Safari Live - Day 134 | National Geographic

You you you you you you you you you you you you this program features live coverage of an African safari and may include animal kills and carcasses. Viewer discretion is advised. Hello, hello, hello, and welcome to a bleak, gray, overcast, cool morning here in South Africa. It's about the kind of cold it's been in a while, so hopefully it will warm up a little bit later as the clouds separate and hopefully a little bit of sunshine will come out at some point. The cloud doesn't look too thick, so I think the sun should come out at some time.

Now, my name is Justin, and on camera, I've got a sins. Oh, there we go. Answer sins. Oh, saying good morning! It is a very, very, very warm welcome to all of you, and I hope that you are going to interact with us lots this morning. Hashtag Safari live on Twitter or YouTube chat.

Now, the plan for the morning is that we've got Brent Leo Smith mended, and it seems to be that he is feeling better, so he's going to be back up with us. We're also going to have Steve on walk, but for us, we're gonna check all the wastes for signs of Juma. I'm gonna try and see if we can find any sign for him, community shadaloo, or even see if maybe the InGoma pride has pushed back further west again.

Interestingly enough, I believe Steve had a very exciting sighting of the InGoma pride after we finished the show last night, so I'm gonna leave that for him to tell you all about because he sounds like he had a really cool time with them.

Good! Now, we're on the trails at the moment. No sign of anything. We had a bit of rain last night that unfortunately has probably washed away 90% of the tracks that we're going to be looking for this morning. I don't even remember what time it was, but the rain came in; it must have been the early hours of this morning, and it didn't rain for long, but it seemed to rain with a little bit of force.

And so now seeing tracks is almost impossible at the moment, so we're gonna try and see if I can find them. I'm just trying to get a bit of light on the situation; it is quite dark this morning, not very good for tracking. The sort of light is not incredibly bright sand, and that makes tracking a little harder, so just trying to look as we go. But this is a road yesterday that was covered in lion tracks. Now today, you can't see a single lion track on it because of that rain.

Hello, impala! Sorry, I didn't even see you there; you were lying down in the grass. Luckily, it wasn't a lion or a leopard, or I might have missed it completely! It's time to wake up to some. Come on! So here is a male impala that was having a bit of a nap on the grass itself, and they sleep a lot in this fire break area. We see them regularly on the monster plant just because it's a bit more open and it's easier for them to see what's going on.

Good! Now, I believe Brent is up and about, and like I say, he is feeling better, so let's go across to him and see how he's doing.

Yes, welcome, welcome! I'm feeling much better! You nearly got to see what I had for lunch yesterday on drive, but I have recovered! And we've got that lovely little cake, dude, who's been catching a ride. He just landed on the car. Good morning! My name is Brent Leo Smith, and I have the Batman on camera. I love katydids, unless they're in my room because they have the ability to create the most incredible screams. Or, look, he's cleaning his foot.

I'm gonna try to get him onto the dashboard so it's easier for Craig because I move around too much. And it's a female katydid, and she lifts up; you can see her ovipositor—egg-laying device—where she's tucked it up now. But a female katydid, now they can create some of the most incredible noises by rubbing their legs—the back legs—together.

It is incredibly loud, and often when they tend to do that, they happen to be in the highest corner of the roof. And now this katydid, your feet again—you can see there's very powerful and big back legs. It looks like she might even be getting ready for a leap into the abyss off the car. Now, most of the katydid species is the opposite to grasshoppers—they are nocturnal.

And so she's obviously was flying somewhere after a night out in the bushes, feeding away. I'm just trying to see. Come on now, yep! So you can see those feet are very, very important for her, so she likes to keep all her feet clean, and also with this saliva, I'll add a bit of stickiness so when she needs to grip onto something.

So what she's gonna try to do is find a nice green patch during the day and what to hide up on. And look how incredibly long her antennae are now. Antennae offer various different reasons, and a lot of it is to pick up possible predators. Also to pick up possible mates.

So, very, very cool little insect! Kalena, you are spot on; the noise is to attract mates, and it's normally the males that make more noise than the females to attract them. And in some species, the females will have longer antennae to pick up where the males are.

I've just noticed I've been looking for this ever since I arrived back from Sabi Sands, so I'm going to have a quick look because there's a—I haven't seen many of them this year—the African vagrant butterfly. And their little caterpillar larval stage is one of my favorites because they've got awesome, awesome coloration!

But also their defense mechanisms are so, so wonderful that their body feels like sandpaper. And they seem to really like this exotic plant that grows here. So this is not a—this is called a peanut butter cassia and actually comes from South America, but I just noticed that this one has been heavily fed on by caterpillars.

And I'm hoping that there might be— I think I might be a bit late—I was hoping that there might be one or two African vagrant larvae around that had been feeding on it, but I can't see any, unfortunately, because they're very, very cool.

So they've got multiple defenses—their body is green and black so it blends in very well. Their skin is like sandpaper, and when you touch them, they have a very cool jump reflex, so it moves quickly and very jerky. That might give a bird or one that's trying to feed off them a fright and enable them to then just keep still afterward and escape detection.

Okay, while we're hoping that the lions and leopards don't evade our detection. Well, it looks like our katydid friend has decided still not to jump into the bus, so we'll see how long she lasts.

In the meantime, let's go send you across to Steve, who's on foot.

Good morning, everyone! I hope you're doing very, very well this morning. Now welcome to a bushwalk safari with myself, Steve Falconbridge, joined on camera by Fergus, and we're obviously joined once again by Herbie, who's assisting us with the tracking and the safety on this magnificent cool morning in Juma in South Africa.

We are on a mission, sort of in a southwesterly direction at the moment, looking for who knows what. We are too excited! Please feel free to send through your comments and questions to hashtag Safari Live or follow us on the YouTube stream and let us know what you'd like to see.

It is a very nice, cool morning, so bring all your equipment with. Don't forget your binoculars, like I seem to have done this morning. I suddenly felt very naked on my chest. What can you do? What can you do?

I find mornings like this really to be cool or not that good for birding, but you never know. Maybe on our way back, the birds might pick up. We find a lot of animals through tracking, but then we also find a lot of them just bumping into them. It depends on what we're looking for. We don't generally track elephant and impala and kudu—the sort of animals we just sort of come across—but we go out in search of leopard and lion.

And when we find their tracks, we put in a lot of effort to try and find them, and by understanding the road network and the direction and where the water is and the game paths, people like Herbie and Tristan and Brent, who've been here for a long time, have a very good understanding of how these animals move.

So if you find, for example, we're just crossing another road now, if you find some tracks along the road, you kind of get an idea of a potential game path for what might be in that direction. When they're moving in a certain direction, then you could just drive around, and if they don't come out the other side, it's a very good chance that they're inside that block.

So when it comes to tracking, that is what we do. But in conditions like this, after rainfall, as Justin has said, 90% of the tracks are washed away. So there was a thunderstorm last night at about, I think, 12 or 1 o'clock in the morning, and it just buckets down, and there's not a single track to be seen anywhere because what we know when the rain comes down like this is that there's water all over the place.

