A few days of hot sun is relieved by scattered showers. Is this keeping the wildebeest nearby, delaying their migration outward? Every night, their collective grunting seems to be intensifying, and by daylight, more and more of them become our campground neighbors. Thanks to their presence, we use the wildebeest as subjects in a photography exercise: panning and shooting moving animals.

Wildebeests are not as ugly as I expected, but not exactly cute either. Still, they have a strange beauty: thick beards; long tar-black faces; dark stripes slashing across their body. Besides milling around the grass, the male wildebeest participate in rutting, which is pretty much relentless posturing and fighting with other males in an attempt to win territory—and a harem of females. These running males (and their hilarious wins and losses of stampeding females who move back and forth like table tennis) give us plenty of practice for our panning technique.

The rain not only reprieves us from the heat and keep the wildebeest close by, it also gives us a favorable experience as we try to shoot hippopotami. We travel to the Retina Hippo Pool and have our second camera exercise: shooting hippos while dealing with the bright, slippery sheen on their sunbathing bodies. But when we arrive at the pool, the overcast sky has already dulled the shine on their backs, and the previous rain has removed their stench from the air. What luck we’ve gained with this rainy weather!

Hippos are not entirely endearing creatures. This watering hole has drawn a massive number of them, all shoving and honking belligerently as they clamber over each other for their spot in the water. So how do they mark their favored territory? They continually squirt out their feces and spin their tails so that the waste spreads out even further. Lovely. But it doesn’t stop our tour group from snapping away at these amusing beasts.

-k

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Hartebeest: Banded mongoose: