We had our usual early morning start. Sam decided to take us to a spot close to where hyenas with their cubs were known to den. According to him, the curious cubs would often come out to look, when they heard a vehicle stop nearby. We could see them lying under a bush, but after waiting a while, we thought that they were not going to come out and we decided to leave. Soon Sam got a call on the radio, informing him that they had emerged when another vehicle stopped there, as we were leaving. This led to us making a U-turn and returning to the site.
Adult hyenas may be considered part of the “ugly five”, but their cubs are extremely cute.
After this we drove north to an area with open plains, where we saw some Springbok
and also found the lions we had seen at the zebra kill on our second day, now relaxing and sleeping in the grass. One male briefly acknowledged our presence, before lying down again.
The afternoon was cold, windy and overcast, the animals pretty much hiding from the elements and from us. My attempt at photographing a Wahlberg eagle in flight was not a great success, the dark eagle against the white clouds not photographing well. I did take my obligatory Lilac Breasted Roller shot though.
Once again, we saw numerous elephants and Wildebeest (Gnu).
In the overcast conditions, darkness arrived rather quickly, with none of the previous days’ spectacular sunsets. Just before dark, we found a group of two lionesses with 8 cubs. With aperture wide open, shutter speed as slow as I was comfortable with while shooting handheld and ISO as high as I was comfortable with, the photos were still very dark and some work in Lightroom and Topaz Denoise was required afterwards to make them usable.
This day was also an unfortunate reminder that things do not always go to plan during traveling. First there was an unfortunate little incident, resulting in my one camera meeting with a sharp edge on the floor of the game drive vehicle. This rendered the camera inoperable, but at least it was at the end of the day and I did not lose any photography opportunities due to this.
As if this wasn’t enough, when we arrived back at the lodge, we were informed that our flight out of Madikwe the next day, was going to be at least an hour delayed, causing concern about our ability to still be in time for our flight home. Not much one can do about that except wait and see.
Etienne's Camera 