South Africa is great for wildlife viewing. Many have heard about the opportunities to see the "big five" (lion, elephant, buffalo, leopard and rhino), but the country is also rich with bird life. Here's a few we saw on our trip.
We saw this hoopoe while eating lunch in Kruger National Park. He was not skittish and didn't mind having his photo taken.
We tried to get closer to this white-fronted bee eater but he flew away, so this is a blow up of the photo taken before his escape. (Yes, we used a zoom lens, but we don't have one of those 6-foot-long mega lenses that allow you to see a gnat on the bird's beak.)
This cape weaver and his friend are perched in a tree outside of our chalet (a house, really) at Hlalanathi in the Northern Drakensberg range. The chalet looked out on "the amphitheater," a section of the mountains often pictured on postcards. A photo of the amphitheater is in our first post on this blog.
We spotted this spoonbill on the other side of the country at West Coast National Park.
There's a penguin colony at Boulder's Beach, near the Cape of Good Hope. You can get close to the penguins, but there were far fewer here than in the reserve we visited in Argentina, Reserva Provincial Punta Tombo.
Aerial view of a penguin.
There are lots of ostriches in South Africa. Some live wild in the parks and reserves, like those pictured here. Others are raised on farms for their meat.
These two ostriches appear to be in love. Or something.
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