The second half of our safari week we were in a more northern area of Kruger park. Kruger is about the size of the state of Massachusetts. In this new area we saw different terrain and some new animals.
Like lots more Zebras and Wildebeests (on the right).
The South Africans pronounce Zebra with the "e" sound like "eh" - Like when you say the color red. Zehbra. It's so nice and refined sounding.
We also had some rain in the second half of the trip. Luckily Neil was prepared with rain ponchos. (this photo is about the poncho - Mike isn't looking at any animals)
We had some pretty fantastic animal experiences here too including seeing the rare African painted wild dog
There are only 120 or so of these in the park and we saw 3!
Also we still had only seen 4 of the Big 5 - The Leopard continued to be elusive.
At one point we came to a block in the road where it looked like people were stopped to look at some kudu.
Kudu are pretty but not usually stop worthy for most people so we were confused. Suddenly the kudu bolted - Something was chasing them!
A Cheetah!
Actually there were two - brothers. They didn't catch the kudu - which is unusual. Cheetahs are 95% efficient at catching their prey. But only 65% successful in keeping it. Both lions and leopards will steal prey from the cheetah. So they hunt during the day (lions and leopards hunt at night) and eat really fast.
Also cheetahs, even though they're cats, have paws like dogs so they can't climb trees and they can't take down prey with their claws they have to knock the legs out from behind them. Pretty clever.
There are less than 200 cheetahs in the park so it's pretty incredible we saw two of them too.
And the cheetah will have to sub in for a leopard as we never did get to see one.
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