Serengeti – Day 2 – 3/15/11

We were up before dawn and watching the sun rise was worth the exhaustion I felt.  Sleeping on the ground is fine but combined with a large group of noisy people talking nearby makes for very little sleep.  Anyways the sky went from pitch black to this beautiful array of pink, yellow, and blue and the bush had this intense orange band above it that faded into the palette of light colors already mentioned.  By 7:30 we were loaded and headed out into the park for our first assignment: bird identification.  While not my favorite activity is was really cool to learn the names of the birds we see every day and I got to stare at the herds of Impala (swala pala in Swahili) that we passed while pretending to look for birds.  Also while we were driving around looking for birds we saw a large group of cruisers pulled over.  This means car trouble or exciting animal.  It was an exciting animal all right….my first leopard!!!!!!!  Peacefully dozing in a tree, it only moved the tip of its tail and occasionally twitched its paw.  By lunch my group had seen over 40 species of birds, a group of giraffe, 2 hippos, a large warthog, and 3 dik diks.  For lunch the group met on this huge topi (large rock formation in the grassland).  It was fun to be up there except it was now midday and the heat of intense and there was not a ton of shade up there.  I found a cave like place under three house sized boulders where I ate my lunch and relaxed.  Before leaving we took a group picture with the professors.  Back on the road we headed to the visitor’s center which was over an hour drive away.  Everyone including me dozed or fell asleep on the way.  I never nap so this was unusual for me.  None the less we arrived at the center where we listened to the head ecologist of Serengeti speak about the ecology and management of the park as well as some problems they have to deal with.  It began to rain as we headed back to camp which chased all the heat from the day letting the smell of the wet ground and cool wind rise instead.  Back at camp we unpacked our backpacks and drank some tea until the rain stopped.  By dinner we had a fire going and the rain had stopped but the sky was still cloudy so no stars were visible and the moon looked like a cotton ball behind the gray clouds.  I went to bed early again this evening and thankfully everyone else was tired enough that the evening was quiet except for the night sounds.  At the bathroom I heard my first lion roar and I think I actually did a happy dance which made Bura laugh at me.  Of course there were several hyenas that were also calling and one came close enough that we could see its head with Bura super powerful flashlight.