Afternoon Game Drive - 10 & 11 October 2025

A partial albino baby elephant was one of the highlights spotted during this game drive. Commentary for all the sightings provided by safari guide Leon Marais from Lawson's Birding and Wildlife Safaris.

0.00s

Highlights Introduction

0.38s

Guide Interview Questions & Answers

4.01s

Partial Albino Elephant

7.21s

Juvenile Bateleur

8.36s

Waterbuck

9.25s

Hyena Den

14.07s

Impala, Vervet Monkeys and Warthog

14.57s

Lions

16.03s

Leopard

16.31s

Outro

A transcript of the video is provided below...

Guide Interview Questions & Answers

The guide commenting on these sightings is Leon Marais from Lawson's Birding and Wildlife Safaris. I asked him some questions about his guiding career just to get to know him a little bit better.

What Are Your Guiding Qualifications And Field Experience?

Hi, Bruce, looks like you guys had an amazing couple of drives, or I don't know if it was one drive or more than that, but it looks like you did very well.

So thanks for giving me the opportunity to comment on these sightings.

In terms of my guiding qualification and field experience, while I've got the usual detail, the sort of government, standard government registrations to be a tour guide and also have the Field Guides Association of Southern Africa's national birding qualifications, qualified as a birding specialist to guide anywhere in South Africa

In terms of field experience, well, I've done tour guiding for close to 20 years and some actual lodge field guiding before that. So I've done a few years.

My experience is gone across a lot of South Africa and a lot of Southern Africa as well. Namibia and Botswana, etc, a bit of Zimbabwe and Mozambique even, and also a bit further afield, Zambia, Kenya, and Tanzania. So, yeah, I've visited a few places in Africa.

How and Why Did You Become A Safari Guide?

In terms of how and why I became a safari guide, well, the why is not so clear. It's one of those things that just happened. And, you know, many years later, you look back and you don't know exactly why you went that way, but you did.

But basically after university, I did, you know, about a couple of years at university and was at a loose end, you know, waiting to sort of enter the formal job market, I guess.

And I had a family who owned a game lodge in the Sabi Sand Game Reserve and offered me the opportunity to go and run the bar there for a couple of months before my graduation and then getting a sort of proper city job or whatever

So I went there to do that and I saw what the actual guides were doing going on the drives. And obviously I had a lifelong interest in birds and wildlife through through family holidays, etc.

So I saw what the guides were doing, and I thought, wow, that looks cool. You know, as a young guy, you're given an offroad vehicle and a rifle. In those days, the qualifications were pretty lack, so I could take a rifle without having had any qualifications to actually handle the thing, which was a bit crazy, but those were the days back then.

So, yeah, I stuck around and became an apprentice guide and then worked up to being a fully fledged field guide in Sabi Sands for a number of years. Just thinking at the time it would be a temporary thing.

And after that, I sort of dibbled and dabbled in a few other things, but I always enjoyed the guiding, so I worked at several other lodges. And then eventually getting tired of being located on one property permanently, I got into tour guiding, which is what I do now.

So that takes me to destinations far and wide from, you know, Cape Town to the Serengeti. So, very exciting and my main push now is to visit new destinations further afield. So, yeah, that's the long and short of it.

Partial Albino Elephant

And the baby elephant that seems to be showing some kind of partial albinism. That is certainly unusual.

I don't want to make myself seem a know it all or anything, but I have seen several like this in the Kruger, young ones like that, and also older ones that maybe don't have as much of the sort of pinkish on the body, but they have these pale blue eyes that seem, when you look at them, it just seems like they non-seeing eyes.

You just a normal elephant, you watch the eyes, you'll see it reacting to things I mean, a lot of the time their eyes are just looking down as they feed but the eyes will look up and you'll see the pupils dilate and all that, depending on what's happening.

But I've seen several all the elephants, not calves, but not adults either, with these very pale eyes and they just seem to be almost static. And I know with albinism, a vision problem problems with vision is an actual associated condition. So to me, it looks like a partial thing.

The whole body isn't pink, it does have some normal coloration and that fits with what I I've seen on what I assume will be other elephants, various places in the park.

So also the question is what happens to them when they get older Because I don't recall anyone seeing and older or an adult elephant with this kind of condition. So that's an interesting question.

