Up before sunrise, so it was the usual minimal birder breakfast. Then we board the boat, crossed the Kafue River, and mounted a Land Rover for another journey into the park interior (green track marks the first leg).
A little brisk (11 C); whoever thought Africa was hot? Still, once the sun was up, the birds were pretty good.
Crested Barbet: the Birds of Southern Africa verdict seems a little harsh.
[O]ne cannot help thinking a large measure of humour went into the making of this bird.
Also, an African Green Pigeon...
And a very sleepy Bateleur, obscured.
...and a Racket Tailed Roller...
just to confirm this really is a racket tailed roller, here's his weird tail.
The cute chinspot batis
A sulphur-treated bushshrike, taking off.
And the lizard buzzard.
A brown-crowned tchagra
Red-necked spur fowl.
An emerald-spotted wood-dove
A pair of brown-hooded kingfishers
The African fish-eagle, as magnificent as the American bald-eagle, and with equally disreputable lifestyle.
Some grey go-away birds, which are exciting on first observation, and pretty soon ho-hum.
A rattling cisticola.
Marabou storks.
The African wattled lapwing.
The beautiful, and uncommon, Böhm's bee-eater.
By now, we had hit the river. A striated heron, fishing.
A pied kingfisher, also fishing...
Overhead, a white backed vulture.
On the ground, a southern puku.
Oh yeah, there are elephants. Elephants everywhere.
The beautiful African barred owlet
An African pipit, not as pretty, unless you're a pipit.
Yellow-billed oxpeckers, taking a break from eating ticks off buffalo backs.
Lichtenstein's hartebeest.
We hit the Shishamba river, and so water birds appear. The somewhat ridiculous-looking saddlebill stork.
A capped wheatear, curiously ubiquitous. We saw them in both Lusaka and Harare airports.
And wattled cranes, who were unaware they were being stalked by a leopard.
I think we eventually startled the cranes, and so the leopard went hungry.
After our feline excitement, we stopped at a baobab tree, ending the first leg of our drive across the park.
The second leg mostly followed the Shishamba, towards Treetop Camp.
An ashy flycatcher.
The irresistibly ugly marabou stork.
A hamerkop!
...and near them, a variable mud turtle.
An Egyptian goose.
The magnificent martial eagle.
And a greater kudu.
Eventually we made it to Treetops camp, a small but very beautiful camp right on the river. We lunched by the river, watching a Goliath heron and various other waterbirds, and checked out the camp, which hs sleeping quarters on a raised platform overlooking a stretch of Savanah.
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