Dave Burns Photo Tours & Safaris

People frequently think that Africa is a swelteringly hot place. It is after all at the equator. While it’s true that the midday sun can be quite hot, people are surprised when I tell them to pack a warm jacket for the mornings. This morning’s sunrise over the Serengeti was made dramatic by a thick layer of fog covering the ground and it was very chilly. As we drove up to the Maasai Kopjes for a change of scenery, it was a great time to photograph landscapes showing the trees and the fog to the horizon.

Once we arrived at the Maasai Kopjes, we found one of the highlights of the trip for me. We came across a serval in the tall grass. They are shy cats and I’ve never had the treat of seeing one before. It only stuck around for half a minute and, luckily, I was able to fire off a few frames before it walked away into the grass where we could no longer see it.

Later, our final evening game drive was mellow. We saw rhino from a distance and tried to track them as close as we could but rhino movements are unpredictable and they never came close enough to photograph.

–Dave

Today was another day of cats. We awoke to another gorgeous sunrise across the Serengeti plains. We started with two lions in a tree, watching nearby zebra (we heard later they came down and chased the herd but came up short). We then came upon four lions who were resting after killing a buffalo by the river. Later that day, we finally saw a cheetah resting under a tree with a freshly killed Thomson’s Gazelle. We stayed with her for an hour and a half, hoping for great photos of the inevitable confrontation when other predators try to take her kill but, after sunset, we had to depart for our camp. When we drove by the same site the next morning, there was no sign the gazelle was ever there.

–Dave

Each day I make a plan with my guides. Sometimes that works out and sometimes not. You can’t predict wildlife. Today I wanted to look for leopards. Although we left camp in the early morning to an incredible sunrise, we had a slow start but by the time we got back to camp for lunch, I had had one of my best leopard sightings. It started when we spotted two playing together. We thought they were a mating pair but soon realized it was a mother with an almost full-grown male cub. We tracked them for a while until they came to a tree and both climbed up to rest on the branches. One of them climbed all the way to the canopy and soon we saw why: they had been keeping a Thomson’s gazelle there.

The mother came down and gave a half-hearted attempt to hunt some gazelles but then went walking north. After tracking her for another 20 minutes, she surprised us by heading back to the tree with another male cub. We followed them back and, after walking right under our vehicle windows, soon we had three leopards in the tree with great light on them. We stayed for another 30 minutes, trying different compositions and capturing different poses, then it was back to the camp for a well-earned lunch.

–Dave