Up at 5 and ready for off at 5:40 so that we arrived in the forest via the electrified elephant fence(!) about 6:30 having picked up David Ngala who knows the Forest and its creatures very well. There were many different birds calling, and Jaap and David were naming them all and pointing them out. I found it a real challenge to see those birds, even when they were pointed out with David's little green light, so that's something I'll need to work at.
The big moment, though, came quite early on - a small brown creature with a bright gold backside trundled across the track about 80 metres away - the Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew! We only saw it for a couple of seconds, but it was very special...
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| Elephant fence gateway |
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| The Golden-rumped Elephant Shrew crossed just beyond where the bushes start on the left of the path |
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| Cat track - Serval perhaps |
We also found three trails of safari ants marching along or across the track. It isn't a good idea to get in the way of these folk - they operate very efficiently, getting onto anything or anybody who gets in their way, and the soldiers (the ones with the big heads and massive jaws) bite hard and hang on!
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| Safari Ant trail |
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| Safari Ants on the march |
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| Emerald-spotted Wood Dove |
I went home on a piki piki - motorbike taxi, because the others were on a course in the forest for the rest of the day, and got back just in time to go with Linda to look for butterflies in the Nature Trail. Again we were very lucky, she counted over 20 species and we got some great pictures:
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| This is the female Hypolimnus missipus and the male is below |
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| This butterfly has just laid an egg at the base of the leaf |
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| This is the caterpillar of the butterfly below |
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| Papillio demodocus |
After all that excitement, I went back to working on the booklet series after lunch - it's good to be in the shade on hot afternoons!
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