There's water on the leaves, so the animals don't have to go very far; they can just kind of drink it off the leaves and stay where they are without having to mission all the way to a water point, where it's potentially dangerous.

Robert, I would love to show you some elephants as well. We saw one yesterday; I have no idea where they've gone. This is my first season working here in Juma, so maybe two individuals like Tristan or Brent might know where the elephants have moved to. It's possible they've moved to the east to the basalt plains there where the rainfall causes the grasses there and the knob ponds there to be beautiful.

So that's my theory—they've gone that way. But let's go over to either one of those two and see if they know where the elephants have gone.

I don't, Steve. I've been wondering the same thing, but you might find you're right that they've headed up towards the basalt plains. If there's been some good rain up in those areas, then you will find the elephants will go that direction, and they like that kind of grass that comes out of there and the nutrients they can get from that area.

So you'll find that they do do that. And also, the basalt plains areas have most of it didn't get much rain in the early summer, and they've got a lot of rain recently. So that's maybe why the elephants have moved in that direction.

Well, the way that hasn't really been good weather; you need sun and sort of dryness, and then you get a situation where ellies come out, and they move towards the water points because there's not much water kind of between them. Whereas now, after a bit of rain, they find water in little mud wallows in the bush and lots of thickets that they can go into and try and hide out from the wind and the cold and the rain. So ellies are not always an almost-seen animal when we have conditions like this. So we'll just have to see where they go, but I know, like I said, there was a big herd around Sidneys dam not yesterday, the day before. So hopefully they'll come our side, and we'll be able to find them and see something.

This has been an early drought of late; I've seen very few ellies. That's all right, no sign of any of our lions coming this way, no sign of any leopards so far—not that we can see very many tracks at the moment. I'm kind of having to sort of scan with eyes squinted to try and see any footprints on the roads. It just kind of has most of it has just been washed away, unfortunately.

So we'll need to find tracks that are on top of the rain, and then we'll be in the running seat. So leopard girl asks, "What is the biggest animal I've seen taken down by a leopard?" Hmm! I’ve seen a fully grown kudu bull taken down by a leopard, which is a massive individual. A rather large giraffe—I'm not a fully grown one, but not a tiny baby either.

I was actually at Tinga when that took that down—a fully grown bull. So big! Instead, because they’ve also seen them take down a baby elephant, but the baby elephant, when it was a brand-new-born baby, I mean, it's not the same size as something like a fully grown kudu bull. But the danger element in that is that much more, given that the female was there; she was not impressed at all and was lots of trumpeting and chasing of elephants, and she smashed a whole tree that an elephant went into.

It depends on one kind of danger versus size, but size I would say probably a fully grown kudu bull or that giraffe—those are both massive animals, and they managed to bring them down. So it was pretty weird looking at the giraffe. Gilly kind of was dwarfed by this thing, and they didn't manage to keep it. He was mating with Moya at the time, and the two of them fiddled for the day and then into the night, and then my ears came, and there was just no way they were going to keep it from the hyenas, unfortunately.

It's just too big a carcass for that, but it was a bit of a surreal experience seeing a female and a male leopard sitting on a giraffe carcass. It was a bit weird; it was not something you’re going to see every single day. One, because it was two of them and two, because of this prey animal that they had brought down.

So you know leopards are very versatile. I'm sure there are reported cases of them even bringing down—in fact, actually there was a situation—I we can't say for sure, but we had Tinga once during a night drive following around a rather old buffalo bull, and the buffalo bull was during the drought wasn't very kind of steady on his feet and it was a little bit sort of struggling in terms of the way that it was walking, and you could see it was quite weakened, and its time was coming.

And then we had a situation where Tinga came and we left him that night just kind of literally sitting right behind the buffalo bull, just following it as it was going. And the next morning, we came there, and Tinga was feeding off this dead buffalo, and so I don't know if he managed to get it by the throats and actually the buffalo was just so weak it collapsed and he was able to kind of kill it or if it just died on its own, sort of under its own conditions. And then Tinga just scavenged—difficult to say. But there were definite bite marks around the nose and the throat area, so maybe he tried to kill it.

I don't know; it would be quite a serious feat for a leopard to bring down a buffalo bull, but that's also in extreme circumstances—it’s not because it was—it’s just because of the drought and those kind of things. But interesting nonetheless, leopards are amazing animals. It's pretty crazy that they can do those kinds of things, and in the same sort of break they’ll go and attack and eat little things like termites and insects and small birds. Pretty strange that they can kind of go through all of those different things. That just gives you an idea of how well they're able to survive!

There are a few sightings; it’s been a long time in the Sabi Sands, and so I've been fortunate to have seen some crazy stuff with leopards. They tend to always come out with something that will surprise you. You kind of think that they, you know, are not capable of XYZ, and then suddenly—anyway, I'm sure somebody else who's got a leopard story is Brent Leo Smith, so let's go find out what's the biggest animal he's seen them kill.

Well, yes, I've been lucky enough to see some pretty crazy stuff in my years out in the bush in terms of leopards. Baby giraffe is a big one. Adult male kudu was a male leopard in Botswana; it took on an adult male kudu. That is massive for a leopard trying to think I’ve seen leopards scavenge on elephant carcasses, hippo carcasses, but I think the biggest thing I know a leopard has caught is an adult male kudu, which is incredibly massive—the male leopard has caught the biggest things in this part of the world since I've been here.

It's definitely quarantine; it's called quite a few sub-adult male kudu—two or three-year-old male kudu, which are very big. A female kudu, so yes, there is a precedence that certain males seem to definitely focus on bigger prey than others. And also, those males that focus on bigger prey seem to be far less tolerant of hyenas.

And yes, Jamie, I think Jamie's seen it twice in the Mara—a male leopard with a giraffe up the tree. K6 was remembering that! So that I think was called the shepherd's tree male; he seemed to like giraffe. I also know there are some male leopards on the Sand River that have been recorded taking giraffes. Actually, I suppose it doesn't really count as a very big prey for a leopard—was an adult zebra in the Mara, but it had already been injured by crocodiles and had a broken leg, and then the leopard and the crocodile fed from either side.

I didn't see it; it was the year before we arrived, and so I suppose— but as ever, it was still alive, and it got out of the water. And the leopard was suffocating it, and the crocodile came and grabbed it from the other side. I saw photographs of that from Boyd—Chris Boyd, I think from Solace. They were lucky enough to see that, Mark Boyd. Thank you, Nicholas.

Mark Boyd from Silas, he saw that during the migration, so crazy stuff does happen, and sometimes you’re lucky enough to be there. I still think the craziest, in terms of hunts that I've ever seen is lions and elephant and lion and rhino, as the boys always been the motley pair, and lions and hippo for that matter, but that's more common. But lion rhino and lion and elephant are really, really crazy to watch.

You’ve often got to be very careful in those situations, where you park because a stressed elephant is just charging around with 25-30 lions trying to jump on it. Now, there’s elephants that are big—15 to 20 years old— and there are certain prides of lions in Botswana that target those young males that have been pushed out of the herds and are pretty solitary.

