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A few years back, two guests — let's call them Athena and Bill — spent months preparing for their African safari. Spreadsheets, packing lists, the works. The one thing they skipped? Binoculars. "We'll just borrow someone else's," Athena said. They eventually bought a pair anyway — a small folding set from a department store, sold to them by a salesman who'd never set foot on the out of his home town. Lovely for the opera. Useless in the bush. One afternoon, lionesses began st

At 0500 in the morning, while everyone is still trying to find coffee and wondering why on earth they agreed to get up this early, the small details can stand out. Sometimes it is the things you don't expect to remember that stay with you. This was one of those mornings. We were in the main lodge area. We were all looking for coffee. It was 0500 in the morning. With me were Sue-Ann and her husband Bob, and their twin teen boys. The boys were bubbly, slightly overweight and en

It was a stunning morning. Beautiful weather. Balmy, one might even say. On my vehicle I had a mismatch of personalities. And nationalities. And opinions. Most were American. A few German. And two South Africans, Shelly and Dan, from Daspoort, Pretoria. We spotted impala first, because, of course. They are one of our more regularly seen and most often underappreciated little animals. I thought this might be the perfect opportunity to point out a few of these lesser-known fact

It has been a while since we had the Panthera project on the reserve. They come roughly once a year to do a survey on the leopard and wild dog populations. To do this, they use more or less 80 camera traps, or trail cameras. These they position on either side of a road, mostly at strategic spots. The reason two cameras are used at each spot is that they need both the right and left side of an animal photographed — this helps with individual identification, and contributes to