row seat!
But lions aren’t always such show-offs – sometimes they like to keep their distance, and other times they lie hidden in plain sight…
Coming across a pack of Painted Wolves, also known as African Wild Dogs, on the road to Skukuza was another special encounter from my solo visit to the Kruger National Park in May 2019. These animals are highly endangered – it is thought that fewer than 7,000 remain in the wild with the estimated 200 living in the Kruger National Park representing South Africa’s biggest population of the species. Seeing these energetic and attractive animals is therefore always thrilling!
Dwarf Mongooses live in close-knit clans, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t the occasional squabble between family members! While walking around Pretoriuskop Rest Camp on a recent visit to the south of the Kruger National Park, I spied two of the tiny tykes continuously working on each other’s nerves, until eventually and inevitably the fight escalated into blows.
We were really surprised at all the Swainson’s and Natal Spurfowl (both formerly known as francolins) families with tiny chicks that we encountered during our recent visits to the Kruger National Park in May and June, supposedly well into our austral winter (and dry) season.
DeWetsWild 