Elephants can reproduce easily and the death of young elephants is not to common. they are familial and protect the youngsters from the day they are born. Females will have a 250 pound youngster every 3-10 years after the previous youngster. The condition of the female (age & health) probably determine when she will ovulate. Females are in heat for a very short time and then they have an almost two year gestation period. The youngsters can eat at two year but most females lactate for four years. The females begin breeding at about 15 years and the young males are persuaded to leave the matriarchal group at about ten years – when they become a teenage nuisance and start to chase the girls.

This page is on the elephants at the Royal Zambezi lodge on the Zambezi River in Zambia. This is one of Africa’s most picturesque locations and the elephants and hippos are always in sight.

Outside the tent/chalets is the river and in the river are elephants. they are around pretty much all the time and generally provide photo opportunities rather than consternation. This one is sloshing in the wet grasses just outside my room. The area outside the river channel is quite dry and elephants enjoy the water and the wet plants.

My deck rail is in the foreground as this girls wanders past. In most cases the animals here are parts of small family groups although there are a few single males around as well. Elephants will eat hundreds of pounds of vegetation each day so they are either in the dry woodlands breaking up trees or along the river drinking and eating the softer wetter vegetation. There are elephants in good numbers here in both habitats.

Because the lodge is right up against the river (the better to go tiger fishing from) animals that utilize the river edge are often in or near camp. The image above and the one below show an elephant working along the river edge. the tent/chalets can be seen just set back a bit from the water.

As far as I know they just wander the edges and cause almost no trouble (usually). But there are occasions where a new group may arrive and not understand the protocols associated with suburban life. It is always wise to have an escort in the dark and to be careful in the daylight.

The image above and below here show an elephant that uses the path and then gathers seed pods that have fallen onto the roof at the reception/dining/gathering building.

The last image, below, is an elephant from Namibia. but he was just to grand not to add in to this page… He was just magnificent.

Leopards are better than lions; well maybe not better but they are more interesting in many ways. Lions are rather common on the African savannas where as leopards may also be common* and widespread but no where are they as easy to locate or watch. In both cases the animals, lions and leopards, are likely to be dozing during the day. Cheetahs are the only truly diurnal cat. To see a leopard up close is memorable and to see one go through a variety of leopard behaviors is quite special.

In Zambia, along the Zambezi River, inside the Lower Zambezi NP we came upon a most cooperative young female leopard. this was great for us but may not play out as great for her. Leopards should be shy and retiring, spending the day in a tree or thicket, and living as a creature of the crepuscular times. She was seen several days in a row out in the open and on the ground near her food/kills. This will soon invite lions and hyenas to the area and she may not only loose her lunch but her life.

But anyway, this was about a two year old female who is out on her own after spending her first two years with her mother. She may have had litter mates as leopards commonly have multiple births. She successfully hunted a baboon just  before dusk as the baboons were headed to a roost tree for the night. And the next morning she had killed a young impala. In neither case did she take the remains to a tree. She probably left the baboon remains, there wasn’t much left over, for the night scavengers and made the kill early the next morning.

This animal was clean and shiny. Her like so far has been easy and she is pretty much untouched by her surroundings. Now that she is away from her mother and on her own things will likely become more demanding.

So, she slinked away, low and pretty much out of sight. Once she had moved so the impalas and baboons couldn’t see her she relaxed again.

She had most of this impala remaining so her desire to hunt was not based on food but on a cats instinct and desire to hunt.

When she relaxed she lay out on the ground usually right out in the open. Most leopards learn to climb trees to avoid encountering troublesome competition. It is probable that when lions or hyenas arrive to steal her dinner she will learn to (both) hide her food and herself in the local trees during the stay and during siesta time. If she doesn’t learn this lesson the lions and hyenas are likely to kill her or at least make her regret learning slowly.

She is a nice looking animal. I will be back there in a few weeks and hope that she is still around. As I said she is about two years old and will likely breed at two and a half. The male is not part of the scene after mating. Lions are the only social and group cat. The female will secret the baby away for a few weeks and then keep it/them with her for about two years.

