Big 5 Bonanza at Berg en Dal

 Sunday 12/12/21

A TEST:- Who can spot the animal?  No cheating and scrolling down.

We're not Big-5 chasers at all, in fact we get quite angry at the Pokemon chasing app-followers who race around from scrum to scrum of the latest sighting, seemingly ignoring the rest that Kruger has to offer. 

We much prefer the quieter routes where we can slowly enjoy all the bird and animal life, not only the 'popular' ones.

Nope, this isn't it, this is just to check if you are cheating...

That said, we have remained aware that we hadn't yet seen all of the big 5 so were rather thrilled when saw all 5 before 9am on our final game drive of this visit.

Yep, there's a Leopard peeping at us through the branches

Luckily we'd seen it before it hid away otherwise it would have been difficult to spot.
(No pun intended.)

We then had an easy sighting of Elephant, well they're hard to miss, really.

We were so busy watching Kingfishers we almost didn't notice these two nearby.

We the had a rather obscure Lion sighting before stopping for brunch, 
but it still counts.

And we wrapped it up with loads of Buffalo, just before 9 am.

We managed some new bird ID's as well, and were lucky enough to watch Kingfishers fishing and a Bee-eater catching a bee (well, it was a wasp).  We weren't able to identify the fish caught by the Kingfisher though.

Pied Kingfisher (with fish), Reed Cormorant and Southern Foam frog's nest

The baby Impala have been an absolute joy to watch.

Arty shot of a Pied Kingfisher

White-crowned Shrike

Toni spotted some cinnamon coated buns, but they turned out to be
Cinnamon-breasted Buntings

Unsure on the id, think it may be a Pipit

Bee-eater doing it's job.

Just for good measure, we had a lovely sighting of two endangered animals again, Wild Dogs and Ground Hornbills.  The dogs came jogging past us effortlessly, clearly on the lookout for something to chase after.

Wild dogs jogging effortlessly down the road

Not even a sideways glance.

Juvenile Ground Hornbill to round off the drive's sightings

Tomorrow morning we leave the Park and head off to our house-sit at Hartebeespoort, which will be a change in scenery for us.  We'll miss the Park life but, Covid willing, we'll be back in January.