This is the third post from my recent visit to the Serengeti National Park. The Serengeti is known for its vast plains, huge herds and predators. It is not normally associated with its primate residents.

“Travel makes you modest, you see what a tiny place you occupy in the world.”

~Gustave Flaubert

Residents in the Serengeti, certainly along the Grumeti river course, include Colobus monkeys, Vervet monkeys and Olive baboons. Along the Grumeti river the forests were verdant and luxurious. This is where you are likely to find Colobus monkeys. What makes the Colobus different to other forest dwelling primates is the colour of their coats but more importantly they do not have thumbs.

Despite their black and white coats, these striking monkeys can be difficult to see in the forest canopy as they try to remain out of sight. They are agile tree dwellers which can on occasions be seen leaping great distances between trees. Colobus monkeys live in territorial groups of about nine individuals, comprising a single male with a number of females and their offspring. Newborn Colobuses are completely white with black rings around their eyes. 

Colobus monkeys are herbivorous, eating leaves, fruit, bark and flowers. They frequent forests, varying from riverine forests to wooded grasslands. Along the Grumeti river are dense verdant riverine forests. Outside the Serengeti, the biggest threat to the Colobus is habitat loss, where human encroachment and logging are destroying forests. These primate face hunting for bush meat and for their striking coats.

“When you realise the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate more on the preservation of the future.”
~Dian Fossey

Olive baboons also live along the Grumeti river but forage on the ground. They also venture onto the plains looking for food. Olive baboons are so named because of the colour of their coats. In every troop there seems to be one, if not two bosses, large males which are the troop’s guardians and disciplinarians. The males are larger than the females and have a mane of longer hair on the side of their faces and along their necks.

Olive baboons are found throughout equatorial Africa and in a number of different habitats. The Olive baboons we came across were savanna-dwelling, foraging in the wide plains of the grasslands and sleeping in open woodlands close to water. The next image shows the troop making its way back to the river where its members climbed up into the trees to rest for the night. I never counted them, but this troop of Olive baboons must have been at least 100 strong.

It was quite a walk to and from their foraging areas. In the late afternoon, the troop stopped for a rest next around this balanite on its way back to the “sleeping trees” next to the river. We watched the antics of many of the baboons which used the opportunity to get rest while the youngsters played in and around the tree.

“For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected.”
~Jane Goodall

I could not get over how casually this mother allowed her youngster to pull her nipple while suckling.

Any mother who has breast fed would probably be cringing at the sight of this youngster excessively pulling at its mother’s nipple.

“One’s destination is never a place, but always a new way of seeing things.”

~Henry Miller

In a troop but forlorn and alone. This one branch of the Balanite became quite a focal point for all sorts of activities.

“Lovers in the air”- as you know balance is everything!!!

After the lovers had disappeared back into the troop, the branch became a plaything for the youngsters, with a little dominance going on!!

Another branch on the other side of the tree was this youngster’s gym bar.

It is amusing to see how human-like these baboons were and despite their antics, they very rarely fall out of the tree. Injury means death!

“I think that intelligence is such a narrow branch of the tree of life – this branch of primates we call humans. No other animal, by our definition, can be considered intelligent. So intelligence can’t be all that important for survival, because there are so many animals that don’t have what we call intelligence, and they’re surviving just fine.”
~Neil deGrasse Tyson

The “baboon’s bedroom”. Come twilight it was time to get off the ground and into a place out of most predators’ way. That assumes a leopard will not come visiting in the quietest and darkest time of night.

The wind was blowing quite hard but this youngster was well protected by its mother.

A strident male Olive baboon who exuded confidence and was not about to take nonsense from anyone or anything! Females stay with their groups their entire lives, but males are in eternal competition with each other and if their ranking is downgraded they may emigrate to another troop.

This youngster showed his masculinity but not the necessary confidence, and seemed unnerved by the wind. Adult males are very competitive but this Olive baboon troop appeared to be remarkably peaceful, more so than I have seen with Chacma baboons.

The troops of Olive baboon which we saw were diurnal and followed a routine of venturing out onto the plains during the day to forage and returning to large trees to sleep out of harm’s way at night. Olive baboons seem to be generally smaller than our southern African Chacma baboons but have much thicker hair.

“I am entitled to say, if I like, that awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet-worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, super-primate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.”
~Lewis Thomas

Explore, seek to understand, marvel at its inter-connectedness and let it be.

Have fun,

Mike

Still in the Western Corridor of the Serengeti and after a relatively unsuccessful previous day waiting for our “flat cats” to raise themselves and start moving and playing, we were up and on our way by 6h30 the next morning full of expectation that a fresh start would reveal something quite unexpected.