A female leopard will weigh only one hundred pounds, max at about 130. A male will be about 20% heavier and sometimes even more.  * Leopards are thought to be common and widespread in all habitats excepting extremely arid ones. But, as they are secretive, nocturnal, and quite heavily poached it is difficult to get a real sense of how many there are in any given area. Their main predators are man and lions; two rather common animals in most leopard habitat.

New Zealand’s Fox Glacier is in the Southern Alps on the western side against the Tasman Sea. The entire west and shatter into smaller pieces, often very much like shale.side of the South Island is rugged and there are few roads that go east/west and really only two roads on the entire island that go north/south.
By road the Fox Glacier is between Haast and Greymouth on the #6 road. There are two glaciers that one can get to visit in this area; the Fox and the Franz Josef Glacier. In actuality (as the kiwi walks) these two spots are not to far from Mount Cook* but you have to drive a big loop to get to the glaciers as there are no roads through the mountains except heading for (1) Milford Sound (and that is a dead end road with no north or south options at its terminus, (2) the road from Wanaka to Haast, (3) the road over Arthur’s Pass that heads east back to Christchurch, and (4) the northern road up near Westport.
*Mount Cook is where the famous mountaineer Edmund Hillary trained. Mount Cook is a great destination but the road in to the site is a bit remote. the actual road to the hotels and camping areas is a road that does dead end into the eastern side of the Southern Alps. The two glaciers are on the western side and there is no road that even comes close to connecting these two spots. The educational films at the Mount Cook interpretive center are simply magnificent. The mountain and its story are both grand and the biography film about Hillary is touching, explanatory, and so real you feel as if you are climbing and trudging along with him. And you feel just as sad and emotionally drained as he did when the plane crash ki…….. oh no!, go see it for yourself. It is worth the trip.

The mountains that make up the Southern Alps are often made of layers of compressed mud stones. These sort of rocks erode way in layers creating loose pieces of shake which eventually slide down the mountainsides and accumulate at the bottom of the slope.

There are often gray valleys that are simply a mountain in the process of falling apart. tThe vegetation does its best but the slopes are poor in nutrients and don’t hold water, so life is difficult.

Where there are roads they often follow a valley or switchback up to the easiest pass and then switchback down the other side. Here a bridge passes over a wide gravel expanse that demarcates the boundaries of a glacial river as it drops down from the mountains. In time of flood these rivers will have many stream beds and as the water diminishes there will be a main channel of perhaps no visible water at all, only the stones that have washed down from the decaying mountain upstream.

Fran was excited to see the glacier as she had never seen a river of ice before. I’m not sure what she expected but this was not a huge groaning ice floe. It was a glacier being covered by silt, stone, and debris as it slowed its progress and the moraine material it was dragging or pushing along was able to cover the surface.

But it was a river of ice and it would have to do. It is so easy to see these glaciers as living entities straining through rocky passages, breaking mountains, and transporting the mountain-fragments toward the sea. The accumulated dirt and ground stone was visible everywhere. When a glacier is large and active it is often part of a series of glaciers that descend for several mountain valleys and connect at a lower level level. Some ice fields will have glaciers descend and combine so that one large glacier reaches the sea but the tributaries can be found in the dirt-lines that form when two glaciers join. The lateral moraines of the glaciers are imbued with grit and that grit joins with the grit of the neighboring glacier leaving a stripe dow the middle of the new and larger glacier.

Here the melt water from the glacier runs out from under the ice. Stones hold heat and melt into the galciuer and the ice cracks and crazes as it moves. there are myriad options for water to invade the glacial ice. It then drops to the ground and flows downhill.

The glaciers are heavy and powerful and they crush rock to dust. this dust is in the water and makes the water milky in color.  All glaciers that have rivers emanating from the will have this color water.

Eventually the river valley fills with pics of the mountain and the river drains through the glacial spoil.