I haven't seen without late rains. We're starting to see some spiders and stuff that we haven't seen too much of this just yet. Yet those who are arachnophobia—golden orb spider—female now! You can see there's a lot of carcasses in the middle of her web, and she leaves the carapace—is she an exoskeleton of the insect she eats in her web? So birds don't fly through it.

Now this isn't—it’s a big spider, but they can get double, triple the size of that. And they've even been recorded catching small birds like waxbills and firefinches! I'm just trying to see—I can't—if we look around to the edges of the web—okay.

So maybe a little bit down. I think I can see—I’m trying to see if we can spot a male. So males tend to hide on the peripheries. Well done, Craig! Well, no, that's a fly that's been caught, but we're trying to see—there's a male! Who's that? A dewdrop—that's a dewdrop spider. That's a klepto parasite.

So those little spiders live on the webs, and they eat the little pieces that are too small for the bigger spider to eat. The males, however, will be on—oh, she's picked up on something in her web! You see how she's using her feet to test where the vibrations are coming from? She's decided, oh, you've—it's quite small, the thing that flew into the web, so she's caught it.

Oh, she's got a fly! It's breakfast! Isn't that cool? We got some hyenas pooping back down towards the Mara now. All spiders—all true spiders are venomous. If they're not poisonous, poison is ingested; venom is injected. But all true spiders are venomous.

However, the spider has got a sore bite, but it’s not a danger to human beings at all. Look how busy she's spinning web around it! And she might be quite full, so she might be saving that fly for later. Okay, leave her to stock up on her larder, and it sounds like Tristan hasn't got his favorite animal, but he's got his favorite animal's favorite food!

I do, but I've got a very interesting one that we see from time to time in this area. It's the one that's busy going to the toilet, which is helpful. So, you try and discern it from the others. Unfortunately, it's facing away from us, so seeing what makes it unique is quite different—difficult—but this is an impala that we've seen from time to time that has a horn growing out from its nose area—basically between its eyes and its nostrils on its face.

There is a little horn, it grows out. It's a very underdeveloped one, given that she's a female. It's not surprising that she's got this undeveloped horn. Now hopefully when she's finished going to the toilet, she'll turn her face, but there you can just make it out between the eyes and the nose. You see there's a sort of ridge there—there it is! You see it there, coming out of the face.

So, very, very unusual to see something like that. And it does happen in females. Sometimes they will have a little bit of a defect, and they grow horns. The ones I've seen are pretty underdeveloped, but to grow it in that area is very, very strange. So there you can just see it—kind of on the nose or the bridge of her nose—should we call it?

And that kind of horn is growing a little bit since the last time I saw it; it was much straighter—it's now kind of curled back down towards her face and is kind of growing and walking back towards her, which is going to be interesting to see how she copes with that. But amazing, isn't it? It's not something you're gonna see every single day.

Like I say, a very developed one, so it's a little piece of bone that's growing out, a little bit of keratin over the top. In fact, it's probably fine; there's not even much bone in there. It's mostly keratin that's coming out, which is pretty weird.

Mrs. Grumpy, is that you? Love this little unicorn! It's very cool, isn't it? And like I say, we've seen this—I don't know; I've seen it twice before—I think Taylor might have seen it before, or Biron—one of the two of them. So it is an impala that does hang around normally be anywhere between sort of Gallagher and where I am now—just north of impala plains; it kind of moves in this way.

It just goes to show that some of our impala herds are regulated in this area, even though we can't really do this whole—the difference when you see this individual. It gives you an idea that some of the impalas spend a lot of time, and hey, if you didn't know that there was one that had this and you looked at them from here, you would never ever be able to spot that it's got a kind of little horn growing out of its face.

It's something that's only if you've not seen it and you kind of look at the females, can you pick it up quite quickly? But I'm just going to reverse back so we can follow her, so should have a better view of her now. She's the first one in that whole row.

There we go, so now you can actually see it quite nicely—just that sort of little horn sticking out. Amazing, isn't it? Such an anomaly! So Pearl, you say April 9th is Unicorn Day? Is that for real? Because if this really is a unicorn day and we found this impala, that will be pretty weird and quite fun!

But it's amazing to me, especially since it grows from, like I say, I've seen females with horns—generally, it comes from the top between the ears, like where the males have it. Very seldom do you see them coming out of the face like this. It's pretty weird but interesting!

Mandy, at the moment, no; you can see she's a healthy individual. She's walking around just like everybody else, and it's not obscuring her vision or hearing or anything like that, so it doesn't seem to affect her in any way. It's also not gonna cause any infections or anything untoward.

The size of it also won't weigh her down; it's not gonna get caught up in branches too much, so she seems to be fine. I think the only thing is if it grows and continues to curl towards her face, she might have a situation. It might cause a bit of damage to her face somewhere or something like that, but for now, it seems as though it's absolutely fine.

Jeff, I don't think so. I'm pretty sure males of the impala kind are not picky, particularly because most of the time that they are mating with females is because they smell like they've come into Easter's. It's not so much about physical appearance with them; it's not the other way around.

Females will judge males on their physical appearance of the horns and size. A male just kind of gets driven by the scent that he's picking up if the female's in estrus and he picks up that she's ready to mate. That drive is there, and he's so hot up because of the rut and all that kind of thing.

Then I'm pretty sure he will mate with a female like that. It's gonna be interesting; I mean hopefully she's around come November, December, January, February, and we hopefully see her with a little one 'cause then we would know if she has a little bit more she did get mated with to be able to say otherwise.

So really, it's National International Unicorn Day today. Can you believe it? That's absolutely ridiculous! You found this impala on Unicorn Day. What is the chances? It's ridiculously sort of a coincidence, but anyway, how these things happen, I don't know. Anyway, let's go back to Steve; let's go see what he's up to, where he's walking.

You know what? His plans are for the morning. Thanks, Justin! Did you all know out there that the unicorn is, in fact, the national animal of Scotland? True story! Fine is that mud sand. So we were talking about elephant movements, and I think for ease of understanding, I have got out my fantastic tree book.

Let's have a look at where we are, understand the loaf a little bit more, and then show you a cross-section of the Kruger Park to see exactly where the soil is and why the elephants might have moved. First of all, we're going to go into South Africa; here we have South Africa. Cape Town is down here in the far southwest, but we are all the way up here inland Popa and Mpumalanga province where you see the green is essentially what this book relates to and we are over there.

Okay, so now I'm gonna go and show you a quick picture of the Kruger Park itself. Let me just turn the page. Here is the Kruger Park in its entirety, with much more included. The Kruger Park is this boundary line here all the way, and there's Mozambique and fence line, although out there, and we are over here somewhere—sabi sands is this section over there, and the Tim of our, the Tein class area all forming up on the side here.

So this is all private game reserves, and you can see how it all falls within a particular color, and this is granite—the pinkish sort of oranges granite. This gray is basalt. We talked about the basalt before, and then the pink all along the eastern side is the Lebombo mountains.

This legend is the low felt; the Drakensberg runs along the entire eastern side here—the Lebombo mountains on the eastern side. Everything in between is what we call the low felts.