“Dance as if you got lost in the mystery and beauty of life.”
― Debasish Mridha

Our guide, Yona, told us that a cheetah female and her two cubs had been seen near Masira hill late the previous evening. We found the female and her two year old cubs lying in the open plain below Masira hill. It was cool early in the morning so they were in the open and had not yet sought shade. When cheetahs lie down their thin frame makes them difficult to see. Normally the only time you will see them from a distance is when either their head pops up to have a look around or you see a flick of the tail.

This morning the cheetahs were on the lookout for something to hunt but there was no prey anywhere near. A family group of warthogs could be seen in the trees below Masira hill which were about three hundred metres away but they drew only a brief glance from the cheetahs.

One of the key advantages of getting up early is that you get the low angle light which is warm in colour. This is the best time to get natural illumination in the cheetah’s eyes.

“The mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience.”
~Frank Herbert

An important advantage of being in this part of the Serengeti in September was that the grass had been well and truly eaten down and it was relatively easy to see and photograph the cheetahs without grass in front of their faces.

The female and one of her cubs were lying next to each other. The youngster seemed to be much closer to its mother while the other one lay some distance off, and did not seem to seek the physical closeness of its mother.

The mutual preening is a bonding process and also provides a quick clean after the meal the day before.

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science.”
~Albert Einstein

Up on the Masira hill we had seen giraffe browsing on the tops of the trees. As time passed, we noticed that all the giraffe were walking down the hill towards the cheetahs. At first, we thought it was just coincidence, but it soon became apparent that they were gathering because of the cheetahs.

Eventually about fifteen giraffe came down from the Masira hill and started to gather in front of the cheetahs.

The mother cheetah had already moved to large area of shade under a bigger tree to the right of us. The cubs stayed put under small bushes in front of the giraffe gathering.

The standoff became intriguing. I had never before seen giraffe gather to intimidate cheetahs. In a previous post from Mashatu, I described how guineafowl had mobbed three young cheetahs driving them out of the area. The giraffe seemed to be doing a similar thing. Until now I had never realised that cheetah had such a tough time. I knew that lion, hyaena and leopard regularly stole their kills but I never realised how many savanna species actively drove off cheetahs.

The more the giraffe congregated the more intimidating they became not only because of their numbers but also their size. I am sure every cheetah knows only too well the power and danger of a giraffe kick. Eventually the young cheetahs were sufficiently intimidated and got up and walked, as confidently as they could, back to their mother.

The young cheetah did not run but walked nonchalantly trying to show they were not impressed by the show of force.

“People no longer try to decipher the mystery of life but choose instead to be a part of it.”
~Paulo Coelho

I never heard a sound from the giraffe but they certainly communicated to produce the gathering. It makes me think that giraffe communicate through infra sound, a low frequency sound which we cannot hear. I know the collective noun for giraffe is a tower of giraffe but after seeing this display I think a gathering is more apt.

Once the giraffe had made their point they dispersed and moved back to Masira hill to browse on the treetops and bushes.

We waited for quite a while that morning for the cheetah to start hunting but our patience never paid off.

“Let us remember that animals are not mere resources for human consumption. They are splendid beings in their own right, who have evolved alongside us as co-inheritors of all the beauty and abundance of life on this planet.”

~ Marc Bekoff

We returned later that afternoon and the cheetahs had moved only a short distance to get more shade. Patience in the afternoon was rewarded by the changing light. In the late afternoon, the sun lowers and the angle of the light continuously improves. This is the time when the cheetah’s eyes are best illuminated and you get to see the liquid amber colour of their eyes.

An iconic pose by an adult cheetah standing on an ant hill to get a better view of potential prey and threats in the distance.

Seeing is much more than having the subject move right in front of you. It is a sense, a revelation that comes from quietly looking for the subtle changes in the light or the animal’s behaviour. Just because nothing has happened for the past 30 minutes is no guide as to what will happen over the next half an hour. A francolin could wander by and startle the cheetahs; the apparently sleeping cheetah could suddenly pick up a scent on the wind which has changed direction, which catches its attention.

The late afternoon light casts a warm glow on the scene.

“How it is that animals understand things I do not know, but it is certain that they do understand. Perhaps there is a language which is not made of words and everything in the world understands it. Perhaps there is a soul hidden in everything and it can always speak, without even making a sound, to another soul.”

~ Frances Hodgson Burnett

One of the fascinating aspects about being out in the bush is that you never know what you are likely to find and invariably new interactions between species are revealed. The ability to move or even rest unseen in the bush is not easy as there are so many eyes watching each predator and those eyes are very happy to alert every living thing around to the whereabouts of that predator. Cheetah choose to hunt mainly in the day while other key predators such as lions and hyaenas are sleeping, so there is less competition. They also need to see what they are doing when travelling at 120 kilometres per hour while in full chase of prey. The down side of daylight hunting is that cheetahs are visible to baboons, vervet monkeys, birds, squirrels and giraffe during the day so seldom get peace and solitude.

