Photo Gallery: Into the wild

In the August of 2009, I had been on a safari to the Selous Game Reserve in central Tanzania. I had then written about the trip in detail. The posts can be found at the following links.

Part 1: The long drive to Selous (pronounced “Seloo”)

Part 2: The Boat Trip

Part 3: Jungle Safari

However, many of my photographs from that trip as well as all my travels since had been languishing in my hard drive. I finally spent some time, this weekend, to sort all of them out and to upload the best ones both at the Interstate 42 Facebook page and in my Flickr photo stream. You can follow the links and enjoy the photos.

This week’s post is a subset of the above collection; an “Into the Wild” photo gallery.

African Golden Weaver

The Great Nile Crocodile: They are the largest crocodiles in Africa. They prey both within its natural habitat (where it is the apex predator) and out of its normal range. Outside its natural habitat, they rely on rapid unpredictable attacks on almost any other animal equal or smaller in size. Other Nile crocodiles and adult hippos are their only threat in the water.  Out of water, however, the Nile crocodile is at a disadvantage. They can only rely on their limbs to chase the prey. So, most hunting on land is done at night by lying in ambush.

Giraffes: The national animal of Tanzania.

Malachite Kingfisher: This is a small kingfisher, only, 13 cm in length.

White fronted bee eaters in flight: This was a lucky shot. I would have preferred if the birds were more in focus, though.

African Pied Wagtail: Its natural habitats are “subtropical or tropical seasonally wet or flooded lowland grassland, rivers and intermittent freshwater marshes” [Source]. They feed on insects and tadpoles. An interesting fact about this species of birds is that human association has not threatened the species’ survival. In fact, they have even benefited from the construction of dams.

That's it for now.

Cheers.