If I quickly jump back to a cross-section of the low felt, you can see this is west over here all the way across to east over here. And you can see the different soil types. You see granite takes up a huge portion; there's a small section of sand felt and then basalt and then rhyolite.

Now to understand this better, the granite is very, very old rock; we're talking about 2.8 billion years. The granite was magma that never came to the surface, and as everything above it eroded away, it’s what's revealed the granite. We don't see too much granite actually visible in this area, but they are very, very obvious with these rocky outcrops, which are quite obvious in some areas elsewhere in the Sabi Sands and around.

But the soil is very, very hot. It's very, very porous—not a huge amount of nutrients, and the water that lands here goes straight through, so any nutrients that are there move down. So you get a very particular type of soil and particular type of plant life in these areas, and this is where we are.

But if you go all the way to the east, the basalt there, that is lava that was deposited on the Earth's surface probably 118 million years ago, 130, 280 million years ago. And a very soft rock, but very high in nutrients—lots and lots of volcanic material and nutrients, and the soil that is very clay-like holds the water very, very well, and it gives rise to very sweet grasses and trees.

So when there's rainfall in the summer months, all of the migrating animals, including elephants, will move into this area where the food is very nice and tasty. So I hope that answers some of the questions and you get a bit of an idea of where we are.

And the diversity of the low felt is because of those different soil types. And just to jump back to the Kruger Park—what also adds to the diversity—not just the soil type, but the rainfall gradient is lower up here and increases as you go south. So as you go south towards sort of Pretoria, Scorpio, Cuza, the rainfall is the highest you get in the park. And so you get even more leaching of the soil, so the granitic soils are even lower in nutrients than further north.

So that's where you get so many different vegetation units within this complex of only three or four soil types—that's it!

What would I eat if I was stranded? There are lots of things to eat! Let me quickly grab you some off the top of my mind. I can see there are some magic worry seeds here—very, very delicious!

Let me grab a couple—there's a quarry! Look at those; those are quite tasty! Hmm. So that's number one. We're ready munching on the white berry bush just before they have fruits hit again. And, hmm, if there must— they must be this color if you grab them when they're green, do you want to see my face? But she did, so better—it's very bit done!

That's all you know; birds can see color because birds will eat fruit when it's ripe—they know when it's red. And Ferg is gonna have one as well! Mmm, tasty, tasty! Hmm, you can see how big the seed is inside. It's very fresh, very nice, and it's almost like a plum. A little bit more bitter than the plum, but very similar in consistency and texture.

Okay, so I hope the explanation of the low felts in where we are explains a little bit more about what's going on and why we see what we do. And because of the soil here, that's why we get quite a similar sort of vegetation unit, and I'm not able to show you hundreds of trees—only that small selection that we've been through.

Craft is to joy and Michael. What happened last night off the drive was really something quite special. Craig and I followed the InGoma pride—we followed them. Craig, you saw that last closing segment; we lost sight of them for a few moments. We continued following them; they crossed another road. We decided to stay in the road and wait for them. Just as she was going on, then all the yanks just stood very still—very still.

Craig and I switched off the car; we listened for some time. And then we heard some running, branches moving. And then we heard the characteristic what? Well, I'm not very good at that—of a kudu barking. We listened to listen; next thing we heard the lions take down the kudu! It took us about three or four minutes to get in there because it was quite thick, and we found them—InGoma absolutely smashing a female kudu or a young kudu. We're not sure. I never got a look at the head wallah nose; it was a kudu because I saw two of them walk off with the leg, and there was a tail, but never found any horns or a head, so they practically ate the ribs—everything. They just smashed it, so that was very, very special.

And that probably happened five to ten minutes after the close of drop, which is very, very sad for all of you out there. But Craig and I had a marvelous afternoon/evening. The ladies in FC were super jealous of us and were constantly commenting on the radio with things like, "Is this making you hungry?" and I was going, "No, not really! Not really!"

Because, you know, I'm a vegetarian. Watching an animal get eaten alive doesn't do anything to my tummy! Sorry, just a very quick little look here at this. This is granite—that is granite—we see them when we look in these little riverbeds. You can see how crumbly it is at the moment, but look how large those particles are! Very sandy, very coarse-grained, very, very coarse. Any water that lands on these soils sinks through to the bottom.

Okay, on that note, let's go over to Brent Leo Smith, and hopefully, he's feeling much better. We tried to find with these lions now that Steve had Craig was with them, and only there was somewhere in this area where they got that could you, but it looks like they might have moved off a little bit.

So if we don't get any lacquer on ya, we might have to check. I don't know if they would have gone as far as Buffalo took dam, if they had a good feed, they might just be lying happy and comatose somewhere in this area.

Well, there's what they were eating last night, so they asked them kudus still in the area, but no sign of the lions just yet. But it sounds like Tristan's got a feathered friend who will be departing for warmer climes soon. Indeed! I'm actually quite surprised that this individual is still here.

It's getting quite late now for Warburg's to still be hanging around, but this is one of our pale forms that's still here. Well, one that I haven't seen much of on this western side. So I don't know if it's one of the ones that's kind of finished up nesting around Tunda's or Warburg's area and kind of now slowly but surely is going to think about departing.

But I'm looking a bit ruffled up there with the wind; you can see the clouds moving in the background as it's sitting there—kind of slowly but surely, it's going to seem as though the clouds need to get blown away, which is going to be quite nice. But this guy, we know he's the Warburg's; it's quite easy to tell. You've got that little crease that's sticking up, that bright yellow seer, and then you can see a long tail that's sticking out from sort of the tail or the wing area.

And then you've got the birds sitting in a sort of quite upright manner. The reason it's leaning a little bit forward more than normal is because of the wind that's blowing so just kind of counterbalancing, unless it's a little bit more upright. But the crest on the yellow seer will be the biggest identifying features on this bird.

And the four say yellow feet makes it much easier to tell that it's that. There are a couple of other birds that you can sometimes confuse it with—booted eagles and the likes—but these guys, with that, like I say, with that crest just gives them away immediately.

Now, it's sitting probably because of the conditions that we've got—this overcast, cloudy weather—not great for flying, although Warburg's typically are not like vultures or some of the other eagle species that will ride thermals. These guys are often a lot lower to the ground in a sort of short flying birds.

You'll find them kind of going from sort of treetop to treetop in their hunt. Birds, they'll hunt winged alerts from termites, so those kind of things, which doesn't require huge amounts of flying for long periods in order to find them. So you do find them perched quite regularly.

There's gonna be interesting; I wonder if they stayed a little longer this year just because of the rain that we had. And it'd be interesting to know, when was the last time we saw Warburg's—last year? What was the last World War we saw on drive?

Ask if anybody knows! Hashtag Safari Live, or YouTube chat! Let us know when we last saw a Warburg's, and if we've passed that date, or are we in a similar time frame as to last year? Both last year and this year we've had late rain, which is odd. I think some of the migratory birds like the Warburg's a little longer.

I did see a lesser spotted eagle yesterday. I think it was yesterday morning, maybe. And so they are around some of the migratory birds, but it must be the last few that are gonna start heading back. Funny enough, I also haven't seen very many red-back tracks this morning. They were around yesterday morning and the day before, but I haven't seen any today yet, which they were everywhere at one point.

