Timbavati Private Reserve - 8 days 7 nights

Those are great and the story even better. My wife and I are going to South Africa in early 2020. If you have a gallery somewhere, I'd love to see the rest of your shots and show them to her. Kruger National Park is on one of our intended stops.

Great shots....

OK the Safari continues and here are some male lions we ran across.

You may notice that these two are extremely skinny for male lions. Our Ranger guide talked about how they were hungry and needed to eat soon.

We were able flow them for a quite a while through the bush before the light just got to bad to continue shooing so we left them and moved on.

The next day through the Timbavati grapevine we heard that the two had made a kill (some sort of large antelope) on the other side of the boundary between Timbavati and Kruger National Park. The rules say that although there isn't a fence separating the two reserves to allow animals to wander between the two, Timbavati based safari lodges are not allowed to cross over into Kruger and vise versa. But we did hear that the two males made a kill the evening after we photographed them and that they were happy. Didn't catch up with these two again but it was very interesting especially to see how news travels quickly in the bush when the news involves predator sightings...

Finally my wife got her wish as we had a sighting of the next member of the Big Five --- Rhino. On our last safari in 2013 Rhinos were one animal we didn't see so this was a special treat!

There was a whole "crash" of Rhinos and we got a few really nice shots (actually more than a few) but here are a couple of the ones i liked. We had several sightings of Rhinos during the safari but this sighting was actually the best as they were in the open and photographing and taking video was easier than the other sightings...

i-G12 wrote in post #18684873
OK the Safari continues and here are some male lions we ran across.

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LOVE IT! The second is AWESOME!!! - Okay... they both are.

More scouring the landscape for other varieties of animal sightings.

We found a magnificent male Water Buck and he gave us an appropriate pose and just let us click away.

Same thing with a great looking male Kudu who wasn't sure whether to run or just stand there and pose... LOL

Here we see a small herd of Impala who seem to be on the menu of all predators in Africa. Still they are beautiful animals and you get to see many of them I think anywhere you are. They sometimes give the most perfect posses and facial expressions...

We spotted this great looking Fish Eagle just sitting in a dead tree surveying the surroundings looking for something to eat...

Enjoying the hell out of these; high on my list is taking one or more trips down there for some outtings. Thanks for sharing!

Great series of images, and nice to hear the stories behind them as well. Thanks for sharing.

kelstar wrote in post #18686503
Great series of images, and nice to hear the stories behind them as well. Thanks for sharing.

Thank you.

More to come. Stay tuned!

OK, so more of the Big Five. Elephants? Yep, we saw lots of them and they are just so cool in the wild.

On one day we had a smaller elephant (probably only a ton ) actually stop and lean right into our tracker who was on the front of the safari vehicle. I don't think the Guide Ranger made a good decision there as it was a rather tense and dangerous situation but nevertheless we were able to get quite close most times and it was great game viewing. Saw lots of babies with mamma and those are the situations were mom gets a little testy when you're too close. Still no issues. In Zambia back in 2013 the elephants were very aggressive, especially the bulls who were in Musth because of all the poaching that has happened there over the years. Yes, elephants never forget...

Anyway a few images...

This guy was a beauty and was shaking his head at us but never decided to charge. We watched him for quite a long time until finally he just moved away and kept with his eating!

And another big one who was just magnificent raising her trunk to see what we were up too. She was pretty mellow and get us a little trumpet just to be sure we knew who was in charge.

Oh and how can I forget the buffalo hunt? Interesting how our Ranger Guide did things. He'd hear things on the radio and then we'd be going full speed somewhere. He never told us what was sighted but we knew it was something good. This time it was a large single male lion who was stalking a heard of buffalo and we thought for a while we might see him attempt a kill. But the herd caught wind of him just in time and then stampeded away and he just got lazy and laid down in the grass. Hey was running in and out of the brush so it was hard getting good shots of him until he broke into the open for a short period. Was trying to alternate between still photos and video and got a little of both. But watching him stalk the buffalo was exciting and your adrendline boils over with anticipation.

Lots of bird varieties in Timbavati and although I'm not much of a birder I did the best I could and got a few nice images...

The first is a White Backed Vulture and the second a Blacksmith Plover...

As I mentioned somewhere before in Timbavati we saw lots of animals but not as many groups of certain species...giraffes specifically we saw a lot of solo animals -- all still beautiful. Also no Cheetah since they seem to be more plentiful in the "plains" regions like the Okavango Delta or especially in Kenya and Tanzinia...

Still here a a couple of my favs of the solo giraffes...

And, who's this? Looks pissed but he was actually cool...