Chapter 2 -- All Creatures Great & Small

Now for your pictorial tour of the Mara's seemingly endless array of creatures...some beautiful, some bizarre, all interesting, and entertaining, to be certain.

Again, please pardon my admitted inability to eliminate photos.  There were simply too many animals out there, and/or too many pictures that I loved.  I hope you enjoy them as much as I loved taking them.  I WILL be back some day...hopefully with an obnoxiously big National Geographic photographer-looking lens on my camera!  Aren't you looking forward to sifting through that  muddled mess of a blog post?

One if by land...

Giraffe family outing -- Check out Grandpa and how much darker he is than everyone else.
They evidently continue to change color as they get older.

How funny are those little birds sitting on his neck?  Straight out of a cartoon!

Cape Buffalo, always down for a staring contest -- I probably have 20 pictures that look just like this one.

The eternal question: white with black stripes, or black with white stripes?

Although some have grey stripes in between!

For whatever warped reason, I find zebra butts irresistibly adorable.  Don't judge me... 

There may be about 4 zillion zebras out here, but I never think they're any less beautiful...

Hyena -- Definitely one of the weirder animals around.  Is it a bear?  Is it a dog?
And why does it always look like it's limping?  Its back legs are a good 6 inches too short...

Pack of hyenas hunting their breakfast -- They were tormenting a herd of wildebeests
and zebras when we left them.  I didn't care to see what happened next...

Jackal -- They may be small (like, Beagle small), but these things CREEP ME OUT.

Wildebeests -- And MAN, are these things dumb.  They're actually running into each other here.
No wonder they get eaten by just about everything.

There really is no way to accurately capture the expansiveness of the herds in a picture.  All I can tell you
is that every dark spot you see, all the way to the back of the horizon, is a
wildebeest.  We're talking in the millions.  It's insane.

Unlucky wildebeest -- We probably saw 25+ skeletons laying around, all in some phase of having
been someone's dinner.  Always a wildebeest, and strangely enough, never being actively
hunted or eaten by a cat or hyena or vulture.

And two if by sea...

♫ Never smile at a crocodile, never tip your hat and stop to talk awhile,
Don't be taken in by his welcome grin, he's imagining how well you'd fit within his skin... ♫ 

Hippos swimming towards us as we drove across the river -- No worries, though.  Jonathan's got it all under
control.  Just about as well as he had The Charging Elephant Situation under control (story to follow in Chapter 4).

Hippo Family Conference

The DLTs...

Clarification:  Aaron has coined a term for this group of animals, which he refers to as "The DLTs."  The "Deer-Like Things."  He can never remember which is which, and he thinks they all sort of look the same anyway, so whenever he sees one of them, he just points and says, "Ahh, look.  A DLT!"  I tried to pay attention and remember the names of the different ones, but honestly, every time I saw one, I just kept thinking, "Oh, ok.  DLT."  Damn Aaron and his bad influence... 

I actually do know this one -- Thompson's Gazelle.  I think these little guys are so cute!

Uhh...Impala, maybe??  Grrr.  AARON...

This is a Topi.  I only know because I asked Jonathan if it was a Water Buck, and he laughed at me...

Fine Feathered Friends...

Ostriches -- They were doing such funny things with their heads; I have
probably 15 pictures, all with their heads going in 4 different directions.

Vulture -- Not as ugly as you'd think.

This is a Bush Chicken -- Kind of like their peacock, I think?

Mirror Twins!

Can't remember what this is, but I like the picture anyway  :)

The uber special animals will follow in their own chapters...

** You'll notice the conspicuous absence of the rhino in any of these photos.  It wasn't for lack of trying -- we stalked a pair of them (there aren't too many in the Mara to begin with) for well over an hour one day.  There were probably 15 or so trucks camped out in the same, apparently popular spot for rhino-sightings, just waiting, and waiting, and waiting some more.  We eventually left when Jonathan caught wind of a cheetah being out in a good spot, and the next morning we heard that people had seen one of the rhinos, but only that morning.  Those who waited for even longer than we did the previous night must have eventually given up and left disappointed.  We're told that it's particularly difficult to find them during this time of year, due to the fact that rhinos don't like the smell of the wildebeests.  Well...you're out of luck then, buddies, because they're EVERYWHERE.  Apparently, too, the wildebeests are notorious for coming along during The Great Migration and eating up all of the grass in the rhino's favorite areas, so the rhinos tend to go elsewhere during these months to find their food.  Having previously seen plenty of them in one of the National Parks in South Africa, I was less disappointed than others, but...it did seem funny that they were the one sort of unicorn animal that no one could find.  Ahh well.  Guess I'll just have to come back another time and find myself a Kenyan rhino!