Our Blog - Safari 2023 - Ndutu area Day 2 - Part 2, Tanzania

Now to continue on the second part of a long day in the Ndutu area, with a little spotted hyena laying down in the grass.

Not the best pictures, but this is a white stork. It is a long-distance migrator, moving from Europe to Africa. An interesting tidbit ... they don't like to go over the Mediterranean because the air thermals that it needs for soaring do not form over water.

I mentioned that it seemed like most of the zebras had given birth already, and here you can see a little baby zebra. It is interesting that while the adults are very much black and white, the babies and brown and white. In addition, the babies seem "fuzzy" with a covering of fur while the adult skin is quite smooth.

This video was my attempt to show just how many animals there were out on the plains. The majority of them are wildebeests although there are a few zebras here and there.

We ended up in an area where we saw a few baby wildebeests although you will see a lot more when we get to the crater blog.

Another hyena, this time not hiding as well as the first one.

A family of cheetah, perhaps it is the same mother and 3 cubs that we saw earlier, but the cubs actually looked a little bigger here.

We caught up with a few more giraffe as we headed back towards the water.

I got this video of two giraffe ... walking around each other, playfully moving their necks. I'm not exactly sure how to explain it ... In the video, only 1 giraffe is really moving their neck around, which made me think that this was a male and a female, and one was attempting to "seduce" the other. But all of my research about giraffes and "necking" seemed to indicate that it would be 2 males that were challenging each other.

As we neared the end of our day, we (and about 12 other trucks) surrounded a set of lions. There was a large male and a female laying on the ground.

But then we saw 2 lions up in a tree. One of them we could clearly see had a tracking collar on.

The other one didn't seem to have a collar on.

We left the large group of trucks, who were still parked around the 4 lions. We we were heading back to camp, we saw another lion up in a tree, although definitely not in as comfortable a position as the other 2 ... this one seemed to be halfway sitting on the branch.