“An animal’s eyes have the power to speak a great language.”

~Martin Buber

Hunting in the Serengeti is not as easy as would be assumed. One of the key risks is that hyaena spread out all over the plains and the scouts lie unseen in tufts of grass. As soon as anything unusual happens or a cheetah makes a kill, invariably (out of apparently nowhere) a hyaena appears on the scene. Only when the hyaena is outnumbered will it start “whooping” for reinforcements.

We left the cheetah family late that afternoon as the sun was setting and that was the last time we saw them. The plains are large and the predators move around looking for prey and to minimise competition from other predators. As we were one of two other vehicles out at that time there were few eyes to keep track of our wandering cheetahs. Once they lie flat, even the keenest eyes will not see then even in the short grass.

When you spend time quietly in the bush you become aware that there is a lot going on. You also realise that your human senses have become blunted compared to the wildlife you are watching. The subtle changes in the wind can herald all sorts of new reactions. We humans, especially the “townies”, with our dulled senses are blissfully unaware of these subtle changes. I think wildlife operates at a much more subtle sensual level than most human beings. What is clear that the guides who spend much of their time in the bush do tune into these subtleties.

“We patronize the animals for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they are more finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other Nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth.” 

~Henry Beston

Explore, seek to understand, marvel at its inter-connectedness and let it be.

Have fun,

Mike

I was privileged to be able to visit the Western Corridor of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania in mid-September 2017 with CNP Safaris. We were based at the Grumeti Tented Camp.

“To move, to breathe, to fly, to float,

To gain all the while you give,

To roam the roads of lands remote,

To travel is to live.”

~Han Christian Anderson

The Grumeti River courses its way along the 80 kilometres of Western Corridor of the Serengeti to Lake Victoria. Although a narrow wedge-shaped corridor, it is a diverse and fascinating area, which features dense groves of acacia trees interspersed with thick woodlands, and vast open plains with ranges of hills as their back drop. A dominant feature of the Western Corridor is the mysterious and treacherous Grumeti River. This river is not wide but is home to some of the largest Nile crocodiles the migrating wildlife will ever encounter. 

Besides wildebeest, the Western Corridor is also home to large numbers of resident wildlife, including Olive baboons, Colobus and Vervet  Monkeys, giraffe, buffalo, impala, topi, eland, Thomson’s gazelle, waterbuck and smaller antelope such as Dik-Diks and duikers. These resident animals support large concentrations of predators such as lion,  hyaena, and lesser seen cheetah and leopards. The Wildebeest Migration passes through the Western Corridor from late May to mid-July after the rains in April.

“One cannot resist the lure of Africa.”

~ Rudyard Kipling

By mid-September, the Wildebeest Migration had passed and I was intrigued to see how the predators coped with less prey. In the eight days we were traveling around the western corridor of the Serengeti with the Grumeti Tented Camp as our base, we were able to see 32 different lions. Apart from a wonderful camp, the best part was that there were very few vehicles in the national park at that time, but the down side was that keeping track of the predators was much more difficult.

We saw many cubs in the various prides we came across. On our first afternoon, we found our first pride, next to the river below the Grumeti Tented Camp. This pride comprised a large maned male, two lionesses and four cubs. 

There were three cubs which must have been about four months old and one much smaller one which seemed to struggle more than all the rest. This smallest cub can be seen suckling on a lower nipple underneath the closest upright cub.

This large male was with the lionesses and the father of the cubs.

The male moved away from his family so that he was not pestered by his cubs.

He was ever alert in the late afternoon. That evening we heard him roaring throughout the night. We did not see him again after that.

We were hoping to capture some interesting images of the cubs playing but they were quite subdued.

The cubs mostly comforted each other.

Beautiful but very vulnerable.

The warmth of the late afternoon sun appeared to be very somniferous.

The next day the male had moved off to probably patrol his territory while the lionesses moved the cubs from next to the river to a the Masira hill about two kilometres to the west.

One lioness walked in to reinforce her bond with the other lioness but was rebuffed as she was trying to rest. 

The cub in the front right was significantly smaller, and looked much worse for wear, than the other cubs. Those dark rings around its eyes outlined its story.

That little cub was plucky and did not hold back despite its poor state and small size.

As it turned out, the smallest most undernourished looking cub had its right back foot bitten off. The wound appeared to be clean but this youngster was battling. Among the many things I admire about wildlife is that it never seems to feel sorry for itself. This little cub with a missing back right leg must have had to walk the two kilometres from the river to Masira hill. Not only had it made the journey but was playing with its bigger cousins.

