I seem to have omitted a few things on the former post that I wanted to mention.  When we were up in the mountains of Wakkerstroom looking for that Yellow Warbler we looked up high on the hill and saw a few Meerkats peeking in and out of the rocks.  Unfortunately they were too quick and far away to get a picture so I gave you a link.  I kept thinking of the Life of Pi and the island with all the Meerkats on it.  They have such big eyes!

The other thing I forgot was a picture from when we were in Kruger.

Hamerkop (probably named that because his head is like a hammer.  Weird bird.)

Thought it might be helpful to see a map of our trip.

Back to Oct. 14th.  We left the lovely Wetland Farm and went back up into the hills and the marsh before starting our long drive to Mkuze. More waterbirds at the marsh and up in the hills we saw 2

Secretary birds.  These birds can be from 35″ to 54″ tall.  They are quite a sight.

Here is some of the flora we saw along the way.

It’s springtime and there are all kinds of beautiful flowers around.

We stopped at Pongola for lunch at Wimpy’s.  Not exciting, but not a lot of options.  We got to our guest house at around 4:00.  This was another wonderful guest house-Umkhumbi Lodge.  It was in the forest with a balcony overlooking the forest and lots of bird sounds.

Our room at the Umkhumbi Lodge.  The sliding door you see is to our balcony.

We went for a walk around the lodge but the light was bad and hard to see the birds.  There are Crested Guineafowl here and they make a very strange (not very pleasant) sound.  Greg tried to called them in .

Warren, me and Greg with his playback speaker.

They didn’t seem to respond for a minute then all of a sudden 4 Guineafowl came running at us making their weird noise thinking they had to attack whatever was calling them.  It was quite the scene.  If you click on this site and then on the first arrow for Crested Guineafowl alarm call you can hear it.

We gave up birding then as the light was really getting bad in the forest.  The lodge has a bar and restaurant that was right next to our rooms where we ate dinner.  Unlike other places we have eaten they only gave us 2 choices: Chicken curry, which I had, and Impala Stew, which Denny had.  He said it tasted like beef.