When the Lions are away, the Leopards come out to play (April 2019)

[Mel]

Thanks for the comments, peeps That eland sighting was something else indeed!

And no, Lis, they were not fast fast, but they were skittish and didn't like our car much

[Mel]

13th to 19th April 2019 Urikaruus

My mission while staying at Uri was to find Miera with her two grown-up cubs. Since I didn't know that they weren't really hanging out together anymore, I had stupidly believed that it must be easy to see them at least once over a period of six days. Never happened.

Mission two was to find out if Corinne and Hanri respectively were still with their grown-up cubs. Also never happened.

We did have the odd good sighting though anyways

But first things first.

Upon our arrival the local crowd danced and sang with joy that we were back at Uri

The resident hornbill performed...

... and ended with a bow.

[Mel]

With the sunset the lions came. Things were looking up again, we thought. But this would be our last lion sighting of the trip. We saw 8 lions in total - two of them dying, so they don't count. And our six lions we had seen all in one day

[Mel]

The next day we took it slow as we usually do after a long day's drive and went out rather late. But there hadn't been much to be seen anyway, as we would learn later in the day from other guests at the camp. One guy had actually gone out with gate opening and only returned at gate closing again, with having seen absolutely nothing apart from the antelopes and other regulars.

We had at least some giraffes and meerkats

[Mel]

At night, the genet visited again… And I made sure to watch it at all times, prepared to get into the hut in case the creature would hop onto the roof of the deck and try to mark me again

[Flutterby]

At least you got to see the lions that night!

And cute meerkat sighting!

Great pic of the genet!

[Lisbeth]

The skinny lion makes me sad

The meerkats make me happy and also the genet is lovely

I love the hornbill

The situation must have been really tragic for the animals.

Do you know how it is now? Has it rained enough?

[Richprins]

AW members are not so good with mission accomplishments!


But not bad at all, and the flash pics are very interesting and subtle...how do you do that, Mello?

Clever bird orchestra, and nice crow, we don't really get crows much...

[Pumbaa]

Simply love the genet, Mel,

and great shots of the meerkats and that is the way it will happen in parks like that sometimes you never know where to look first and on other days you will see nearly nothing

[Mel]

Thanks Flutts, Lis, Richprins and Pumbaa

But not bad at all, and the flash pics are very interesting and subtle...how do you do that, Mello?

I used only my headlight torch

Do you know how it is now? Has it rained enough?

People were still quite positive for rain to happen although they also complained that winter rains are cold
(Don't we know that?!). I'm not sure if it has rained enough generally but on our last night the north had
received some very productive rains and it spread throughout the park over the next days. So much that
they had major puddles in the road and the riverbeds held water at least for some time.