So it's all so much quieter! And here, they little fishy sort of chirpy sound that they sometimes have! Archer, so I wonder if maybe just maybe they've started to leave now, as all with this kind of cold front has pushed in and in the winds that we've got.

Maybe they've decided they are going to start hitting back north as well. So it's so sad when all of our migratory birds start to leave. I get sad! They provide so much color and sort of variety to our birdlife. So he's very nice to have them in this area.

Good! One! No one else is in store for us this morning! Very quiet from an animal point of view. I don't know, unicorn, which I suppose is special nonetheless! We should take that just with both hands, given that it is the day that it is.

Get my brain working because I'm drawing a blank as to what the longest migratory bird is! I’m sure Steve will know straight away! I do know the answer to this, but I've honestly at the moment just trying to think. I've read this many, many, many, many, many, many times, but I just can't think of it right now.

Okay, I'll think about it. Maybe Steve will—we have the answer.

Hmm. Thanks, Justin! Sorry! We just stopped for a little bit of what we call in South Africa, “Pat course,” a little bit of food for the road. Mmm, white berry bush—marvelous! Look, I'm sorted for the morning and very, very tasty!

Very, very juicy seeds! So this is one of the things that you would eat in the bush, and we are bumbling around from tree to tree. So the largest migrating bird, or the furthest migrating bird, I think Judy Edge sent a little article on Twitter the other night. Thank you for that; very interesting!

It is the Arctic Tern, which is now going more than 6,000 miles, further than the shearwater, which is a bird they thought used to cover the greatest distance—6,000 miles further than that! They come down from Antarctica and go down Africa, South America, and back again.

And it's all about feeding. It's all about the movement of fish in the water—that's some marvelous distance. The cliff drops about 30 years, and they're not putting these very small little transmitters that weigh about a gram on their foot, and they're getting all these zigzagging movements.

They don't go in a straight line; they kind of move like this. So they go so much further than they need to, but it's all about energy, and they're feeding along as they go.

So that is a marvelous article that we read just the other day, and that's truth because they got the trackers on the birds. Now, before, all we could know about was we'd see a bird some way and, “Okay, cool, as the crow flies, they've gone from here to there!”

But now, with the actual GPS tracker— and I know exactly how far the birds have gone, and I think it's like 17,000 miles or something in a year flying. Imagine—that's some serious miles! I wonder if they're—and they have no passports, they have no customs control, they just—they just go! Isn't it marvelous? No security checks, they don't have to take off their shoes or their belt; the good old days—the good old days!

Okay, yeah, I am a bit of both! Gem video browser and aggressor, it just depends on what leaf type! So here is a very nice grass! This is known as red grass, and this is grass tit to be associated with basaltic soils.

We go up to the Maasai Mara; the red oak grass everybody talks about there; it's the same species! Out of 10, you'd say 10 out of 10, and this grows very, very well on nutrient-rich soils. Here in the Sabi Sands, we find it in small sporadic places.

It's got nothing to do with an overall layout, but in the Mara, this is the dominant grass species that brings in the millions of animals that come there to graze. So this is a very nice species, and when we find lots of it, you could call it very good grazing.

But here, we find it just in a little patch. A little patch here as we keep moving, it's going to disappear again! So, a very nice grass to munch on! And this stick is a stick I found up in the northern Kruger.

A friend of mine actually found it, and he gave it an oil, and then he left it on the deck of the room where I was staying in. He went on leave; I needed a stick to go walking! I'd left mastic. I'd been in an elephant encounter one afternoon where I'd left my stick on the ground purely because we had to leave the scene very quickly.

We were sitting down, elephants came in, and we quickly retreated up onto the rocks, and I left my stick. The next day, I needed one, and I found this, and it's marvelous! It is my wisdom stick. It's got lots of stories to tell; it's nice and polished now from my hand, and it's lovely to walk with the stick.

You can evade spider webs, you can point things out, you can hit Fergus on the head when he's not paying attention! Very important! Very, very important to have a stick out here. Pointing out tracks also—when you start getting old like me, and you want to point out tracks on the floor, it's much easier to point with your stick.

Indeed, they get quite old! Well, talking about getting old and people with injuries, let's go over to see how Brendan is doing.

Hi, Steve! Ha ha! You're older than me! So, since Steve’s come back, and Fergus has come back, the old men have come back! So I'm known for—so I think Sebastian and I were the two oldest in camp, but we are not anymore we've handed over that to Steven and Fergus.

So we had tracks of the lions coming out of that thick block; they lay on the road here for a bit, so I'm just going to check around on the next road. Otherwise, they’re sleeping somewhere between here and Buffalo Dam. If they haven't gone north or west or east or, but it doesn't look like it!

Last night on the Sun Sunset Safari, we saw a very old male lion from the Magellan coalition. So there used to be four; there's only two left. And apparently both of them are in that really, really bad state, like we saw that male yesterday.

So far, no updates on him this morning; he crashed into the earth and lost last night. We haven't heard anything yet this morning, but he is about 14 years old, which is incredibly old for a male lion.

So currently in the western sections of the Sabi Sands, there are no dominant male lions. There's apparently one 2-and-a-half-year-old otto ally, and he thinks he's the bee's knees.

However, we just heard that the Birmingham’s are mating on Londolozi, and I think what's going to happen is they're gonna push west into that area that is devoid of male lions—which is troubling news for the InGoma, Torchwood, and Styx prides—less so for the Styx than the other two, but these northern prides are probably at great risk at the moment.

So they're very, very great risk at the moment; as the Birmingham's are looking to probably spend more time down south and maybe even head west from there.

As we were just saying there, the Magellan males still alive and both in very bad condition; like the one we saw yesterday, both sort of eating out an existence. Often that when male lions get to that sort of state, they eat tortoises and terrapins and anything. Now even if they had to come across an InGoma pride or anything like that, the lionesses would probably kill a male like that, especially if it's not one of the males from their coalition.

So it’s going to be very interesting what happens with the lions and the leopards. At the moment, there is so much upheaval in the dynamics!

Just checking carefully. I think these are the tracks from when Steve was following last night! Now, one of the biggest myths that is perpetrated out on safari is that bright colors will cause animals to charge and react and everything.

So Paulo! Most animals see in a various monotone colors, especially the predators. And the only things that really see in true color are cats—not cats; oh, monkeys! Because cats don't really see in true color.

So lions sort of see in a monotone greeny-gray—probably very similar to what we see in IR—except without the definition that we see. So strangely enough, the two colors that stick up the most in the African bush are black and white because they are really, really prominent solid blocks of color!

So that whole neutral colors and whatnot that you get told to wear on safari is more so as not to offend the other people on the vehicle than to offend the animals, as most animals couldn't care if you're wearing neon pink!

Okay, now have these lions arrived at Buffalo K? It's a possibility that you—like this area! Oh yes, so while we keep meandering towards the Buffalo gorge, it seems like Steve has found something else on bushwalk.

