Tag: photography

Elephant …

I met my first wild Elephant on the 16th of August 1997. You never forget your first.

It was first thing in the morning of our first day on safari, Mombo, Botswana. I had the rear seat of an open safari vehicle. We came upon a youngish male. He was running along thrashing the vegetation. The driver/guide pointed out the secretion of temporin running down its face and the seminal fluid dripping from its penis. Told us that its testosterone levels were through the roof. Its mania was due to the state of musth, an annual event for bull elephants over about 30 years of age. After a while we overtook it and continued on our way.

About 15 minutes later we came upon our first collection of Impala. We stopped with our rear wheels in a bit of a ditch and turned off the engine. Our driver/guide pointed out that this was a male and his harem and began to explain the exhausting and competitive life of the male Impala. Turned three quarters around to address his guests he was well placed to notice a maniacal male elephant charging the back of the vehicle. He immediately started the engine and set about rectifying the situation.

But forgot that the rear wheels were in a bit of a ditch and stalled the engine. Valuable moments were lost. The engine was restarted, many more revs were injected and we were on the way again. The elephant had its head down, fortunately for me because those tusks could easily have impaled me. Its forehead hit the rear end of the vehicle but by that stage our relative velocities dampened the impact to a minor blow.

Those were the days of single shot exposures and 200 ASA colour slide film. The head filled the frame but it wasn’t a keeper, poor focus and too much motion blur.

Cheetah …

Nought to 70 in two and a half seconds, a top speed of 100 kph plus, 7 meters per stride. Impact. Choke hold. Suffocation. Consumption. No time wasted. The chase occurs over a maximum of about 200 meters and has a success rate of about 50%. The Cheetah is the obvious choice as the falconer’s cat and has been tamed and used for hunting for perhaps 5000 years, probably in ancient Sumer, certainly in early Egypt.

Today the Cheetah, Acinonyx jubatus, is confined to Africa plus a small isolated population in Iran. It was once far more widely distributed disappearing from North America at the end of the last ice age. Then dwindling in Asia in the last few centuries. There appears to have been a couple of population bottlenecks along the way indicated by a very high level of homozygosity.

Males tend to live territorial lives in small coalitions usually of brothers. Females roam more widely on their own or with their youngsters. Males and females come together only to mate.

Hunting usually takes place in the morning or evening. Loss of their kill to other predators is common. They usually eat immediately, don’t return to a carcass and don’t scavenge.

Spotted in Africa …

Bold, beautiful, smart and really really weird. Very capable hunters, social, ferocious and, did I mention, really really weird. Crocuta crocuta, the Spotted Hyena. For a very interesting account of just how weird go <HERE>.

But briefly, the girls are bigger and stronger and have bigger dicks than the boys. The alpha female rules the clan. Their genitalia mimic the male genitalia so well that to be sure you need to squeeze the scrotum (presumably the boys then burst into tears).

It looks like a dog, hunts like a dog, and very successfully too, taking down Zebra and Buffalo and killing far more than scavenging. But the last time it shared a common ancestor with the dogs was 50 million years ago when the feliforms and the caniforms went their separate ways.

Dogs …

Just kidding about the wildflowers. Although my camera was easily distracted my focus was on carnivora.

God tossed a meteor at the dinosaurs about 64 million years ago clearing the way for the mammals. The carnivora emerged in the next 10 million years or so and soon diverged into two main groups, the feliformia and the caniformia. A few more mutations later and we had the house cat and a state on the west coast of America.

Actually we can be a bit more precise than that. A recurring question on the expedition was which group belongs where. I have appended a diagram showing the broad outline of relationships to the bottom of this post. Hopefully whoever holds the copyright won’t notice.

Meanwhile, dogs.

Lycaon pictus from the Greek meaning Wolf-like and Latin painted. Some conservation minded groups prefer the name Painted Dog to the traditional Wild Dog. Gives it a better spin. The local people often nominate it as their favorite animal. It’s social, shares food, hunts cooperatively and very successfully relying on stamina and persistence rather than speed and power. So a lot of characteristics that we admire in people.

Now, as promised, an overview of the carnivora.

Relationship of carnivores based on DNA hybridization data (Wayne et al. 1989). Family and suborder groupings are indicated. Time scale in millions of year before present (MYBP) is based on comparisons of DNA sequence divergence to first appearance times in the fossil record. 

Panthera leo …

Would Lions find the elephant? We would not know the answer because we would move to our next camp before they showed up but there was no shortage of lions.

We had the opportunity to see them at work and at rest, adults and young, hunting, feeding, copulating, suckling, grooming. We were not present at a kill but witnessed close escapes by Impala and Warthog and a standoff with a herd of Buffalo.

How much do they hunt and how much do they scavenge? The world wide web suggests that they might scavenge somewhere between 10 and 50 per cent of their food varying with pride size, season, territory and gender. Male Lions are said to be lazier than the females as well as bigger. If they have a lioness to do the work they just eat, if not then they take the easy option and scavenge when they can, hunt when they can’t.

For every kilogram of carnivore there needs to be about 10kg of herbivore. For every 10kg of herbivore there needs to be about 100kg of herbs. And providing all the energy for the herbs is the sun.

Corollary. For every photograph of a carnivore there should be ten photographs of herbivores. That’s not the way it works though, the carnivores get the lion’s share even in a figure of speech. There will be more …

Dry …

It doesn’t come with a guarantee of zero rain but it feels so different. The nights are cooler, the sky is clearer and the humidity is way less. The dry is upon us.

I thought I’d try out the new OM1 mark ii and the 7-14mm lens with a milky way shot. Rather than drive out into the country side I drove 10 minutes to the beach at Entrance Point and pointed the camera away from the city lights. With the camera on a tripod I used a single shot of the milky way – 15 seconds at ISO 6400 f/2.8 and combined that with a single light painted shot of the foreground at ISO 800.

Lucky Stars …

It’s an hour before dawn, the vault of the sky is cobalt blue. The foreground is lit by the almost full moon behind me. The tide is way out. I’m up to my ankles in mud and making a blood donation to a flock of mosquitoes. And I thank those lucky stars for the opportunity to be here to see and photograph this exquisite moment.

Moody Skies …

Nature has been serving up so photogenic skies in recent days …

Click on the gallery to get a good look.

And some house keeping …

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