Manyleti: days 4-5

Wildlife sightings were a bit slim in the bush this morning, but yesterday we had two great highlights: one was an invasion of our swimming pool area by a large breeding herd of nearly two dozen elephants, parched in the heat and eager to drink the water (which is unchlorinated and runs continuously over the pool’s far edge, where excess water fills a smaller pool from which the pachyderms drink). For that we didn’t have to leave the lodge.

The second was our third sighting of a leopard, as well as a new cat for me: the cheetah. We saw both cats within just an hour of setting off on our three-hour afternoon drive. All of these are documented below.

Before lunch every day, they set the tables and put out a plate of bread and rolls. I swear to Ceiling Cat that  the the vervet monkeys know when lunchtime is, and are aware of the tempting breadstuffs. This onr, whom I photographed before his Big Theft, ran into the dining room, and before anyone could stop her (I don’t know the sex, but without balls it seems to be a female), grabbed two pieces of bread, stuffing one in her mouth and holding the other in her hand. She then hied off and ran up a tree while the leader of a group of young Italian visitors, about to sit down at the table, yelled at the vervet. The leader then returned the plate to the kitchen, asking for a replacement (I wouldn’t have asked). The lucky primate then sat in the tree, stuffing herself with carbs.

After lunch the elephants began show up at the pool to drink, for the day was hot.The big one to the right is, I’m told, probably the matriarch of a breeding group that appears to be largely female (yes, elephants have, like all animals, only two sexes).

This gave one Italian visitor the chance to importune her boyfriend for the selfie of a lifetime:

The elephants started showing up individually or in small groups, so that eventually there were 21 of them, all vying to drink! They were of all sizes and ages, but so far as I can tell nearly all were female. Rosemary will, I think, do her best to verify or disconfirm this in the comments.

You can see the small runoff pool where most of the elephants drink, while the bigger one can reach their trunks into the larger and cleaner pool to the left (the regular swimming pool). It’s wonderful that the designers of this lodge provided for the elephants in this way:

All sizes were there; check out the little one under the matriarch. Its trunk could barely reach even the smaller pool.

Adult and infants get a drink of cool water:

What a sight! One of the employees told me that when it’s hot they often get this many elephants. The new human visitors to the lodge were stupefied at the sight.

As it was hot, some of them used the water to spray their backs, like this one. Many also fanned their blood-rich ears to cool off. And they clearly enjoyed playing in the water. One of them even blew bubbles into the small pool.

Within the first two hours of the afternoon drive yesterday, we saw two rare species of cat. The first was the same leopard we saw yesterday, now resting on the ground and apparently unperturbed by our vehicle:

Soon thereafter, our vehicle, which held eight plus local driver/guide Dan (two Italians, a family of four Frenchmen, and two Americans, including me and an astronomer from Baltimore), came upon a great species The French paterfamilias was good at spotting animals, and cried out late in the afternoon. He had seen something in the distance lying atop a large, defunct termite mound.

This is what it was:

Yep, a hard-to-find cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), the world’s fastest land animal. How fast is it? As you can imagine, its flat-out speed is hard to measure, but it’s about a mile a minute, attaining this speed from a standstill in just a few seconds. Wikipedia says this (bolding is mine):

The cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal. Estimates of the maximum speed attained range from 80 to 128 km/h (50 to 80 mph).  A commonly quoted value is 112 km/h (70 mph), recorded in 1957, but this measurement is disputed.  In 2012, an 11-year-old cheetah from the Cincinnati Zoo set a world record by running 100 m (330 ft) in 5.95 seconds over a set run, recording a maximum speed of 98 km/h (61 mph).

