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Safari Live - Day 110 | National Geographic


3m read
·Nov 11, 2024

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Generally, with me today is Ferg, and we are fighting and braving the African weather just to be able to go and find some animals. Now, if you've got any comments or any questions, please send them through using the hashtags #bylab or use the YouTube chat. We are not too sure where we're headed; we want to go perhaps see the last area where the tracks were in this morning for a pack of wild dogs. Perhaps, by any miracle, they've come back, and I think that's our plan for the afternoon.

Other than that, perhaps we'll head later on to see good old Boat in Ghana, the male leopard. Hopefully, he will be roughly in the same area where we saw him this morning, and we'll be able to share some time with him. Now, I'm hoping that'll be the case, and other than that, like I say, just braving the wind. We were scheduled to do a walk this afternoon, but the windy conditions often make it very dangerous, so we've decided against it just because of our general safety.

Now, as you can see the wind all around us, if you look at all the grass, you can see how everything's moving—all the trees, all the branches. Now, the weather has been quite puzzling, and we had this massive storm predicted for today—lots and lots of rain. But as the day has gone through, we still haven't had any drops, which is a good and a bad thing. So, I wonder if perhaps later on during this afternoon we're gonna get all that rain. Really interesting to see.

Although you're ready for the rain, Ferg and I, we've got all of our rain gear, so we're not scared. We will brave the weather as well as the Impala. I hope they were being clever, and we just went past one breeding herd, and they were all tucked away in the bushes, all standing together trying to seek or find some shelter from all this wind and the possible gloomy weather ahead.

Now, there is a blue sky to our right—so towards the east. I am hoping that the beautiful blue skies are gonna carry with us for the rest of the afternoon, and I think we are actually going to start driving onto the blue skies. That sounds like a wonderful plan for the afternoon; we'll just pretend and go leave the dark skies ahead of us behind us so that way we won't even see them.

Right, seems like Tristan is looking up at some tracks, so let's head back to him and find out what he's after.

I am looking at tracks. I'm looking at tracks of probably one of the biggest snake tracks that I've seen since I've been at Juma. This is seriously large. As you can see, it’s kind of twisting its way. I don't know what the word would be; sort of going from side to side across the road. You can see the big mounds of sand being pushed away from the backside and going. So, the snake was moving towards us, with the sand being pushed away from us a little bit.

And so, what I wanted to show you is just how thick this snake track actually is. It looks about the size of my forearm. So, where’s a good clear one here, VM? Let's do this side. So if I have to put my forearm inside there, there we go, it fits just right. So my forearm would fit inside of that section right there, which is, well, there we go, that's how wide that snake is. That gives you an idea of how thick the snake is and how big it is.

Now, snakes that get this thick are very few and far between. There's only probably three candidates that we could take for this one. One would be a puff adder; the other one would be a python of some size. I mean, that wouldn't be the biggest python, but it would be a python. Or an incredibly large black mamba would be the other option. But given the small gate of the twist and turn, it probably in all likelihood is a very big puff adder. Puff adders get a wide, wide, wide body, and that small kind of gate like that would be a short snake but very wide. But still amazing to see.

Now it's gone towards a little section here behind me that's fallen over—trees and stumps—and these tracks are actually, funny enough, on top of our vehicle tracks, which we came down just now, which was not long ago—maybe about 45 minutes ago. So I want to just check back here and see maybe we get lucky and we can actually find the snake and tr...

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