Sociable weaver birds often have large nests around campsites, and are friendly little birds, a bit like our sparrows. They turned out to be good friends as well as good photo subjects! We'd been camping in the same spot for a couple of days and the birds often came to clear up our crumbs, but one day they started to mass beside a log and make a terrible racket. Looking more closely we saw there was a horned viper very well camouflaged under it. We'd collected kindling from that area so we were glad our little friends had given us the warning. The snake soon got fed up with the noise and moved on, and we were a little more careful picking up wood from then on.
LISABukalders LRPS CPAGB EFIAP
nature and wildlife photography
Experiencing a 'kill' is something many safari-goers hope to see. I never wanted to, but it's happened a couple of times and is fairly inevitable if you observe the big cats. My feelings are mixed, for one thing it's not as traumatic as I thought. Big cats kill to eat and feed their young. Far more efficient than a domestic cat which kills for fun, or plays with it's live prey for a while then discards it. We observed a lioness take down and kill an antelope in a matter of seconds, then fetch her two very young cubs to the carcass. They didn't quite know what to do with it.
On another occasion we saw a female cheetah chase down a young antelope for her 5 cubs - the cubs were left to dispatch the antelope - a vital life lesson for them. It doesn't give me a great deal of pleasure that this has been one of my most successful nature images.
Kenya Masai Mara