Harnas

About 2 weeks ago, our colleague friend and I planned another surprise for Kevin for his birthday.  Harnas was where we had originally wanted to go for his actual birthday, but since it didn't work out for the day of the birthday, we figured we'd put the plan in motion for another time when Kevin wouldn't expect it.

The deal with this place is that that they've rescued animals that wouldn't have survived in the wild for some reason and rehabilitate and reintroduce them if/when possible.  Harnas also takes visitors on their daily feedings, which is what we did.

Leopard:

The cheetahs may have been the coolest part of the excursion since we took the vehicle into their enclosure.

The wild dogs were interesting in their own way too.  Unfortunately we couldn't upload the video to show you, but their sound, if you can call it that, is just obnoxious!

I've never seen juvenile ostrich play before, but they were puffing out their wings and spinning around together.  It's pretty adorable!

One of the thorniest trees we've seen yet!  And that's saying something!

Dung beetles

Truly amazing. Nature's dump trucks. Thanks to Patches for providing us specimens, we captured these waste disposers in the following footage.

Digging the hole:

Rolling in the dung:

You can see how they are made perfectly to do this wonderful job too!  So cool!  (If you're a dork like me/us, anyway.)

When I told a Namibian that we don't have dung beetles where we're from, he was shocked!  His suggestion was we import and sell them.  I can see our business now: "Go green with nature's pooper scooper!"  I must say, we do find them to be quite helpful to have around!

For more on the dung beetle, visit Nat Geo kids!

Etosha

Photos from a recent visit to Etosha:

(Spring bok)

(Kudu)

(Oryx)

(Flamingos)

(Elephant just bathing itself)

(A pretty devoured giraffe carcass. Look closely at the left side to see the neck and head.)

The jackal (above) prefers to feed on what the predator has already killed.  This seemed to be a pretty recent kill, so we were just wishing we got to see it!  We had our eyes peeled for that lion.

And just for the sake of comparison...!

Here, Patches enjoys the leg of horse (from about the knee down) in which he dragged out of the tall grasses in our backyard.  Pretty gross, but he's sort of a wild animal too, right?  (He hasn't died yet..!)


Don't you love how Patches manages to find his way into nearly every blog post... :-P

Game

We saw some awesome game on a nice drive this weekend, all of which were highly visible and close to the road... Giraffes.  Zebras.  Baboons.  Ostriches.  Spring bok.  Something that looked like mini spring bok?

Didn't have a camera handy unfortunately, but we have a feeling we will be seeing some more wildlife soon and will be prepared with our camera for the occasion so we can share with ya'll. :-)

Our Namibian pets.. if we wanted

I think this is a very large locust, but thinking of him as a grasshopper seems less gross to me. These guys are all over...

And this is a chameleon someone found along the road who was a pretty good find!


Our host sister's friend also found a snake along the road and killed it, though it seemed like a harmless garden snake from the corpse. To be identified...

Baboons

Finally some wildlife photos (and video). Here we have the Papio ursinus (coincidence?!). We also saw some cross the highway the other day, so we'll probably get used to seeing these guys pretty quickly:





You might also say that the baboons made monkeys out of us: