Thursday, July 2, 2009

Elephants...

2 July 2009 By Wesley Cragg

My guests are into their third day here at Riverbend and we have seen more elephants than we had even hoped to see!! On drive this morning, not even half an hour after heading out, we stopped at a river crossing to see what a troop of vervet monkeys were alarm calling for!! We were discussing the possibility of a caracal that we had just seen crossing the road ahead of us being the cause of all the comotion, but could not see anything in the direction that the monkeys were looking. My guest (Christo Botma) then asked me what was ahead of us on the road... it was a herd of (+ -)50 elephants, including suckling calves, heading straight towards us! What an incredible sight! Every one of the elephants went down into the riverbed below us in search of water and we had the most amazing arial view of them. It was an entirely different feeling being able to view them from that angle. We waited until all the elephants had moved off and continued with a very successful drive.

Success in seeing what we wanted..

2 July 2009 By Wesley Cragg

After having a fairly peaceful drive yesterday afternoon and easing my guests into their stay at Riverbend for six nights, we decided to go looking for lions and elephants this morning. About half an hour into the drive we were in luck! Neither elephant nor lion, but seven bat eared foxes sitting in the middle of the road soaking up the morning sun! What an incredible sighting!! Only after a few minutes did they decide to take off into the thicket, giving us a fantastic oppurtunity to view them and their behaviour and not so long after that, we once again ran into some luck and bumped into a huge male lion that appeared out of the thicket to our right and crossed the road about fifty meters ahead of us. He moved a further fifty meters off the road and lay down completely flat cat!! We sat with him for about an hour before moving on. A successful drive even without elephants..I'll save that for tonight. Have a good evening all..

Three striped polecats!


29 June 09 by Wesley Cragg

Hi all! The beginning of this winter has brought some amazing sightings for us all at RiverBend. I had a trio of british Lions supporters on drive with me yesterday afternoon. It was an excellent drive to say the least. Sightings of numerous antelope species, a very relaxed vervet monkey troop, a pair of Lanner Falcons harrassing a pair of Ravens and an absolutely incredible sun set! To top it all off, we got to spend an incredible twenty minutes with three striped polecats scurrying about and interacting just after sunset!! Wow, it was fascinating!!