Yes, I have! Once again, looking at a very nice tree—one of the favorite trees—a very favorite from a food point of view, but from a spiritual and cultural point of view—the buffalo thorn.

Very easy to see by the straight hook and the backward hook, and this is one of the favorite browsing plants for myself; it’s a substitute for spinach and very, very tasty. When the fruits are up, you can actually eat them as well. They are red berry, dark fruit with a very hard seed inside, and you must eat them when they're red, and they are very, very tasty!

But what I was going to talk about is how this buffalo thorn is growing has actually facilitated enormous amounts of growth of two types of grasses. The first one we have seen already is the red, the great grass—the red oak grass, or for me, to try Andhra. And the second one is this wonderful panicum maximum, blue guinea grass.

There are a lot of common names out there, and I talked about grazing and browsing here. I'm eating the leaves, and here I'm eating the seeds—very tasty! And the base of these grass stalks are so juicy—Hmm! You can eat them all day!

As we walk through, we're constantly pulling these up and eating them, and these are one of the grasses that need semi-shade. It's a reason why they don't grow really much up in the Mara because there's not much shade. They need semi-shade and semi-sun, and they grow very, very well in the undergrowth like this, protected by trees like the buffalo thorn—very, very marvelous!

But the reason why I actually wanted you to come back to me was we found a rock, and this rock is very easily identified by the very large sort of granules in there and that sort of dark orange color to it. Now, this rock is known as ferric, and it is the youngest rocks you find on Earth at the moment.

And a very good geologist friend of mine told me that these rocks actually, when historians look back or a new civilization looks back on the human world, they can actually correlate this rock with the existence of Homo sapiens.

How interesting is that? So, we're looking at about two million years, which is very young in the scope of a rock, but these rocks are being formed as we speak. There are sedimentary rocks, which means they are deposited soil particles moving and then getting compacted through lithification.

And these rocks are correlated with the existence of the human species. I think that is an absolutely marvelous story. When you think about the granite—2.8 billion years! That is an enormous amount of time! And even the best thoughts—150, 250 million—it’s a very long time, versus about one to two million years. Marvelous indeed!

Are you going to leave this right here? We found it, and we'll continue on! Joy and Al, if we find invasive plant species, we will definitely remove them. I don't—I haven't found too many while I've been walking around, but a lot of the invasive species come in, as I've said a few times before, via the extensive river systems that come in from the west.

I showed you that photo of the map. That entire map runs from north to south, and all the rivers come in from the west. So those perennial rivers, those free-flowing rivers that flow all year round are the bringers of agricultural pests and problem plants, and we don't find many of them here in the Doom itself because we don't have a perennial river system moving through.

But if we do find, we’ll show you, and we’ll pull them out. So we are walking, as you can see! Let's go with Justin Dixon, who is driving!

Indeed we are! We are driving with very little success at this rate, so we've come to try out to the dam now, which means we'll just have a little stop here and have a look around at what's going on and see if there's anything that's looking. Is that oh no, it's just a log for a second.

Yeah, I thought maybe there was a crocodile that was interesting, but it's not; it's just a log that is positioned kind of—oh, is it mud? Might be mud, yes! It's mud, that's what it is!

So I thought for a second that it was a croc that was sitting kind of on the edge of the woods. I briefly glanced at it, but it's definitely mud. Now, shallow's dam is quiet; literally, we have not seen a single track from after the rain, so there's been nothing moving around. Maybe everybody's decided it's bad weather, and it's decided to have a bit of a nap!

So I'm not sure actually where I'm going to head from here. I might head to the elephant carcass again, see—we haven't been there for a few days. You never know—maybe something lurking around that side, so we're gonna have a little look around there, and hopefully, Windy behaves herself in that area.

Now, I'm glad that we resolved the longest migratory bird! It was funny! As we kind of sent you to Steve, I said to him I'm 99% sure it's the tern, and then I wasn't—you know I was just drawing a blank, and I mean, you know—it was confirmed Arctic Tern, and, you know, all the information comes back which is good!

But anyway, that's the way it goes. Sometimes you forget things! Now Julie, largest migratory birds. Hmm! I'm actually not even sure about this, you know what I would say—what would we say? Large would be heaviest, or largest would be biggest wingspan, or would it be...

There's different parameters! Is heaviest and is sort of longest wingspan? I would say probably, I might be wrong in this, but maybe one of the stork species would be one of the large birds. Misbehaving is also a violation!

Should Fernanda's comedic terribly! Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen; having a few technical issues with Windy, but don't you worry, we are back with bushwalk, and we have found a magnificent specimen of a golden orb-web spider! This is the female. She is about 200 times bigger than the male.

And look at those beautiful colors—the black, the orange—a very contrasting—it stands out quite brightly, and that is to indicate to birds, potentially its toxicity if eaten! I don't know if it is poisonous to eat; what I do know is that it is slightly venomous! If it did give you a bite, it would only give you a mild headache—so nothing to be worried about; it's not one of the dangerous or human-fearing spiders out there!

But the name golden orb comes from the beautiful golden web that it spins. And this female actually has got an ecosystem—or should we say—a party to herself! First of all, in her web, which you can see now at that beautiful golden light, there is her junk line in the middle; that is where the remains of her kills she puts—makes it— it stands out quite easily from a distance!

You can clearly see that line it hopefully deters an animal from walking through, and then over here, you can see there is a male—there is a male here! There's two males, in fact, in the web!

And what I always marvel at is quite often the males are missing a leg or two—the one male has got all of his legs, albeit one of them is half, and the other male is missing a few legs. And that is because whenever they try to mate with the female, they're living in her web.

This guy's missing most of his legs; he's only got five legs—he should have eight! So what happens, in fact, is they live in the web, and they want to mate with the female, so when they touch the web, the female gets excited about food, she goes rushing off there to go catch the food, and then the male will often drop down a line and sort of escape, and then come back again, and he learns to play a very particular tune on the web—a little sort of serenade for the female, you could say.

And then eventually, she realizes, "Oh, hang on, maybe this is a mating partner," and then she does not eat him! But it's very common to find them missing legs, so they live in the web with the female, and she does most of the hunting and catching. That’s right—we learned to play the guitar to serenade the ladies!

Hmm, Paula, I have no idea what the average weight is, but these spiders have been known to catch small birds in these webs. They are very, very strong, so a small finch-like bird of about maybe 9 to 10 grams could potentially get caught in these webs, but the thing is, as the spider won't be able to eat them, and it just damages the web. Hence, the fact that they put these drag lines or often a Surelimen Tum to show other organisms that the web is here and to try and steer clear.

But what is very interesting is we've got a parasitic spider within the web! If Ferg is gonna try to focus on it, there's quite a few of them there. They are known as the dewdrop spider, and I wonder if—look at it! It looks like a little drop of mercury, and they live in the web of the female golden orb spider, and they are actually klepto parasites!

Which means that they steal food! Do you know what a kleptomaniac is? Is that someone who steals? So a klepto parasite lives in the web of the female golden orb, and they all feed on catches that she has wrapped up ready for digestion! So they don't seem to affect her too much because they're so small, and she doesn't seem to hunt them down, but they will steal bits and pieces of food, just like a tick stealing the blood out of an animal!

