Cradle of Life

October 23, 2019                              Africa Blog #3

My featured gallery of Africa 2019 images is now live on my website. This collection of favorite captures from the photo safari will continue to grow in the weeks to come, but I invite you to take a look now.

One of the many highlights of the expedition was the great number of youngsters we were privileged to see. Three sightings were of newborns so fresh that the mothers still retained the afterbirth and the offspring were damp around the edges. Most notable was the baby giraffe, such a charmer with his earnest gaze and comical face! His mother was quite enamored of her new calf.

We also enjoyed time spent watching a just born topi (a variety of gazelle) as he practiced controlling his long legs and figuring out where the milk supply was located. And our guide’s sharp eyes spotted a tiny Thomson’s gazelle tucked safely away under an equally tiny shrub while the mother lay a short distance away licking herself clean.

One of the priorities on our checklist was to locate the cheetah mom with a litter of SIX cubs. There has not been a litter of six cheetah cubs in the Mara since 2010, so she is quite the celebrity. Our reliable guides took us to her on Day 2 and we spent several hours watching this contented mother lounging in the sunshine with her many children, until she shook herself awake and strolled off to hunt, babies scampering along behind mimicking her alert expression and searching gaze.The survival rate for cheetah cubs is only about 30%, but the 2010 mother managed to raise all six of her cubs to adulthood, so fingers crossed this prolific cat will also succeed in 2019. 

Another item high on our list was the one-in-a-million zebra foal, born mid-September. This unique creature has a genetic mutation to his stripe pattern, exceedingly rare, thought by many experts to be a form of pseudomelanism. Regardless, this very beautiful and unusual baby zebra was an instant international star, hitting the big news services and going viral on Facebook at the same time. Although we knew he had been discovered in the Mara, the game reserve is nearly 600 square miles in size so we weren’t holding our breath that our group would be so lucky as to spot him.

We should have had more faith – our guides had this task handled as well, and took us straight to this unique zebra colt and his herd two days in succession. The light was poor on day 1 and not conducive to good photographs, but on the second day, the sun was shining and lit the grass and the foal’s chocolate brown baby fuzz with a warm glow. Only a few days later, the communal radio chatter among the brotherhood of safari guides indicated that the foal and his dam had joined the migration north into Tanzania, crossing the river and vanishing into the unmonitored wilderness. We can only hope he survives and thrives and will be seen again when he returns next spring on the annual migration back to the Mara!

Existence in the African bush is precarious for new lives. The guides give names to the more important cats. The leopard mother of the precocious single cub is called Lorian. The oldest male lion in the Mara is named Scarface. I can’t spell or pronounce some of the names our drivers rattled off to us. But the guides will not christen the young ones until they have survived their first year.

We saw baby lions, baby cheetahs, baby gazelles, baby hyenas, baby giraffes, baby gazelles, baby elephants, baby zebras, baby warthogs, even baby birds. The one species that did not have newborns at their sides were the wildebeest. More about that in next week’s post: “The Migration That Wasn’t!”

Africa 2019 Gallery