March 19, 2013
Cheetah, Three-Banded Plover, and Chacma Baboon in Kruger National Park, South Africa

My visit to Kruger National Park, South Africa, began with a bang! I entered through the Crocodile Bridge Gate in the southeastern corner of the park to quickly get to the Lower Sabie camp where I spent my first three nights. Within a mile (or kilometer) down the road, I spotted this Cheetah! While Kruger is one of the better parks in South Africa for cats, it's still unusual to see a Cheetah there. It was on the shoulder in the middle of a cheetah-jam, and after it moved away from the road and started paralleling the road, I was able to get ahead of it and make some nice images as it searched for prey.

Then within a mile (or kilometer) after leaving the Cheetah, I came upon a photographable Black Rhino. White Rhino are fairly common in the park, but it's uncommon to see a Black Rhino, especially one that's photographable. It was so nice to have good subjects to photograph right off the bat after Hluhluwe/Imfolozi had been so slow.

I just couldn't resist going to the Biyamiti Dam the next morning. It's one of my favorite locations for photography in the park because the dam is low and there's a causeway immediately downstream so that the water level above the dam is less than a foot below a car's windowsill. I wanted to check it out early in the trip to see what the conditions were like because the park experienced flooding in January. The area upstream of the dam was the most open that I've ever seen it. Usually there's lots of grass on the sandy shore and sandbars, but this time there was hardly any grass along the shore and no sandbars — great for photography. While I was there, this Three-Banded Plover came nice and close. It's great to be able to get eye-level images like this from the comfort of the front seat of your car — much more civilized than crawling into position on your belly through the sand!

Right before getting back to camp on my first full day in the park, I came upon another Cheetah! It was too dark to photograph it, but it was great to watch. Two Cheetahs in two days — unheard of in Kruger!

The highlight of my second full day in Kruger was photographing a troupe of Chacma Baboons late in the afternoon. There were two infants, and I had lots of opportunities to photograph them riding on their mother's backs as they generally made their way down the side of the road. At one point, most of the troupe went up on a rise by the road, and that's when I made this image of an infant. It's always nice to be at your subject's eye level, and I love the eye contact he gave me.

Oh, right around lunch time on my second full day, there were four Cheetah out on the sandy shore of the Sabie River. Six Cheetah in Kruger in three days — unbelievable!