Blog – Page 174 – Christian Sperka Photography

2014-03-10

Water, water and more water …

A wet weekend 🙂

Enjoy this “weather report” from the Thanda Reserve Management

“Last Saturday night we had 106 mm of rainfall in less than 12 hours. This wet weather is a welcome respite from the recent dry spell. We were becoming concerned about drying waterholes and fire hazards from long, dry grass. The accumulated rainfall in March is already more than three times the average over the last ten years!

Now all waterholes are brimming with fresh rain water which will carry the Thanda wildlife for many months. However, nature’s blessings in such sudden abundance often require a bit of mopping up. Some of our roads and fence lines became compromised by soil erosion and we have to mobilize all our teams to bring them up to scratch again. And when the sun comes out we will need to monitor the germination of new alien vegetation which takes advantage of the rich moist Zululand soils.

Nevertheless we welcome the African…

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2014-03-09

Getting close :-)

If one would ask anyone who plans an African Safari what they would like to experience on their trip to the wild, most of the answers would include “getting close to the animals”.

For the Thanda guests on my vehicle that wish came true. Even more than expected!

This young Lioness was passing our vehicles in touching distance while staring at my passengers. One could hear a pin drop and breathing stopped for a little while as the predator silently went its way.

What a safari experience!

2014-03-07

On the move!

It is amazing how far Elephants move even if they take a leisurely pace. So following them if they move fast is quite difficult.

The Thanda guests on my vehicle enjoyed the fast drive to catch up with these gentle giants when they were on the way to the next waterhole. And we just caught them as they crossed the road in front of us.

A special type of road block 🙂

2014-03-06

Two Years in the Wild!

This is a message for all my friends in and around Nashville!

I have been asked quite a few times if I will give a presentation about my work in South Africa when I am visiting Nashville in 2014. So here it is!

The Brentwood Photography Group kindly invited me to speak at their monthly meeting on Tuesday, 3 June 2014.

The presentation will be about “Two Years in the Wild!“. I will share some of my adventures and experiences – with a lot of images 🙂 and I will also talk a bit about my methods to get good wildlife pictures.

Guests are very welcome at the meeting, so if you would like to be there, just mark the date in your calendar.

The meeting will be held at the Otter Creek Church of Christ on Franklin Road in Brentwood. The meeting will start at 6:30pm.

It would be great to see you then!

Click here to download a PDF with the meeting information:

PS: Please feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who you think might be interested in the topic – Thanks

2014-03-05

New cubs!

It was the first time I saw the new Lion cubs of the oldest Thanda South Pride female. The mum of the two youngsters is quite shy and likes thick bush. Bheki and I were on our way to take some pictures on the Thanda Mduna Royal Reserve. As we approached the fence line to this new part of Thanda we spotted the female with her two new cubs and the their two older brothers.

I got a few shots of some of the family members before they disappeared into a drainage line. This is my favorite images from this fast photo shoot 🙂

2014-03-04

BIRDS – Village Weavers mating

Since I have posted the image of a strangely colored bird a few days ago – now identified as a Village Weaver – a few of you have asked me about how do Village Weavers normally look like.

So here is an image of a Village Weaver pair mating in front of their nest.

2014-03-03

Smooth and Rough – Female and Male!

I recently took these images of a female and a male Giraffe on Thanda. Without looking at the rest of the animals it is quite clear which one is the male and which is the female.

Smooth lines and hairs on top of the ossicones (the horn-like extensions of the skull) define the female head. A rough outline with many calluses from fighting other males and being bold on top of the ossicones shows a distinctly male head.

So, when looking trough binoculars and seeing only the head of a Giraffe sticking out from the trees, it is quite easy to tell what gender animal it is!

2014-03-02

HELP! – A questions for the birders among you.

Bheki – my tracker on Thanda – is an excellent birding guide. And he usually is able to identify any bird for our guest or for me :-).

But this one puzzles us both. I shot this image in July 2011. As I am currently reviewing all my images – many thousands 😦 – I came across this one and wanted to get an ID.

Does anyone have an idea what this is (it looks like a Weaver or Canary with some of the colors of a Barbet).

Thanks for the help!

2014-03-01

Bush Disco?

This is a story from the Thanda Wildlife department I just posted on Thanda’s blog. I am sure you, the reader’s of my blog, will enjoy it as well!

Far from it – Enjoy this story from the Thanda Wildlife department 🙂

Relocating Lions

Every now and again we have to say goodbye to some of our animals on Thanda. Not because we want to, but because we have to in order to manage the reserve properly.

Currently we have two beautiful, two and half-year old male Lions. They have decided to join up with their mom and her two new cubs. In order to prevent inbreeding and fighting with the much bigger older males, we will have to move them to a new home. A game reserve nearby, whose male lion was caught in a snare, is looking for a replacement. A good match!

Well that was the easy part… Unfortunately you don’t just walk up to a lion and ask him to please climb into the vehicle for a ride to his new home. So we bought 2 HUGE speakers and an amplifier which we will take out into the bush and use it to play the sound of a distressed animal from a recording, which should attract these two elusive boys.

We will have bait tied to a tree to make it irresistible for them to stick around. This way the vet can dart them once they start eating.

Sounds like fun, right? Well attempt number one brought us a Hyena after playing “distress sounds” for three hours and we eventually decided to pack up for the day. So this is what we’re going to do for many nights so to catch these lions for their big move. Wish us luck!

Mariana Venter – Thanda Wildlife Operations

The image above on the left shows John and Mariana from Thanda Wildlife Operations “playing to the Lions”. The image above on the right shows one of two young males.

The image below shows mum and her two boys – They are also hard to catch on camera as they are quite shy 🙂

2014-02-27

New Thanda e-brochure

We have created a new Thanda e-brochure. It contains a lot of images and interesting information on 40 pages. All the wildlife images are mine 🙂

You can either view the brochure as a flipping book online at
http://www.edvc.com/Thanda/e-brochure/Thanda.html

or download it as a zip file to your computer at
http://thandablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/thanda-e-brochure.zip

or view the brochure as a pdf at
http://thandablog.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/thanda-e-brochure.pdf

Let me know what you think!

PS: The title page image is one of my favorite Lioness images. She was “bird-watching” when I took the shot 🙂