It’s cold here! Especially coming from the heat of Samburu! We spent 12 hours out in the park, eating both breakfast and lunch in the bush. It was a wildebeest day. They are here! We saw hundreds of thousands.
The wildebeest are migrating. To do so they have to cross a number of rivers. It’s dangerous. We watched a crossing of the Mara River of about 50,000 wildebeests with about 25 zebras thrown in. It took about 2 1/2 hours. It’s amazing to see. They wait around the bank awhile until one gets the nerve to start. They cross in a line, leaping off the bank and swimming to the other side. They go single file and keep coming and coming. We saw only two get snatched by a very very large crocodile. Two out of 50,000 is pretty good odds.
The hard thing to watch is the young foals who get separated from their mothers in the rush. These little ones swam back across alone looking for their moms. Most don’t find them and then their chance of survival is small. It is heart breaking to see.
We saw many more lions…
… and we visited again the pride we had seen last night. They were sleeping with very full bellies. It’s very interesting because we saw the subadults in the pride 2 years ago as Cubs!
We came across a pretty small river in a kind of ravine. It’s where we had lunch.
The black dot in the middle at the back is a Cape buffalo.
We saw a tower (group) of 26 giraffes, a pack of 6 hyenas, & and a tiny baby hyena in its den.
A little further the river is a lot wider and the ravine steeper. A young foal was trapped in the ravine having been separated from her mom when the wildebeests crossed the ravine. It was panicking a bit trying to find a way out. It was being tracked by both a leopard (BTW we have seen leopards 8 of 10 days!) and a lioness. The leopard saw the lioness and gave up the hunt. The lioness started down the bank of the ravine & then made a very smart move. She realized she could move faster along the top. She ran up the bank, raced across the top, came down the ravine opposite the foal, ran across the river ( it was not deep) …. And a film crew was there–she got distracted, looked at them and the foal got away, ran out of the ravine and back to the herd. That was one very lucky baby wildebeest.
Tomorrow is our last full day here so we will be spending another 12 hours out. I’m hoping we can find the Monoco pride. Their pictures were hanging in my office so I have been looking at them for two years!
Current lion count (number of DIFFERENT lions seen)
Total-47
Males-7
Females-14
Subadults-18
Cubs-8
Looking Out Seeing Within 