They will not kill the spider, but they are stealing its food! So klepto parasite—very interesting symbiotic relationship! I wonder if you can actually see that mercury-like ball on their back!

CeCe and Mysterio, we're going to show you how big the spider is. I'm gonna come stand on the other side of it, and then folks are gonna get a bit of a relation in that you can see how big it is compared to my fingers!

Here, that's about half the length of my index finger! If you can see that, I'm not afraid of her, because she's not going to try to bite me! There she is! Beautiful! Hey! Absolutely beautiful!

And what will happen is after mating and after laying eggs in the tree itself, she's about as big as she can get; a little bit bigger than that! What is she doing? Is she laying? Why is she sticking some more web? It's possible that her web got a little bit damaged last night. She's gonna remake some of it!

And after laying eggs in the tree soon, she will die, and the next season they will hatch again, and the whole process of the golden orb's ecology begins again!

Rev, Indus. The Revenant Paula spiders have got a very special mechanism on their feet, which enables them to walk over their web without getting stuck! It is obviously unique to spiders; they don't get stuck in the web!

I don't know exactly how it works, but the web is designed by them, and facilitated by them. If they got stuck in it, evolution just would not continue. So they've evolved, obviously, to live in a web, to produce the web, to gobble it up as well or to spin it whenever they need!

And so they are very adept at not getting stuck! I saw some little eggs over here?! Fair girls on the other side! I saw some little white patches!

Okay! Well, it looks like Justin has managed to get back into a better signal area. Let's leave our spider and go over to him some bait! The signal!

I want to just head quickly towards Janet Jackson's home and see if maybe she's home on a cold day like today, whichever one it is, and see whether or not they are relaxing in the little hole and appearing out. Now, we were discussing the largest migratory birds, and I wasn't a hundred percent sure what they were, but I went and checked it out quickly just to kind of make sure and see what it was!

And interestingly enough, it is a pelican! So the great white pelican is the largest migratory bird apparently in the world, which is pretty interesting! It has a wingspan of over two meters and is the largest one according to some articles.

Now, I don't know if that just applies to the Americas or if it applies to us as well, but I mean here in southern Africa, obviously, we don't see much of a migration of pelicans at all, and we don't see much of a migration in terms of any of the other top ten birds that they are in that list!

So I'll tell you what the top ten birds are met according to a certain list that I found! In number 10 is the Canadian goose. That is apparently a bird that is got 1.7-2 meter wingspan, and these geese follow over North America, basically, and they are the most distributed—used in North America! Then you've got the great blue heron; then you've got a turkey vulture, golden eagle, bald eagle, sandhill crane, tundra swan, whooping crane, trumpeter swan, and then American white pelican!

It's pretty much all the North American species! I don't know if this is completely true, but it does say this is the world's sort of migratory birds, but I think it must be the American migratory bird! So maybe somebody can help us and see what the world's is; it'd be interesting to see!

My first thought would have been one of the sort of—like I say cranes, maybe storks for us here in southern Africa! But in terms of the world, I'm a die-hard potential!

Now, no, Janet Jackson today as well! That's it! So let's carry on and see! I'm interested to know, though, if somebody can find what our largest South African migratory bird is! Maybe I just am curious to know what it is!

Do you all know? I haven't checked the barn owl nest recently, just from a simple fact that I haven't actually been on Chitra recently. I spent a very little time in the time that I was there the other day. We had Kochava and the little one and in Tingan's. I didn't actually get a chance to get this; I might get there today.

Now, since on the road over here, there’s a crime scene of some sort—maybe a bit closed, right? Yeah, so the pole might be all—the car might be in the way, but there's the shell of a tortoise! Oh, I need to move a little; sorry, sins! Let me go back a little. Sorry, I thought I had enough space, but evidently not.

Here we go! So it's interesting to see because this is just the bottom side of a tortoise, but I don't see any other signs of it. And that's very strange; normally when you have a situation where a tortoise is cleaned up and eaten, then you'll find bits of it broken all over the place of its old image.

You see them kind of separated in half like this and stole some of the flesh there, but no signs of the rest of the shell—so now I wonder if this was maybe killed somewhere else and then something like a young hyena picked it up and carried it around, or what the actual situation is!

Constantine, I strapped around it, so I think this has been here for a day or two, and then the rain has washed over whatever had walked here. Hmm! Interesting, that's for sure! Tortoises— they're getting absolutely hammered at the moment! This is about the third dead tortoise I've seen in the last couple of days.

Okay, well, we're going to leave our tortoise; we need to head down towards the elephant carcass! I see there's a few fresh tracks for hyenas going in that direction, so maybe we'll get some painting action at the carcass itself!

I know a lot of you love hyenas, so I'll try and see if we can find that carcass! Here—oh, great go away bird—calling quite a bit! Just see this guy's slowly—I just wanna check! Sometimes they can be a good indicator that something's lurking!

No, sir, quiet! Now, okay, we'll carry on down towards the elephant carcass while we do have to send you to Brent, who I think has found what Steve saw last night!

Well, we have! We've arrived at the remnants of the kudu, and I think it's quite a young kudu, just judging by how little of it's left and on the jawbone—it's not a big, big jawbone at all, even though part of it's chewed off. I think it's quite a young kudu—a sub-adult.

And the fact that there's all the ribcage—most of the vertebrae gone—is only a jawbone and two scapulars left! Chair! I'm hoping that the lions aren't too far away now! Quite interestingly, even if we didn't know it was a kudu, we could surmise it was a kudu!

Even if we didn't have the jawbone to look at because if you look at some of the undigested stomach contents, you can see all the leaves, and it looks like these could have been eating quite a lot of roundleaf teak!

So you can see it hasn't been ruminated fully yet, and there's quite a lot of leaves inside it! Now, the other reason I know it's a small kudu is just from the size of the stomach contents. A big kudu would be a lot more stomach now!

The lions seem to have come out to come back in here, and I think we heard some Franklin alarming not too far away. I'm hoping they’re lying up just; they’re all—they're just about to get moving!

So we're gonna try to negotiate our way through this thick area to see if we can catch up with the lions! Now, since it is National Unicorn Day, I've got a question for you to ponder before I send you back to Steve!

Why did Scotland choose the unicorn as their national emblem or national animal? Okay? Think about that! Hashtag Safari Live. In the meantime, Steve's doing some flowering!

Yes, we are! Thank you, Brent! And the players are able to find that kudu carcass, and I'm happy to see that my assumption said it was a small kudu is correct!

And then, as purely because we watched those lions just devour the bones as if there was nothing, so the reason our stock share is—we found two beautiful flowers, which are related—both of them! This is the blue wandering jew, or calamelina, and here is the yellow, and then the common name for them is Mickey Mouse ears, which you can quite easily see in the shape of them.

And these are very well-known for, if you use the leaves themselves, you make them into a drink. They’re very good to cure any bladder problems that you might have, and I’ve also heard the story that you can actually—there's a little droplet that gets caught in over there, and you can use that as an eye wash, as eyedrops—if need be!

