Nairobi National Park, Kenya - May 2014

At the end of our African vacation we were staying in a Nairobi hotel and had a sleep-in on the itinerary. I asked our guide if he would take my wife and I to Nairobi National Park ("NNP") while the others enjoyed their free morning. NNP is 45.26 square miles with electric fencing on three sides. The open southern boundary is the Mbagathi River which allows migrating wildlife to travel between NNP and the Kitengela Plains. We met our driver at 6:15 a.m. and it was only 6 miles (a 15 minute drive) to NNP. There were only two of us (instead of the usual six) and the guide in the vehicle, also less about six other vehicles that usually traveled with us, so we had more freedom in focusing on the wildlife we wanted to see, which meant I could spend more time looking at birds instead of just mammals. We saw our only East African eland of the trip, which was worth the excursion by itself. We watched mating lions, the only view we had of male and female lions interacting on the trip. We spent quite a bit of time watching an amorous male Masai giraffe trying to coax a much smaller female Masai giraffe to mate (unsuccessfully). We got our best views of Masai ostriches, some of them with very pink skin. We saw a white-browed coucal, a Diederick cuckoo, a long-tailed fiscal, birds we hadn't seen before, and marabou storks, common gallinules, and a kori bustard, birds we had seen before. We saw a colony of bush hyrax, including many young ones huddled with their parents; a herd of impala with two young males clashing horns; and got our best views of Coke's hartebeest of the trip. Even though we could occasionally see the tall buildings of Nairobi in the background, we felt very much out in the bush. We made it back for lunch and enjoyed dinner at Carnivore Restaurant that night.

Publicado el junio 12, 2022 09:58 TARDE por rwcannon57