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Published: November 12th 2007
Sandwich stealing bird
He looks pretty but this little dude was NOT nice!We had a great time in the crater but we were also very excited to head to the Serengeti. You always hear about the Serengeti as the place to see these amazing creates and "wild things"!! Would we see a lion attacking a wildebeast or maybe a leopard enjoying a gazelle?!?! We headed out from the Sopa lodge at 8 am and we were not sad to say good bye! On the way to the Serengeti National Park gate we stopped at a place called the Udapi gorge. They had a nice little museum about the gorge and what they had found there. The curator of the museum gave us a 20 minute talk that was quite nice. I was not expecting to get an archeology lesson while on safari but it was a welcome surprise!
We arrived at the gate around lunch time but this gate wasn't without its lunch menace either. The good news is that this one didn't have an ugly butt and huge teeth. At first glance it was just a little, harmless bird but they were sneaky! If you didn't watch carefully they would help themselves to a bite of your sandwich. Yes, this happened
to me! Luckily I wasn't too heart broken to lose my butter and bread sandwich! Yummy! I don't think the chef at the hotel that made our box lunch was terrible familiar with what a vegetarian eats! The entrance gate to the park was near a rock out-cropping that had a very nice view of the vast plains of the Serengeti. Normally predators might climb up here to get a view of their domain but the only predators we saw were these bizarre pink and purple lizards!
Woohoo, we're in the Serengeti! During lunch Manase had not only opened the roof of our safari-mobile like the day before, but he had also added a shade. We were ridin' in style! The first animal we encountered has as many vertebrae in it's backbone as we do but it significantly larger! That is your fun fact for the day. It's a giraffe if you hadn't figured out what I was talking about yet! We figured that Manase would stop for sure but he started to zoom right by him! We had to ask him to stop. I guess he didn't think we would be terribly interested in giraffes. We couldn't stay
long though because we were still on the main road and had lots of safari vehicle traffic around us. Manase told us that he likes to stay near the rivers in the park because that is where a lot of animals like to hang out. After all, they have to come get a drink at some point! As we were heading towards the river we passed a rocky area that had three female lions and four or five baby lions! Apparently the females often come together to form bigger prides like this to help each other "raise" the babies and for protection. Two of the females were the mothers and the other one just sat off to the side and seemed to be a bit annoyed by the children romping around. Manase told us that the mothers also share in the duty of feeding the babies so they were going back and forth between the moms trying to get them to roll over and expose the "goods"!!! The moms were very annoyed and would give a big lion roar like "leave me ALONE"! We could have watched these guys for a long time but there were much more animals out
there to find!
And that we did........ our next encounter was a lesson in how those baby lions came to be! That's right, we came upon mating lions. Now, prepare yourselves to learn several fun facts during the next few minutes of reading (: When a female lion is ready to mate she goes in search of a male lion that will willingly take part. Once she finds this male lion they select a place that they will call home for the next four days. The ones we came upon were 20 feet from the road in grass that was about 3 feet tall. The lions stay here for FOUR days and do nothing but mate! While this may sound appealing to many of you....just wait! On the first day the lionesses want to mate every 15 to 20 minutes. On the second day it is every 20 to 30 minutes, third day is every 30 to 45 minutes and the fourth day is every 45 minutes to 1 hour! So, as you can imagine the male lion becomes very exhausted and really quite pissy! I have failed to mention that the mating pair that we came upon was
Purple and pink lizard!
