Friday, May 2, 2008

Nature's Way

One morning when we came back from another exhilarating drive I saw a female zebra that couldn’t get up on her own. She must have had some kind of a disease. Normally when that happens to animals it is when they were chased over a long distance especially by came capture helicopters. Even when they are kept for too long in captivity they get 'capture myopathy'. Normally that is fur to a shortage of Vitamin B12.

Well back to the zebra………. I told my guests that the zebra won’t make it through the day with the wild dogs and lions in the area.

As it turned out, that afternoon the dogs got her.

This is nature’s way of taking care of the weak and sick. It was amazing to see how all the dogs were eating on the carcass without fighting. That’s because of the hierarchy level in the pack. We sat with them for more than 20 min. This is one of the awesome things about Madikwe. We can really get close to the important species like lions, buffalo, wild dogs, leopard, rhino and elephants.

Sorry losing track again………

The next morning the dogs were still there. During the night we could hear hyena activity and the dogs went crazy, unfortunately we couldn’t view them with the spotlight because they are diurnal animals. There was nothing left only a view ribs. The dogs hanged around for the day before moving off.

Never a dull moment in the African bush!

Until next time.

Written by Grant Marcus

(To view more of Grant's images or to contact him, visit his page on Photo-Africa!)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the short stories on your drives. Some are sad but I guess that is nature.

Look forward to the next chapter!

Sandpiper (Lin) said...

Fantastic! I love your blog! There are not enough blogs about South African wildlife. I'm hoping to get a blog up soon, too, about SA wildlife. Your pictures are wonderful. I'll be back again.

Thanks for stopping by my blog, too.