April 28, 2010

Spare a Few Bucks?

Rounding out or collection of every conceivable variant of east african antelope, here's a selection of animals that all end in 'buck.' First off, this bushbuck was seen at the salt lick outside The Ark where a few of them were very cautiously feeding around a herd of buffalo. This particular salt lick was also very thick with Ox Peckers which were eating parasites off the passing animals and some of the female bushbucks were covered in them and quite frightened by the number of birds swarming on them.
The most elusive buck of all for our trip, this reedbuck was seen by a stream in the Serengeti and when I say elusive, I mean that we only saw maybe 3 in a full month of being out and about and came home with just five pictures of them. They are lovely animals with distinctive forward-curling horns and beyond that I can't say much about them.
The most common buck we saw were waterbuck, this one in particular was posing quite nicely at a roadside in Sweetwaters. We saw two types, Defassa and Common, though I have a hard time telling them apart. They are the biggest of the bucks we saw and apparently their thick fur makes them hard for lions to eat comfortably as it bothers their mouths and their meat doesn't taste very good. I'm sure this defense mechanism doesn't work all the time but it seems to give them a degree of safety from predation. We had several other nice encounters with these animals including seeing some of them sparring for females during a walk we took in the evening at Lake Naivasha.

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