We found this crazy guy sitting on a rock near our lunch stop. not actually a pair, it was a trio. We watched these three for about 1.5 hours and figured out that one of the lionesses was on her first day of mating because she would get up every 15 minutes to find the male while the other female did not get up the entire time we were there so she must have been on her fourth day of mating. When the "first day lioness" got up she would walk over to the male (that was laying down in the grass) and paw at him or simply walk by him and would then lay down again near him. He would get up, "do his thing" (which took a grand total of 15 seconds) and then either bite her head and roar or simply collapse back down into the grass. He seemed to be just exhausted and worn out. Everytime this lioness would come around it seemed to take every ounce of energy he had to get up! It was quite the show. (:
While we were observing our new lion friends, Manase says to us "Female lions are just like Masai females." Ok, what on earth does that mean? He went
Lioness
This is the lioness that didn't have children. Hence the reason that she looks so relaxed! on to explain that just like a male lion might have two or three lionesses to attend to during a mating session, Masai men can also have many wives. Some can have 5 or 10 wives but the women do not get jealous. Just like a lioness! I guess the Masai women believe that it would be very difficult to satisfy their husband all by themselves so they are happy to share the job and allow him to have other wives! In the villages I described earlier, one man inhabits one of the houses in the village while his wives have the others. Each evening he may select a different house to go into and then goes back home to his own house! Each of his wives may have 4 or 5 children so it is not uncommon for a Masai man to have 20 children! When a Masai man wants to marry another woman, he needs to provide her with cows or goats. If no cows or goats, no new wife! This is why we saw so many Masai men walking with many, many cows or goats! I obviously found this little lesson fascinating! I think Yuri thought I
was a bit of a nut job for asking so many questions about it but oh well. Just such a different world.
We wished the male lion luck and we were off to explore some more! We finally made it to the river and found some buffalo and red buck. I guess you don't want to get too close to those buffalo. They have been known to attack a safari vehicle or two with their giant horns! We admired them from afar!
You would think that our luck would have run out at baby lions or even mating lions but the "animal angels" were watching over us that day and we got to see our first leopard in the tree. We were watching some elephants near the river when Manase must have received a call over his radio that there was a leopard in the tree. We never even heard the radio at all. Secret safari guide language! By the time we got to the tree, there were already 8 or 10 other safari vehicles admiring the leopard. We got to see him for just a few minutes before something scared him away. I asked Manase if he
Baby lion (:
This little guy was full of piss and vinegar. You could tell that he caused the problems in the pride! thought it was all of the cars but his response was that the animals were used to it. Huh.......good thing or bad thing? I guess good because the fee that we pay to get into the park goes towards protecting these animals. Hopefully anyway.
On the way home that evening we saw two more juvenille, male lions hanging out near a watering hole. I had no idea that they would be so prevelant and "out there". Maybe we got lucky but there seemed to be lions everywhere! Just before arriving at our Serengeti tented camp we came until a HUGE herd of wildebeast and zebras. Manase was very surprised to see them because they are not usually back from their migration until November. There has been a few storms the weeks prior so he assumed that is why they were back so early. The wildebeasts follow the water so the zebras follow the wildebeasts! I guess the zebras are excellent at detecting predators so the wildebeast allow them to hang around!
The tented camp we stayed at that night was AWESOME! The tent was a big army-looking tent that was about 30 feet long and 15 feet wide.
The MAN!
This is the male lion that was mating with two lionesses. I think this is one of the times he actually stood up for 4 seconds before he collapsed again! It even had a bathroom! In the back of the tent they had two "rooms", one for the toilet and sink, and one for the shower! The shower was gravity fed and you needed to tell the guys when you wanted to take a warm shower and they would go collect warm water from somewhere and put it in your tank! Funny story - When we first arrived at the camp the guys asked if we wanted to take showers. Sure! So he explains that he will add the warm water. Great! So I go into the tent, organize for a little bit and then head back out to take some pictures of the beatiful sunset. As I go around the back of our tent I find one of the guys just sitting there looking towards our tent! I said hello and then asked him what he was doing and he says "Waiting for you"! They give you the first bucket of water and sit there and wait until you are done with your shower to ensure that you don't need anymore! Kind of strange to think of someone just sitting there on the other side of the canvas as
you shower!
There was only one other couple staying there and we all ate dinner together in the food tent. Dinner was excellent as usual. As we headed off to bed of course we had to ask "Do animals ever come into this camp?" They said that there are usually zebras and other hoofed animals around and that they can always hear the hyeenas calling to each other. They also hear the occasional lion but not to worry, there is a guide walking around all night to protect us! Huh, that guy has an interesting job!
DAY NUMBER 2 of the SERENGETI
Our guide also stayed at the tented camp so we asked him if he heard any animals during the night and he heard lions! Of course Yuri and I did not hear them. I think a herd of elephants could have run through the place and we wouldn´t have heard them. Going on Safari is oh so tiring you know! Unfortunately our morning did not start out with a very "warm fuzzy" feeling. As usual, our guide stopped right in the middle of the road and was staring at something through his binoculars. We were
Tired yet?
