Monday morning saw the arrival of a coach load of young schoolchildren and their teachers who were here for a conservation education day. After I’d taken loads of gorgeous photos of the children, I learned that due to the child protection policy I’m not allowed to put anything on social media that easily identifies the child so I’ve had to […]
51 hours after leaving home, I finally arrived at Dumela Lodge, my home for the next 12 weeks. I was met with lots of hugs from the lovely people I worked with last year, and after taking my bags to my room I spent a couple of hours out in the garden with them enjoying a braii. (The South African […]
I’ve covered most things in my previous posts, but here are a few more photos and snippets of what I spent the last couple of weeks doing: Avoiding vicious thorns and seeing Sacred Ibis that weren’t really there! Meeting a little rescued Meerkat: Seeing some gorgeous sunsets, moon rises, and helping Aaron photograph the moon: Getting ridiculously excited when I […]
On a couple of mornings we got up early and left at 6.00 to drive to the bird hide. The hide is newly built and overlooks a man-made lake, in which hippos wallow, wildlife drink, and birds congregate. The hide is sunk below water level, so when sitting down our eyes are level with the slit window. This has one-way […]
Unfortunately we are not far away enough from the nearest town to have completely dark skies, so my attempts at star trails have been unsuccessful due to the light coming from there. Here are a couple but I’m not really happy with them as you can clearly see the glow from the lights at the bottom of the images. […]
Unfortunately lions and cheetah are not vegetarian, so ‘meat prep’ is part and parcel of looking after them. What goes in must come out, so the day after the lions and cheetahs have been fed, we clean their enclosures. As they are quite large areas this involves searching in long grass with a shovel at the ready and a wheelbarrow […]
Last week we went to Pilansberg National Park which is about an hour and a half away. This Big Five game reserve is the same size of Singapore, so obviously we only covered a small portion of it. We had some good sightings of Elephants and Rhinos which we don’t have here at Sable Ranch, as well as a […]
The best seat in the house is actually not in a house, but is the tracker seat on the front of a game viewer. Whenever an offer is made to do something new I generally say ‘Yes’, so leaped at the chance to sit in front of the bonnet on a game drive. There is just a lap belt to […]
The Best Seat in the House, Big Birds, Sunsets, & Headbutting Nyala.Read More »
It’s a good job I don’t mind my clothes getting dirty when I’m out here. Feeding the Vervet Monkeys involves having milk spilled onto me from their bottles, and then bits of grape skin being spat out as they only like the flesh. If they are sitting on my lap or shoulders this of course means that it’s dropped onto […]