I am not  sure that this small cub would make it, but I gave it “100 -out -of -ten” for its determination to prevail. When it came to getting milk from its mother this little one had to fight for a nipple but always seemed to get there eventually. I really hope it survived but if it did its future would always be tenuous. It was wonderful to see how the cubs relied on each other for comfort and warmth.

The cubs sought attention and comfort from their mother whether she offered it or not.

We saw this lone cub in the bush along the side the road leading to Nyasiriro plains. We had briefly seen two lionesses just before this point. They looked to have been hunting and must have left the cub to seek refuge in a thicket nearby.

That afternoon, on the Kwanga plain near the Grumeti camp, below the Masira hill, we found four year-old cubs with their mother out in the open.  These cubs looked to be about nine months old.

We spent hours waiting for them to start playing but they never did. The best we got was one of the cubs trying to catch the tsetse flies which were biting him.

The cubs lay apart but never too far from each other. Their mother, on the other hand, lay some distance off, presumably to get some peace.

We spent the afternoon waiting for this family to wake up and get active. To no avail, they remained “flat cats” even as the clouds began rolling in threatening rain. (Double click on the panorama to get a full screen image).

As it started to cool in the late afternoon, the mother of the four sub-adult cubs woke up and, after stretching, came around from behind thicket and stood scanning the plain for prey. There was nothing close by. The next day we found that this lioness must had killed an ostrich in the night which filled their bellies.

Another two lionesses on their own down at Nyasiriro plain looking for prey. The lionesses were using the dips and drainage lines to approach their prey. They had their sights on prey which was some distance away from the road so we left them in peace to do what they do best.

On the way back to camp from the Nyasiriro plains we came across a family group of lionesses and cubs. Nothing unusual about the image except that I loved the perspective with the trees and hill in the background.

“Africa changes you forever, like nowhere on earth. Once you have been there, you will never be the same. But how do you begin to describe its magic to someone who has never felt it?”

~ Brian Jackman

I am not sure why they were moving mid-morning, as lions are usually lying flat by this time of the day under the shade of a well leafed tree.

That afternoon down next to the road from the ranger’s camp in Nyasiriro plains we found this lone lioness. She was very muddy but being overcast she was resting in the open in the cool, lush grass next to a large pool of water dammed by the road embankment.

The reason she was muddy is that she must have ambushed a warthog as it came down to drink. The warthog was not muddy so we presumed she had bolted through water and muddy verge to attack the warthog. It’s partly consumed carcass lay underneath a nearby group of bushes.

Early the following morning while on our way to Nyasiriro plains, we found this lone large male lying in the open about fifty metres off the road.

Initially he was intrigued by us.

Then looked at us much more attentively. I am sure the large camera lenses must have looked like large eyes to him.

He did not like the large eyes looking at him from our photographic vehicle and decided to move into the bush behind him away from our glare.

He clearly had fed well the previous night.

“Nothing but breathing the air of Africa, and actually walking through it, can communicate the indescribable sensations.”

~William Burchell

Including more of the background gives a sense of this large male lion’s environment.

This was a different male down next to the road from the ranger’s camp in Nyasiriro plains. This male was mating with a lioness but we did not manage to get any images of her.

The same male some distance off the road. This couple did not move too far while mating though we only had fleeting glimpses of the female.

Moving in and out of the shade in the morning light increased the photographic challenge.

On our second last day, we crossed the Grumeti and travelled on the southern side of the river. There was plenty of wildlife and close to the hot-air balloon camp we found two lionesses with their pride of cubs. It had rained each of the previous two nights so there was plenty of water on the plains.

The lionesses had killed a zebra, so the family was well fed. Once it had cooled down somewhat the lionesses and cubs went to one of the small pools of rainwater to drink.

The grazers like wildebeest, zebra and Thomson’s gazelle move with the migrating herd. Not all of the grazers migrate but the vast majority do. The predators are territorial so stay behind. The competition for food intensifies for both the lion, hyaena and cheetahs. Mid-September was a good time to see and photograph the predators as the grass had been grazed very short by the migrating grazers. Unfortunately our predator subjects were not very active but it was still wonderful to be immersed in these vast beautiful, unspoilt areas which still teemed with wildlife.

“To witness that calm rhythm of life revives our worn souls and recaptures a feeling of belonging to the natural world. No one can return from the Serengeti unchanged, for tawny lions will forever prowl our memory and great herds throng our imagination.”

~ George Schaller

Explore,seek to understand, marvel at its interconnectedness and let it be.

Have fun,

Mike