March 9, 2013
Elephant, Meerkat, Jackal, and Caracal in Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa

Right after Mountain Zebra National Park, I visited Addo Elephant National Park, South Africa, for four days. They're perfectly situated so that one can photograph in one park in the morning, travel to the other park in the middle of the day, and photograph in the other park in the afternoon.

As one would expect, Addo Elephant National Park is a great place to photograph Elephants. This female is taking a mud bath and I like the way the mud was captured in mid air as she was spraying herself. What really prompted me to include this image in the blog however, is what happened after she finished with this spray, below.

This is the Elephant equivalent to a human in the shower saying, "Dang, I got soap in my eye."

The park has been good to me for unexpected subjects and behaviors, and on my first afternoon of this visit I spotted a group of Meerkat close to the road. As I set up to photograph them, I noticed this one on sentry duty up in a bush right at my eye level — perfect!

The next morning, I came across this Black-Backed Jackal eating a small Leopard Tortoise. Jackals are opportunists, but I had never seen one eat a tortoise before.

The biggest unexpected subject was this Caracal. You probably don't believe me after reading my recent blog posts, but they're extremely rare to see. Prior to my previous trip to Africa, I had never seen one in the wild, and even the guides in East Africa who spend a lot of time in the bush usually don't see one every year. I spotted this one on the road in the same area where Jan and I had spotted one two years ago. I stopped to set up to photograph it, and it hunkered down right by the side of the road among some brush as a guided game drive vehicle drove by oblivious to the unique sighting. However, they were quite amused by me making a three-point turn in the middle of the narrow dirt road with my camera out the window for no apparent reason. When I pulled up to the Caracal, it watched me nervously as I captured some landscape (above) and portrait images. Just look at those eyes! Then it dashed into the thick brush. I drove up and down the road hoping to spot it again in one of the clearings, but after a while decided to go look for another subject. As I rounded a curve, it was out in the middle of the road again! I quickly approached it and got some shots of it walking away from the road down an open path while pausing now and then to look back over its shoulder. What a cool set of encounters!