This is the every fifteen minutes female! The time just before this picture must have worn her out! waiting with baited breath to see what he saw and then he says "Poachers"! My heart just sank. I just cannot bear the thought of one of those precious animals being killed. He saw three of them and he thought they were cutting the meat off. I hated to know but I had to ask what he thought they had killed. He said a gazelle or possibly zebra. I hate to admit it, but I was a tad bit relieved that it was not an elephant. I guess the poachers mostly use traps called snares (not sure if I spelled that right) and they set them at night so they can hide better. I asked Manase if he had a phone number for the rangers so we could report this. Surprisingly he did not. I´m not sure if the poachers eventually saw us looking at them, or something else scared them, but all of a sudden they ran away. Manase thought that they were probably from the local village. It is still a HUGE problem in Tanzania, and many other areas I´m sure, but if poachers are caught, there are hefty fines to pay including jail time. Maybe these were
the same guys that stole the battery out of the tented camp´s tractor the night before. We saw the guides looking at tracks in the road just before we left and Manase said that someone had been there and stolen the battery. The night guard was too busy making sure those roaring lions didn´t get too close so he didn´t see or hear them! What a shame.
When we checked in at the Ranger´s hut Manase did mention that we saw poachers and where they were but they said that they do not have the man power to check on every case that they hear about. In short, those guys were going to get away with it. URGG!!! The morning of animal sightings was slow compared to our previous afternoon. Yuri´s theory is that they all sleep in until around noon! We stopped at the hippo pool for our morning dose of the foulest smell in the entire world! Yuri was trying to get a picture as one of them opener their mouths so we were there forever but finally Manase and I couldn´t take the smell any longer and we had to move on! We found several giraffes
Buffalo
This guy was across the river and we wanted to keep it that way! treating themselves to their morning massage on a few trees. We also found two female lions lounging under a tree but they did not move the entire time we watched them. Funny how quickly you become spoiled. Come on lion, mate or have a baby or something! That´s what I saw yesterday! I´m joking of course, it was amazing to see them regardless of what they were doing!
Lunch was at the Serengeti visitors center which was quite nice. I was very happy to see that some of our tourist dollars had gone towards this lovely center. They even had a little pathway with lots of signage describing the ecosystem, animals, etc... Lunch just would not have been the same without a pest. This time it was fuzzy and cute though. I cannot remember the name of this animal though, maybe a marmot or a muskrat?
The afternoon started out just as we would have ordered with some bathing wart hogs. Most excellent! We love these little guys but every time we would try and stop the truck to look at them, they would run away with their little tails straight up in the air! This time they
Our first elephants!
They kept their heads hidden in the bushes most of the time with the exception of the baby! He seemed a bit bored with his mom and older brother so he was playing with bushes and his own trunk! were too busy caking themselves in mud to run away. And then...... another Leopard! This animal was just so gorgeous! It was in a tree in the middle of grass and by the time we got there, the tree was already surrounded by 8 safari vehicles! He didn´t seem to care at all (Manase says they are used to it), in fact he seemed to be posing for pictures. However, something eventually irritated him and he slinked off into the grass.
Baby and bathing elephants were next on the agenda! We saw one baby elephant that we thought was really small until we saw the second one! SOO cute. Manase thought he was about 4 months old. The mom had her hands full because she still had another youngster with her that she was still taking care of.
A trip back towards our tented camp just wouldn´t have been the same without a lion sighting! And man was this one amazing! We first saw a pride of 2 females with 5 juvenilles that we crossing the road. The adults were making loud noises and Manase initially thought were calls towards other members of the pride that were close
by. We then saw two lions coming through the bush in the same direction. The pride stopped and stared in their direction and it became apparent that they were not calling them. They were most likely making warning noises! We watched for a long time and eventually the two adults stopped in their tracks and just stared in the direction of the pride. The pride moved on and got a drink of water and then took a break under a tree. The interesting thing was that the two adults never did turn around, they just sat and stared!
What a trip! We had no idea that we would see so many animals so close up. I love Africa!
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Molly James
non-member comment
wow
Damn..... those picture are amazing!!!!! You got to see so many animals!!