Chapter Six:

In Which Marg Comes to the Rescue

 

 "Never trust a computer you can’t throw out a window.”

Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple Inc.

     

I pushed the button to turn on my travel laptop and waited to see if the crackling noises were still there.    Silence.

    I plugged it into a power source.   Silence.

    The laptop was well and truly fried.   It would not turn on, would not charge.   It lay on the counter at Pangolin Chobe hotel as useless as a rock.

 

                                                    The Crispy Critter

    Marg came to the rescue.   She messaged Shelly in Canada, who would be joining us in Kenya in a few days, to fetch a small MacBook Pro from her office and bring it when she flew to Kenya.  In the meantime, Marg took my camera memory cards and the two external hard drives I had to her room.

    She made a Lightroom catalogue on one of the drives and downloaded all my photos to it, as well as making a copy of the photos to the second drive.  Lightroom is a software program we use to edit photos.   Its use has been a steep learning curve for me and I’m still a beginner at it.

 

    Nonetheless, for the next week, Marg continued to download my photos to my external drives.  The process, which took hours on my laptop, took minutes on her super-Mac, but it still cut into her valuable free time during which she could have been editing her own photos.

 

                                    

                                The two 2TB external drives that would hold two copies of my photos.

    Problem solved for the immediate future though I didn’t look forward to re-learning what little I knew of Macs.   Windows gave me enough problems.

     Once back on the Chobe River, we found birds and baboons to photograph on the way to Elephant Bay.

 

    Baboon infants are carried under the mother’s chest.   When they are older, they ride jockey-style on the mother’s back.

 

A large male walks over and sits in front of the mother and infant.   The infant seems interested in the male's large paw.

Juvenile yellow-billed stork.

African Mourning Dove

Rock pratincoles staying warm as the sun rises.

"Pensive"

Surprise!   A different, more blonde lion was in charge of guarding the elephant carcass and he had his paws full trying to keep the vultures away.

 

     Whenever he sought shade from the blazing sun, the vultures crept in.   When the vultures crept in, he ran down to chase them away.   And on and on it went.

 

    

 

       

At one point, a water monitor walked through.   The lion paid it no attention.

 

    The lizard is between the lion and the carcass.

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    The next day, the lions were gone.   The carcass reeked of decay.   The vultures and the Marabou storks were closer, but not on the carcass.

     The crocodiles had moved in and claimed it for their own.   There were dozens of crocs lying around, huge malevolent crocodiles.

 

    They had managed to move the carcass even farther into the water. 

     The elephants still came but were cautious.

 Note the crocodile between the carcass and shore.  There is another behind the carcass and dozens in various places along the shoreline.

This was our last look at Elephant Bay, the Chobe River, and our friends at Pangolin photo safaris for this trip. Just before noon we boarded a small plane that would take us to the famed Okavango Delta. 

    The plane took off and headed west.   I looked out the window and saw a long line of smoke rising along the horizon.

     Wait a minute!   Smoke?    No one told us about wildfires!!!

 

 

 

 

Reed cormorant landing.

White-breasted cormorant

Carmine bee-eater

Carmine bee-eater

Pied kingfisher

Water lily

Black-winged stilt

Skimmer

Skimmer

Skimmer

Skimmer

Goliath heron

Goliath heron

Goliath heron

Brunch at Pangolin

I don't know what it is, but it's huge.