And it's marvelous to see both of them together! Why one is yellow and one is blue, no idea! But I mean you can see the flowering parts and the shape of them are identical, but it's just the color!

So the color itself will actually attract a different type of insect! So yellows you're expected to attract sort of daytime animals, and blues and purples are sort of more for the nocturnal spectrum, but all flowers have got a UV signature and we know all insects actually follow UV signatures versus color, so to speak, because they see in a very different level to what we see!

But marvelous! Another situation, or another thing I wanted to talk about was—we're talking about grazing and browsing again! I found another beautiful flower—not flower, but grass! This is very easy to identify!

Nikki, I tortured this one yesterday! It looks like some fingers! This is the finger grass, and very, very tasty! Out of the two other grasses that I showed you—the red grass and the blue buffalo grass—I keep getting their common name mixed up, panicum maximum.

This is on par with it with regards to feeding! And you can tell that by—mmm! Very, very juicy! But now, ladies and gentlemen, how can I be an aggressor? It's not possible! If I had to take this grass here and eat it, it would cause me to vomit!

I just would—we are not designed to eat grass! The food that we eat, we need to eat completely raw, or we need to cook it! Grasses—if you ever see a cat or a dog, they eat grass, and it's offered to cough up a furball! I saw one of the lionesses last night eat some of the grass, and she coughed up a furball with some bones in it! It's quite revolting!

But it is an emetic, which causes you to regurgitate whatever it is you have in your tummy. So we are not able to digest grass! We probably were at one stage, but our pendex has altogether disappeared!

And at one stage, it is probably quite similar to that of a grazing animal—very large cecum for digesting those sort of things. So we can't directly eat grass! I have tried before; it does not work!

It's curved! Tristan, who has managed to find a dead elephant carcass—well, not very difficult to find! It's been here for the last three weeks! Fairly easy to go and don't really know anyway; you know very much left of this elephant!

It's amazing how a few weeks ago this was a full elephant, and it was alive! And now, look at what it's been reduced to! You can see you have a hyena that’s also in the area; it's just chomping down on bones! And it is literally all that is left—there's a bit of skin here and there that they've eaten!

After the rain, skin is softened up, and it looks like a blanket that has been dragged all over the place, but it's actually the skin that is around! So there it is! Say, Kira, who’s 11 years old, was asking, "Have I ever seen—" I know, Kira! We have seen hyenas! We see them!

From time to time, most days! In fact, maybe we don't get them on the show every single day, but as we live in and work in this area, we get them pretty much every day. We hear them every night—very common! Archer, and there's lots of them, and they love these kinds of things where they can find a carcass like this!

And it's amazing to watch them go to town and to try and feed off all of this kind of thing! The power in their jaws is amazing! And if I keep quiet, you might be able to hear it crunching down on the bone.

You can see it salivating because it's trying to get to that bone. I'm not sure if you'll be able to hear it; it's a little soft! But basically, what it’s trying to do is trying to get any little last bit of nutrients that it can, so it's kind of biting down on the leg bones and sort of areas where there's a bit of maybe marrow that’s exposed and can try and feed off that.

So you'll see this little hyenas. They'll come back day in, day out, especially after a bit of rain! Rain basically reactivates the scent a little bit, and it makes everything smell like there's a fresh wall, at least some meat left, and then they come in and they come and chew the bones, and they scatter things around.

And they'll choose the skin, so there's still some nutrients left! Jeff! For both vulture and hyenas, there are a few vultures that are here as well. There's a white-back vulture that's off to the right-hand side, that's feeding off the spinal area.

And then in the distance, there's a whole bunch of hooded vultures that are sitting up on the tree over there. So there's four hooded vultures all together hoping—maybe just maybe there might be an Egyptian vulture amongst them, but alas no sign of our Egyptian friend on this carcass, which is very, very sad!

Sisi! The smell is almost nonexistent now! There's no real smell—kind of decaying, dead, dry smell—but it's not nearly as bad as it was a few weeks ago! Once all the meat's really gone, and it's just the bones that are left now, the bones themselves will stink!

This skull and the ribcage and everything else—it's going to smell horrific for months! And you’ll take probably six months to a year before you won't be able to smell that dead, decaying smell on the bones! But in terms of us just sitting here, it's not bad at all—doesn't really stink much anymore!

It's actually quite fine just sitting here, not really getting any smell like that! So MIG sometimes they wag their tails when they're happy! They just—it just depends on how they feel sometimes! They'll just kind of give it a little wag just because they have fun, and they like to do it!

No, not really! No, hyenas know when they're excited—they’ll turn their tails up! So the tails will lift, and they'll become very excitable, then their tails in the air, quite straight, and they kind of have them up in...

And there's lots of weeping that goes on with that! But in terms of when they see each other—not really! The tail tends to stay flattened down! Anytime we really see the tail wagging as if they’ve got a situation where they've got flies that are landing on their coats or landing around them!

They really end up like that, and then you just see it kind of flicks to be able to try and kind of chase them away! But they don't wag them to be happy—they are not a dog! Remember that! They might look like dogs, but they are not a dog! They're in their own family altogether!

And in fact, they reckon there are more closely related to cats than they are to dogs, which is pretty interesting! But they are not a dog in any way!

So, the wagging of the tail is not the same as a domestic dog; that's all! For hyena females—yes, they—it's the same yet in general because the females will take feeders, but the males do, in fact, mate with multiple partners, but it seems to be a situation where the females can push them out for matrimony after they’ve mated with them.

And the young males will try and push their luck against older males, but that's a separate conversation altogether! So, I mean, we can go on and on about these vulture hyena dynamics, but we'll just have to see how it goes!

I think... perhaps we should give them another minute before we move on and see what's buried beneath the back of there.

Hmm... so let's move on and see what's there.

So apparently, it seems that we haven't gone far, but we are intrigued to see if Hirani heads south, towards the elephant carcass, so we can go follow them on their sights there now. So, let's take a peek!

Well, I do enjoy my rocks! We don't find too many rocks around here because it's all still very flat, and the weathering has happened, so I don't find too many beautiful rocks! Mmm! Ladybird, I am not sure on what type of gemstones we find around here!

Further up in reserve, called the Salati, who I used to work as an emerald mine there, and they have closed down for some reason! But there are still emeralds within the rock in those! So they found emeralds there!

I have never found—I did to go scratching around in the soil and the rocks there, but I didn’t find anything of any great value. But in Botswana, there are lots of diamonds that are found in and around in Namibia. There are diamonds found all along the coastline there; you cannot go into those areas, as you can imagine! Diamonds are quite heavily controlled by the people who have all the money!

But in this area, I don't know of any gemstones, unfortunately! I can't help you with that! The birds are starting to wake up; they've been very quiet. They've probably been very wet.

I just heard some Aramark babblers making their very noisy call in the background! Okay!

Oh, yeah! I'm trying to tell the difference about these birds, wondering what else might be lurking there!

My stomach is rumbling; I need to find lunch! Well, we’ll keep heading in this direction to see if we can find anything!

While we're hunting, let's go back to Brent, who might be lucky to find his very own prey!