Lewa3

Thursday

It seems that every day we say “we had an amazing day” but it was true again today!  Our morning game drive took us to a new part of the Lewa Conservancy in search of rare antelope species. We were quite successful in our search. We saw dik-dik, gerenuk, klipspringers and greater kudu. We saw more rock hyrax, lion, ostrich and more common ungulates. We also saw a leopard, giving us a view of the last of the African big five (lion, Cape buffalo, rhino, elephant, and leopard).  We also saw two of the small five: an ant lion and a buffalo weaver.  The full list of the small five is: ant lion, buffalo weaver, elephant shrew, rhinoceros beetle, and leopard tortoise.

These sightings would have made a great morning, but the highlight was undoubtedly seeing four young hyena.  We had first spotted the adult hyenas, but as we got closer, we saw one pup, then we saw another, then two more.  Their mothers decided we were not dangerous and went off to hunt, leaving us free to watch the puppies play and be curious about us for as long as we liked.  The puppies were of three different ages.  Joseph said that hyena tend to have twins; so these were the puppies of three different mothers. Truly, baby anything are cute! 

During the game drive, Joseph, our guide, gave us a brief overview of the geology of the area.  Lewa sits in a hilly bowl formed by three mountain ranges. Mt Kenya, an extinct volcano to the northeast, is one of the highest peaks in Africa and last erupted about two million years ago. Subsequent volcanic eruptions occurred by magma flowing through cracks in the bedrock, pushing up the three mountain ranges, the most recent only 200,000 years ago, and in some cases later lava flows filled in the canyons the earlier ones had created. All of this makes for a dry (in the rain shadow of the mountains) environment with a complicated geology.  Until cattle farming (by westerners as well as the local tribes) began in the 19th century, Lewa was too harsh an environment for settlement.  We also learned that to keep elephant from killing trees by stripping the bark, you should hang beehives from the trees. Elephants don’t like bees, and giraffes don’t like ants! 

The afternoon drive (the final drive of our stay at Lewa) was a show stopper.   Our first encounter was an eagle owl.  It was sound asleep; therefore an easy target for a photographer.  Next we came to a huge herd of zebra.  It was a mixed herd of Grevy’s and plains zebra.  After that we saw all the big five in one afternoon drive!!  The rhino sighting was a female black rhino with her baby.  We got an excellent viewing of a leopard, first by a stream in long grass and later walking to, and jumping up into, a pile of fallen branches. The climax of the big five sightings was a pair of lions mating, not once, but twice.

The photos are hyena puppies, a generuk, and the second leopard of the day.