New Zealand does a pretty nice job with wildlife properties and interpretation. The national parks are well managed and public access is quite comfortable. They have almost no vandalism is these areas, which makes life much easier for those responsible for the sites.

On the way back through Arthur’s Pass toward Christchurch we happened on a group of the “bad boy” parrots called Kea. They are birds of the mountains and are often in the snow fields. they will also tear the rubber gaskets or windshield wipers of vehicles. They are great birds for a visitor to see, but can be a nuisance.

You’d think that a sparsely vegetated dry countryside would be devoid of life. Well, nature doesn’t work that way – in fact there are many creatures adapted to this harsh environment and then there are creatures that are adapted to eating those things that are adapted to the harsh environment. All it takes is time, lots of time.
There are fewer animals and plants over all and the diversity doesn’t compare to places like Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, or Borneo or other wet and crumpled countrysides. But there is quite a variety of life in the Namibian desert.

Because this is a sparsely populated country the roads are not always sealed. But there isn’t much traffic so the roads are pretty much yours to drive as you wish. We happened on this other mode of transport and stopped to say hello and hand out a few bottles of water.

 

Much of the charm and interest in Namibia is based on the great dunes just inland from the coast. The names Deadvlei and Sossusvlei are but two of the many majestic and unlikely mounds of sand in this huge complex. The whole of the country is dry and seemingly barren. In the north the great Etosha pans are chalk. The Namib is largely sand. There are high erg (rocky desert plateaus) plains and exposed rock mountains. It is a geologist’s paradise. The vista swing from dry and hard to soft and sweeping. Many areas are layer upon layer of ocean-floor sediments and other areas are mountains of windswept sand. The roads also change from germanic straight to mountainous switchbacks with each curve opening a view onto another plain or dune ridge or sandstone cliff.

 There isn’t much vegetation, but there is some pretty cool vegetation. There are grasses (shown three images above) and trees where there is soil and permanent (or regular) water. There are also many representatives of the plant group Euphorbia, a cactus-like group found in Africa and Asia.

The tree shown in the above two images are Quiver Trees; an aloe. The San (Bushmen) would hollow out a branch to use as a quiver. Near the town of Keetmanshoop there is a Quiver Tree Forest NP. Strangely, this is a nationally protected property but is on a private land holding. One of the trees there has a huge Social Weaver nest in it.

In North America and South America we have leafless, spiny, barrel-shaped plants with spines and photosynthetic skin called cactus (cacti). In this part of the world there is a group of leafless, spiny, barrel-shaped plants with photosynthetic skin and poison called Euphorbia. Parallel (sometimes convergent) evolution is the term for things that adapted to widely spread habitats and have evolved the same sorts of characteristics; like cactus and euphorbia.

 The two landscapes above show that sand isn’t all the same. Some has iron in it and oxidizes red. Other has had tiny particles brought by the occasional rain over the centuries that now forms a clay-like layer in a hollow or swale. These depressions become shallow lakes when it does rain and some years the puddles will persist for many months.

The sand was formed from an eroding mountain range and washed into the Atlantic over the past several million years. Much of the sand now seen on the ground and in the dunes has been brought northward and then spewed onto the shore as the ever-active ocean, powered by the Benguela Current, moves sand all the time. In many ways the sand goes round and round: from land to ocean, northward to land again, southward by wind and back into the ocean.

The eroded canyon below is the Sesreim Gorge. It is a washed out area that shows river worn stones and many layers of conglomerate rock. This 100′ deep canyon was eroded by a flooding about two million years ago. It is an area of unlikely configuration but may give some indication of what lies under the Namib-Naukluft National Park.

The countryside is mostly ranch land, with very poor grazing; but a great deal is national park land. The visitors are allowed to walk through much of the area and experience the sand and wind on a very personal basis. There is a tractor and wagon that gets people out through the soft sand to the larger dunes. Even when going downhill there is no sense of a forward gravitational pull as the friction of each step is isolated from any larger movement. It is very pleasant and a bit surprising.