It's a beautiful afternoon sitting out on my deck overlooking the Sand River. Since we have a 3-4 hour game drive at 6:30 AM and another at 3:30 PM, the midday is when I have time to write the blog. Inyati Lodge may have the best game drives I've ever experienced. It is just astounding what we've seen. For Game Drive 3, we started by the river and followed it for quite a while. We saw lots of birds. Here's a White-Fronted Bee Eater.
And a Black-Winged Stilt.
This is my first photo of an African Fish Eagle. It was at the very end of my telephoto length, but you can still see it.
We then found the pride of lions we had seen the day before. They had taken down a male Nyala to eat. I'll skip the gore on the blog. This lady is taking a break from chowing down.
Further along the river we saw a Giraffe--the first I'be seen in Sabi Sands. Here's their drinking process.
We then went back to check on the mother Leopard who had killed the Impala. She had moved it up even higher in the tree.
And her son was fooling around at the bottom of the tree looking incredibly cute.
We stopped for our sundowner drinks along the river. Here's a Hadeda Ibis. I'm surprised this came out so well since it was almost dark.
This morning we went back to see what happened to the lions who were eating the Nyala. It was almost completely gone. Omega told us that probably the male lion of the pride had come in and eaten the bulk of the prey. Since there was nothing left to eat, the female lions and cubs decided to go down to the river for a drink and some frolicking in the shallow water.
Then we had an amazing moment. This large male elephant had felled a tree right across the road we were on and was eating it. Omega stopped the Land Cruiser and this dude came right up to us. We held still and he passed by within inches of our vehicle.
Peggy took this awesome video of the event.
Next Omega took us to a kill where another pride of Lions had downed a Cape Buffalo. There was nothing left of it and these Hyenas were eating the bones.
And others wanted in on the scraps. This is a White-Backed Vulture . . .
A Tawney Eagle . . .
And a-Hooded Vulture.
We then went and saw part of the pride that took down the Cape Buffalo. There are 10 cubs in this pride. They were all sound asleep after gorging themselves, but these two cubs managed to lift their heads up for a second.
At different times during our drive we saw male and female Waterbuck.
And as if we hadn't seen enough on the drive, we came across a large herd of Elephants with lots of babies and youngsters.
We are so lucky to be experiencing this.
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