Maybe they die or maybe, I don't know, the color sort of of comes back, which theoretically it shouldn't, if it's a proper albinism, but interesting question. I will admit, I don't know a lot about this.

I've tried to do some research and it’s, you get conflicting reports about it as well. So it's definitely not unheard of, but unusual and open to still a lot of questions, I think, as to, like I say, what happens to them as they get older? How common is it? Is it restricted to one or two genetic populations So very interesting, but highly unusual to see.

Well, an article I looked at mentioned that it's not uncommon to see baby elephants with pink behind the ears, but if it covers more of the body than that, then it's obviously not just a normal condition. But like I say, there's a lot of conflicting info.

Another report said that, well, the same page actually mentioned that if there are fully albino, they may well be rejected by the herd because they look different, but it doesn't really sort of gel with my knowledge of elephants and how how. sort of unified they are the animal, the baby would still smell normal and everything.

So I don't see it being rejected because it's full albinism, but then again, I've never seen seen a full albino. And also, this article brought up the point of sun exposure.

So maybe if they have a lot of this sort of very unpigmented skin, they say suffer from extreme sun exposure and maybe that's a factor in dying or not seeing them as adults.

So very interesting and that's the nature of safari for you. There's always something new and different to see

Juvenile Bateleur

You know, this is a young Bateleur, all brown in the young form. They can retain this subadult plumage for up to about eight years before they actually become a full adults as we know them with the striking, sort of black and white and brown plumage and the red face and legs and as such probably one of our best looking raptors.

And such a remarkable bird in flight, the whole flight pattern is very unique kind of not flapping much. Obviously, when they're getting airborne, they'll flap, but once they're up 50 or 60 feet, they just cruise along, no flapping, gliding along. It's that characteristic side to side rocking motion.

So a wonderful bird, and always nice to see. And probably now one of the most common of the larger raptors in the Greater Kruger National Park.

And interesting what I was reading about the Bateleur in researching this is that the young ones have longer tails than the adults, which may be a factor of making it easier for them to actually fly, because flying without a tail, it creates aerodynamically, creates an unstable platform, which makes it very maneuverable, but probably not that easy to to do when you're just out of a nest

So yeah, wonderful bird, the Bateleur.

Waterbuck

Here's a female waterbuck, a common waterbuck taking a drink, waterbuck, very characteristic, an unusual round circle, white marking on the rear end.

How and why it got that a matter of much speculation and myths and stories, such as the famous kids' story. Kids love it, that it was the first animal to board Noah's Ark before the actual painted toilet seats had dried properly, giving it that round circle on the backside.

Always a big antelope, a characteristic, long, shaggy coat, and one of the bulk grazers, and as his name suggests, usually found close to water.

So not an animal you'll find in very dry, arid regions.

Hyena Den

Some great footage here of clans of spotted hyenas, Africa's most abundant large carnivore.

And clearly here in the Kruger using the drainage pipes under the roads as a very handy den site already made and very solid. So you'll find a lot of the dens are actually under the roads and obviously when the animals are out, they'll be sleeping next to the road.

So for this reason, they're quite relaxed with cars. You know, the pups from a very young age are seeing cars and sometimes interacting with cars.

So they're very relaxed. I call them pups, some people call them cubs. I guess that's probably technically more correct because they are in terms of evolution, they are closer to the cats than the dogs on the carnivore tree. So maybe pups is more appropriate, but, sorry, cubs is more appropriate, but I like the term pups with them.

So they're currently four hyena species on the planet. The biggest one is the spotted, which is restricted to Africa. Then you have the brown hyena as well, and the strange aardwolf, which is more of a termite-eating animal, and then the stripped hyena, which occurs into Arabia and the east as well.

Interesting enough, with only four species now, but the fossil record shows almost 100 species, so hyenas were in the past, who were very prolific animals, came in all sorts of shapes and sizes as well.

Actually very interesting animals. make a lot of great sounds, I think, in terms of noises. They make some of the coolest sounds, sometimes called laughing hyena because of a strange cackling, laughing sound, which you can really put the hairs up on your back. It sounds so strange.

