This Elephant is Ready for His Close-Up

Ready for Day 2 of our Serengeti safari trip? Today we’ll spend the entire day exploring the park — at 5,700 square miles, it’s slightly larger than the size of Connecticut and we’ll only see a relatively small part of it during our three days here.

We start at a nearby visitor’s center which has lots of information and displays, as well as a short walk.

Quick note about the above photo — in the event of a wildfire, even the fumes from this poisoned milk cactus are harmful. Crazy, right?

Here’s my sister Bethany.

Funny story about this type of bird — the males will build nests to impress the females. If they don’t pass the test, the female rejects both the home and the mate.

I guess that one didn’t measure up!

Many of my tour guides throughout Africa refer to impalas as “fast food for leopards” … because they have the McDonalds logo on their butts.

Something big awaits — there are dozens of safari vehicles lined up here as passengers ready their cameras.

Word soon spreads that there is a leopard in that tree — it’s the most elusive of the Big Five.

Let me describe this scene — the leopard is snoozing on the lower-right branch, and its fresh kill lies in the upper-left part of the tree. Can you see them?

Here’s a closer (albeit slightly blurry) shot of the leopard. I love how its back legs are totally relaxed, just hanging off the tree limb.

We hang around for quite awhile — it’s the first leopard anyone in our group has spotted on this trip, and we’re eager to see it in action — but it’s clearly not going to move. So eventually we press on.

It’s rare to catch a hippo above ground in the daytime — usually they submerge in water because their skin is sensitive to the sun. This one below pops out of the water for a few seconds while adjusting its position.

The male and female ostriches in the following photos do a mating dance:

We spot buffalo a few times throughout the day:

But the highlight of Day 2 in the Serengeti is the following elephant encounter. This bachelor male elephant emerges from the bush not too far away:

He sips water from a stream, content to hang out as a few adult females and one baby pass in the background.

A long sip:

But then we get a tad uncomfortable as this pachyderm moves closer to our vehicle.

Suddenly he’s right alongside our truck. We’ve been parked here with the ignition turned off since we first spotted him 100 meters away. He’s been well aware of us the whole time but all of a sudden he decides to check us out.

He’s so close — we’re all holding our breath at this point. I’m desperate to switch to my fish-eye lens but I don’t want to make noise, so I’m stuck with super tight shots on my telephoto lens.

He moves behind the vehicle which gives me time to get the fish-eye lens on. Then he roars at us!

Having asserted his dominance, he promptly loses interest and moves on to graze.

I wish I’d been shooting video when the elephant was right next to us, but I was distracted by the element of danger. However I did get footage of this big guy grazing; here’s a 40 second clip: