And the zebra, one of Africa's most unique animals, it's just so unusual with that striping pattern, formerly called Burchill's zebra, now generally referred to as plains zebra. This is the the common species across most of Africa.

You do have a couple of others, but this is the one that you'll find from South Africa's savannas all the way up to East Africa, although there are subspecies in in places like Zambia, etc.

One of the standard sort of almost joke questions is a zebra, a black animal with white stripes or a white animal with black stripes? Well actually probably the former, because if you look at the skin in the exposed skin, is actually black. So would assume the rest of the skin is black, so it's actually a black animal with white stripes. As to why it has black and white stripes. There's lots of theories that go around. I'm not sure that any have really been proved to beyond a shadow of a doubt.

I always like to say that's just the way God made them because there is no real explanation that really fits very well. But anyway, regardless of why, there're always a pleasure to see you on a safari.

So the spotted hyenas are a bit of a strange animal in terms of its anatomy, in that females and males are hard to distinguish if you're just looking at genitalia, which is a bit strange. So the females almost mimic the males in terms of external genitalia, which makes them a little bit hard to sex at a glance. Generally females will would be bigger and would have sounds of suckling pups, which obviously males wouldn't.

But apart from that, the females sort of fake organs resemble very closely those of the male So over time, in times past, this has led to sort of theories that the hyena is actually a hermaphrodite, which is not the case. They're definitely female, but they're just have very different females.

I'm going to read something about this in sort of human culture from larger carnivores of the African savannas by Bothma and Walker So they say the belief that the spotted hyena was a hermaphrodite was recorded and refuted by Aristotle as early as to BC Pliny the Elder, which was AD to , repeats them as, though he also mentions that Aristotle disagreed with him Claudius Elianus, who lived in about AD to , not only repeated the myth, but added that the spotted hyena changes its sex in alternate years.

Yeah, okay, interesting. But then, even as recently as , Hemingway still believed that the spotted hyena was a hermaphrodite. It's interesting that there was already refuted by Aristotle in to BC. But , Hemingway was still pushing that theory. So obviously, very incorrect and hyenas are strange, but that's just one of the things that makes them such an interesting animal to see.

This is one of my all time favorite animals, the African wild dog, sometimes called Painted Wolf or Painted Dog. One of Africa's most endangered large carnivores together with the cheetah. I think the Kruger population is roughly about 350, It does vary.

This time of year, the numbers will be high because there's lots of pups, but obviously there will be deaths of those pups as they head towards maturity, so the numbers may drop again. So it sort of rises and falls, but a decent number for the size of the park, and as such South Africa's only really viable population that is self-sustaining. You do get them in several other reserves, but not many of these are really big enough to have a sort of self sustaining population in so they have to be managed to a certain extent.

But Kruger's numbers are looking good. I mean, I must be honest in the early days of guiding, it was not often that you saw wild dogs for the last while, maybe five years or more, you're seeing them pretty regularly, sometimes go, you know, four or five safaris every time you see them.

So wonderful to see, particularly at this time of year, these are generally winter breeders, so they'll have their pups in the winter, sort of anywhere between about May and August, roughly. And so this period, October, November, the pups are out, they're mobile, so most sightings, you'll have loads of pups around, which is always a pleasure to see.

For me, a very endearing animal is they're so highly cooperative, you know, everything's for the benefit of the pack. There's very little selfishness in a wild dog pack Another interesting aspect to this sighting is the presence of the spotted hyena close by to the wild dogs. So this is not unusual. Spotted hyenas are often found in association with wild dogs, either hanging around close by or actually tailing them when they're on the hunt.

So this is basically what they term kleptoparasitism. So they often steal the kills of wild dogs. So what they'll do is just follow the dogs and wait for opportunity to, once the wild dogs are made a kill, an opportunity to either grab some bits, or, in fact, steal the whole carcass as well which is it's not great for the wild dogs, but it's an interesting relationship that hyenas and wild dogs have. Sometimes aggression between the two and the tables can go either way, the wild dogs can keep the hyenas at bay and vice versa. Sometimes it's kind of neutral.

They can be seen lying quite close to each other, and just no animosity whatsoever. Kind of ignoring each other, and other times can be quite a little bit of affection between them, if one can call it that. I've never seen that myself, but I've seen videos where they'll kind of interact and play a little bit, so very interesting relationship between spotted hyenas and wild dogs.

Wilddog is one of my favourites because of how cooperative they are. Everything is done for the good of the pack. There's very little sort of selfishness in the pack, and each animal knows its place and its role for the benefit of the group. And another reason I like them is you can see the same behavior in your dog at home, just that sense of loyalty, which is amazing.

I remember one sighting we had in Sabi Sand Game Reserve. I think it was the first time that the guides had seen the pups coming out of a den. So this was our first afternoon drive there, we went straight to the den and we had a wonderful moment with all these little pups coming out and all the adults milling around, greeting each other with their wonderful sounds. And I think it was by the next morning, the adults have gone out hunting, so they left two minders behind at the den to look after the pups.

So we were there at least one more night and almost every drive went back to the den and the rest of the pack had still not appeared. We got a little bit worried, but they'd just been out hunting, but you could really see that, the sort of attitude of these two that were left behind looking after the pups, like your dog, when you go out, if you had a camera watching it, you just see how dejected it looks, you know, head resting on the paw. Every time there's a slight noise, the ears prick up, excited, you know, is it the pack returning? Oh, no, it's not.

And the head goes back down again and the ears sink and you can just feel that sort of longing for the rest of the pack to be there. It was just wonderful to see. Unfortunately, we weren't there when the rest of the pack came back, but they eventually did, and I'm sure those two that were left behind would have been overjoyed to see the rest of their pack returning.

A troop of chacma baboons in the trees, looks like they may be feeding on tree wisteria blossoms.

But they also take insects, any kind of insects, they might come across, large arthropods, birds, eggs, things like that, birds themselves, and even up to things like young antelope. They are quite partial to a bit of meat in their diet as well.

Very interesting animals, often nice to just sit and watch them. They're always active and a lot going on in a big troop, which can be up to you, let's say, around about members. So there's a lot of activity in that big group, a lot of socializing, you know, fighting and establishing hierarchies and things like that.

So actually a very interesting animal and lovely to just sit and watch for a while.

Nice sighting here of giraffe bull drinking. Always an awkward thing for a giraffe to take a sip of water where their head so high, it's pretty hard to get it down low and you can see that awkward posture.

And for that reason, they are quite vulnerable when drinking. They don't just walk up to the water and start drinking because if someone comes at them while they're doing that It's going to take them a while to react properly. So they know they're vulnerable, so they take their time.

Sometimes you'll watch a giraffe scope out the water for, you know, more than half an hour checking all the corners, maybe even false drinking, sort of appearing to drink and then looking up again to see if anything came out of a bush or something So you know, you're waiting there with your camera. You want to get the shot of the giraffe drinking and he's just takes forever to get there. But that's just a survival mechanism.

So this one you can see is a male with a who might call them horns on their head, but they're actually technically called Ossicones because they're pure bone with a skin covering. There's no keratin horn material like these on an antelope.

So we say horns, but but they're actually ossicones, but these big horns on the giraffe are are robust and they don't have a sort of tuft of hair on black hair on the end, so that's an easy way to identify it as a male giraffe or bull giraffe.