And if you had to hear that, in the middle of the night while you're in a little tent somewhere in the bush, it's pretty, pretty hair raising experience, but very cool to hear the cackling and the giggling and the laughing, which is done under social interactions, sometimes when they're interacting with each other, but more strongly when they're going to war, let's say a clan's going to war with another clan or a pride of lions, then you'll hear a lot of that noise, which is really nice to hear.

So they have a bit of a bad rep in terms of the human outlook hyenas have always been seen as sort of cowardly scavavengers, but of course, that's just human perception. There's nothing cowardly about them.

Very effective animal, very effective predator and scavenger. Seems in the Krugger, they do more scavenging, because obviously there's a big lion and leopard population and cheetah to an extent, and even wild dogs.

So, hyenas are very good kleptoparasites. In other words, they steal kills from the smaller predators and scavenge around lion kills. They can even steal lion kills if the numbers are in their favor and there's no big male lions present, so if it's just two or maybe two or three female lions, they might be put off by a big clan of hyenas.

And in other parts of the range, for example, East Africa, they're much more hunting animals, so they tend to do more hunting there than scavenging. In terms of clan size in East Africa, the clans can get really big, apparently recorded up to even over 100 individuals in the Ngorongoro Crater is the highest density of hyenas around 170 per square kilometers.

Compare that to Kruger, which only has 10 per 100 square kilometers. And the clan size in the Kruger is a lot smaller. Probably find if there's six to eight adults, that's probably about average

Another point of interest that it's a matriarchal society, so the females are dominant. They're bigger and stronger than the males. They've got a higher levels of testosterone, so they're quite aggressive and they can easily dominate the males.And even the younger females or female pups or cubs can dominate adult males, depending on the rank of the adult male. So for the ladies, that's a strong point.

But yeah, often not popular animal. It's often I've had it where clients have sort of stated that they don't like hyenas as we approach a sighting with hyenas, and they've never seen them before, but obviously that's just this sort of cultural baggage that comes with them from things like the Jungle Book, etc.

But by the time you finished with the sighting off, you'd been explaining what interesting animals are they are, their perception often changes and they actually end up quite liking hyenas.

So yeah, that's the spotted hyena. If you could do Kruger, that's probably the predator you're going to see the most of.

Impala, Vervet Monkeys and Warthog

It was a lovely afternoon scene here with several species feeding together. You have the impala grazing on the grass as are the warthogs and a troop of vervet monkeys feeding in between.

So I'm assuming the vervets are not feeding on the grass, so they could, but maybe there's something like termite allates or emerging termites coming out there that has brought them to the area.

Otherwise, the warthogs have got nice green grass, very important, especially after the dry winter that we've been through.

And warthogs are one of those feel-good animals. Everybody loves the warthog and I always chuckle to myself on safari because they always seem to bring a laugh and a smile to the people's faces especially when they're running along with their tails up.

So lovely little animals and always had values to any drive.

Lions

Well, this is a great lion sighting up close in the clear and importantly, a sort of eye level angle, which makes for really good photographs rather than traditionally photographing down on things, you know, looking down on them, which is not great from a photographic point of view.

But lovely sighting looks like two young males from what I can see. You can just see the mane hair coming through the on the necks and heads.

So these two perhaps just dispersed from their natal pride, although maybe a little bit young for that, maybe the others were close by.

But anyway, it's a tough time for male lions, the stage when they're young and they have to leave their pride, the security of their pride, but they also got to face any adult males that may be out there and would really take offense to them being in the area as potential up and coming males.

So a very difficult time for male lions and unfortunately, a lot of them won't make it only the tough survive, but that's what in the end puts out these really big and tough male lions that have the really good genetic material.

Leopard

What a moment. This is a great leopard sighting.

Always one of the highlights on a Kruger safari, such a beautiful animal just exudes such stealth and power.

It looks like a young animal, maybe a young male, possibly, and obviously alert and on the hunt, moving through the bush, hoping to flush something like a duiker or a steenbuck to make a nice meal for such an animal.

So yes, a real highlight on any safari

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Partial Albino Elephant

Afternoon Game Drive - 10 & 11 October 2025

What Are Your Guiding Qualifications And Field Experience?

How and Why Did You Become A Safari Guide?