Natural splendour, real musics, wines, wordpower
This post documents the last of our four close encounters with leopards in Namibia during November 2022.
The featured image shows “our hero”, not long after we had noticed him.
He was to our right; his quarry (a springbok) was where all the visible grazing mammals were at that time – to our left, on the other side of the relevant road.
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Pictured above is a leopard, stalking.
He had targeted a springbok, on the morning of 07 November 2022 in Etosha National Park, northern Namibia.
Almost exactly four months later, in very different habitat we enjoyed our first Indian sighting of a leopard.
The next two Pelican Yoga posts will feature each encounter, separately.
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All “true” wild boars – as distinct from domesticated pigs who have escaped and become “wild”/“feral” – hail from Eurasia or North Africa, the so-called “Old” World.
They are generally reckoned a single species, Sus scrofa.
Circa sixteen subspecies are recognised, and none are more striking than Sus scrofa cristatus, the Indian boar. (aka “Andamanese pig” or “Moupin pig”)
Its signature feature is a dorsal mane/crest that can be very spectacular, especially when it is a mature male’s, in erect mode.
Comments closedEvery living thing needs water.
However, different living things’ particular ways of accessing/consuming/conserving/using water, are hugely variable.
So are the quantities they require, how often they need to drink – if they do need to drink – and even the very nature of their relationship to water.
Certain terrestrial creatures absolutely relish water…and not just as something to drink or to swim in.
In this respect, warthogs are nigh-peerless.
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Classical Greek statuary, 21st century Hollywood, “supermodels”, “influencers”, Barbie and Ken, the work of profit-maximising cosmetic surgeons or “surgeons”, pedlars of “miracle” diets and so-called “beauticians”…
Is your idea of “beauty” the fruit of parameters set by one or more of the above?
If your answer is an unchangeable “yes”, you will never appreciate that warthogs are indeed beautiful…
Comments closed…but too many humans revile and/or ridicule suids – the pig family.
Warthogs (pictured above, at a waterhole in Namibia) get a particularly “bad press”.
They are routinely described as “ugly”.
Allegedly, their faces are ones that only their mothers could love.
To the best of my knowledge, I bear little resemblance to a warthog, but I really like warthogs’ faces…and their whole-hog selves.
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I loved the little moment which the image captures.
Had I been in front of the mother and daughter – and thereby made my presence intrusive – the moment simply would not have happened…at that moment, at least.
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A heron (or egret) in hunting mode delivers a fascinating, repeating sequence of events.
For unpredictably short or long periods the heron is a study in concentration and stillness, until that stillness is suddenly shattered by the bird’s speargun-like attack.
The prey – usually a small fish, crustacean, mollusc, amphibian or insect – is swallowed, rapidly.
The sequence then repeats…
For obvious reasons, a photographer cannot “capture” this behaviour from a very close vantage point, directly in front of the heron’s beak/“speargun”.
However, one can sometimes get surprisingly close, “from behind”.
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For a giraffe, drinking is as necessary as it is for any other mammal.
The very act of positioning oneself to make drinking physically possible is, however, an enormously more delicate, demanding task for a giraffe than for other mammals.
Giraffes’ approach to a waterhole is always slow, tentative, hesitant…and in a group.
Anxiety and hyper vigilance are especially evident at the crucial moment when a giraffe has to decide that it is now “safe” – or not – to get into drinking position.
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I took this photo in the latter part of an amazing three hours, which had begun shortly before sunrise, well within Jamnagar’s city limits.
Jamnagar, in western India, is a whisker inland from the Arabian Sea, in Gujarat.
Nearby is what bills itself as the world’s largest petrochemical plant.
You can’t see any feathers in this photo, but its humans are watching and/or photographing birds – water birds of many species, in profusion…all thriving in a far from pristine, definitely-urban wetland.
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