Night Drive

One way to view hard to find animals (and sometimes birds), is to go on a night drive. This might seem the obvious seeing that so many animals and birds are nocturnal but actually catching some action at night is even more hit and miss than driving in the daytime. Most morning game drives start before dawn while afternoon drives usually finish after dark. The tracker sits on the front of the vehicle scanning the bush with a powerful spotlight - the idea is that you can locate animals even if they are far away because their eyes will reflect the spotlight briefly - providing they look directly at the light, even if they are at a distance.

That said, in my experience, spotlighting is very hit and miss because, once night falls, wild animals tend to hunker down deep in the bush, usually some way off the road you are driving on, to shelter from the wind and to hide from passing predators.

As luck would have it we did see some animals at night, including an African Wildcat, Hyenas, rhinos and even a couple of lazy lions.

This was an exceptional sighting - an owl sheltering under deep foliage in the early evening, presumably waiting for night to come so it could take flight and hunt. This is Verreaux's Eagle Owl, identified by its pink eyelids - it's the largest owl in Africa.

Not really a true night shot - this snap of a vulture was taken at dusk. Unusually it was sitting about 4 metres among the branches of a tree. Normally vultures will take up position at the very top of big trees but in this instance there was a lion finishing off a warthog at the base of the tree, and the vulture wanted a front row seat for the time when the lion had finished and moved on.

These two shots were taken at a small waterhole in Kapama Reserve. It was pitch black - with the only illumination coming from the tracker's spotlight. Most guides avoid shining the spotlight directly at the animal because that would seriously affect their eyesight. Rhinos have very poor eyesight in daylight so don't react well to being blinded at night. What the tracker does is to try and bounce light off the foliage around the animal - in this case it was reflected off the water directly in front of the rhino. This created a softer light source but that forces you to ramp up the ISO - in this case to 25,600. In these two examples the banding seen on the animals, particularly the lioness, is caused by reflections off the water surface. Something I didn't see until the picture was downloaded.

One of my favourite African animals - hyenas usually hunt at night although we did come across several groups active at dawn and dusk. These two hyenas were part of a group resting - possibly before setting off in the hunt for food. Like the rhino and lioness shots, the lighting is mostly indirect requiring very high ISO settings - which produces a lot of ugly digital noise and odd colouring - most of which I find can be cleaned up using my favourite software: DXO Photolab 7.