Cheetahs equipped with GPS collars hunted at speeds during most of the chase much lower than the highest recorded speed; their run was interspersed with a few short bursts of a few seconds when they attained peak speeds. The average speed recorded during the high speed phase was 53.64 km/h (33.3 mph), or within the range 41.4–65.88 km/h (25.7–40.9 mph) including error. The highest recorded value was 93.24 km/h (57.9 mph)

. . . Cheetahs have subsequently been measured at running at a speed of 64 mph (103 km/h) as an average of three runs including in opposite direction, for a single individual, over a marked 200 m (220 yd) course, even starting the run 18 m (59 ft) behind the start line, starting the run already running on the course. Again dividing the distance by time, but this time to determine the maximum sustained speed, completing the runs in an average time of 7 seconds. Being a more accurate method of measurement, this test was made in 1965 but published in 1997. Subsequently, with GPS-IMU collars, running speed was measured for wild cheetahs during hunts with turns and maneuvers, and the maximum speed recorded was 58 mph (93 km/h) sustained for 1–2 seconds. The speed was obtained by dividing the length by the time between footfalls of a stride. Cheetahs can go from 0 to 97 km/h (0 to 60 mph) in less than 3 seconds.

I think the one we saw (below) is a female though I couldn’t see teats. But testes should be visible if it were a male. It is slim and graceful, much thinner than the leopard shown above. Its figure shows the need for speed:

More from Wikipedia:

The cheetah lives in three main social groups: females and their cubs, male “coalitions”, and solitary males. While females lead a nomadic life searching for prey in large home ranges, males are more sedentary and instead establish much smaller territories in areas with plentiful prey and access to females. The cheetah is active during the day, with peaks during dawn and dusk. It feeds on small- to medium-sized prey, mostly weighing under 40 kg (88 lb), and prefers medium-sized ungulates such as impala, springbok and Thomson’s gazelles. The cheetah typically stalks its prey within 60–100 m (200–330 ft) before charging towards it, trips it during the chase and bites its throat to suffocate it to death.

What a lovely cat!

Now birds. Rita and Martim, as well as Dan, identify the large woven nests below as the product of the red-billed buffalo weaver (Bubalornis niger), a denizen of dry savanna. Here are three colonial nests in one tree, a tree with bark partly removed by elephant scratching (reddish area near the ground).

Wikipedia describes the nests:

Red-billed buffalo weavers breed in colonies. The nests are composed of an enormous mass of thorny twigs. These twigs are divided into separate lodges (compartments), each with multiple egg chambers. Each chamber has a smaller nest, typically built by the female (unless they are part of a cooperative breeding colony). The smaller nest is composed of grass, leaves, and roots. The whole nest is usually found in a thorny tree or in a windmill near areas inhabited by humans.

Two ways of looking at zebras:

To our best knowledge, as I’ve reported several times, the stripes evolved mainly as a deterrent to biting flies, which simply don’t like landing on striped substrates. They don’t seem to be any kind of camouflage or a deterrent to predation by carnivores.

. . . and a blue wildebeest:

Now from this morning.  These holes appeared overnight in the packed-earth parking lot, and we were told they were made by termites. I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I have inquired of an entomologist:

It was chilly and partly cloudy this morning, and this is an unmanipulated shot of the bush, which really is a black-and-white view at sunrise:

Pickings were slim on this morning’s drive (this is why you must stay at a place like this for, I think, at least four days).  Dan livened things up by propping up the skull of a dead hippo (I showed the skeleton before). He said this hippo had been badly mauled in a battle with another hippo, and died from bleeding out:

We had a rare “sunupper” today (the coffee we get near the end of a morning’s drive): we got to get out of the car and drink our java right near wildlife: a trio of giraffe. They were quite curious about us and looked at our group of nine intently for a long time:

Now that is what I call a coffee break!

Nearby, concentric species of dung: the darker and smaller droppings from a zebra surrounded the larger brownish ones from an elephant:

Every day we see one ostrich, and it’s always crossing the road. One might think it was confecting a joke:

Finally, Dan spotted rhino tracks (see below) and spent a long time trying to find rhinos for us. I’d already seen one, but as the longest resident of the lodge now—I’ve been here four days—none of the others had. Dan always tries hard to find hard-to-see species, but despite his getting out of the car and combing the bush, we found nada except for these prints:

But I have two more 3-hour drives (the animals I have yet to see include the Cape buffalo—my last of the Big Five—a hippo out of water, and the lilac-breasted roller (Coracias caudatus), one of the world’s most beautiful birds. I’ve actually seen the species twice, but they always fly away before I can take a photo. Here’s a shot taken from Wikipedia, as I doubt I’ll be able to photograph one properly: they’re not uncommon, but are also skittish:

The caption says that this one was photographed at Kruger National Park, which is right next door.