Botswana – Day 3 The Okavango Delta (Part 2)

Here we are in the Okavango Delta.  The staff at the Pom Pom Camp were beginning to wonder where we had got to.  We had the usual welcome drink on arrival, but as soon as we had finished we hurried to take our seats in the mokoros.  I had wondered whether to risk taking my Olympus E-520 DSLR in the canoe, but having made the investment in the excursion and as it looked pretty stable, I decided to go ahead.  Most, but not all of the shots taken from the water were with my 70-300 mm, f4-f5.6 lens.  Some were with a 14-42 mm lens.

I have decided to stick to showing the photos in roughly chronological order as I think it describes the day better.

As we started our mokoro journey, our guide told us all about the ‘hippo highways’ that existed all over the delta, and which we would be crossing.  This was really reassuring as we had already learned how bad tempered hippos were, and how more humans were killed by hippos, than by any other african animal.  Apparently though, the hippos use these ‘hippo highways’, outbound in the early morning and inbound in the evening, so we shouldn’t have one pop up under us in the middle of the day.  You can see from these next two photos, our travelling companions looked pretty relaxed, as were we.

Mokoro Cruise

Mokoro Canoe

The last shot showed how we were floating peacefully through the waterlilies.  The next few shots are close ups of Day Waterlilies and another yellow water plant that I have not been able to identify.  Any advice would be welcome.

Day Waterlily

Yellow Flower

Day Waterlily

Now for some fauna.  You’ve seen them before in this blog, but photographing this African Fish Eagle from the mokoro gave me a lot of satisfaction.  It was flying circuits and re-landing in the same tree.

African Fish Eagle

African Fish Eagle

African Fish Eagle

Sorry.  Another Day Waterlily portrait.

I am particularly fond of the following fish eagle shot, as it provided my first ever photography competition win, as a novice in the first competition I entered after joining a local Camera Club.

African Fish Eagle – Okavango Delta

This little fella is a Painted Reed Frog.  They hang on to the reeds with adhesive disks on their toes.

Painted Reed Frog

You’ve also seen the African Jacana before, but here we had a much lower viewpoint.

African Jacana lily hopping

A bit larger.  This elephant was wreaking havoc with the branches of the tree that it is standing under.  It just stopped for a moment to scrutinise these strange small boats that were passing.

I can’t identify exactly what type of Dragonfly this was.  My wildlife guide book was a bit lacking on information on dragonflies.  We saw two types in the delta.

This is also a Painted Reed Frog, even though it has no colouring.  Not sure, but the colouring may depend on its emotional (?) state.

Also a Painted Reed Frog

If I remember correctly, these are Spur Winged Geese, that were surprised by our approach.

Spurwinged Geese

And this is another Blacksmith Plover, that we had also seen before on the Chobe River.

This is the other type of Dragonfly that we saw in the delta, but again I am not sure exactly what it is.  Advice on identification would be welcomed for either of these dragonflies.

Dragonfly

Just some pretty little flowers amongst the reeds.

Reeds and Flowers

Mokoros in loose formation as we came together before stopping for a ‘coffee break’.

The rest of our party

More Painted Reed Frogs possibly with some ‘hanky panky’ on their on their minds, judging from their bright colours.

Painted Reed Frog – Okavango Delta

Surprisingly this next little frog is called the Long Reed Frog, surprising because their length it is only 25 mm or less, and it is the smallest frog in the delta.

As we are about to land on an island for a well deserved ‘coffee break’, this is probably a good time to break this part of the story.  I’ll continue in the next post (Part 3) very soon.  Please come back and take a look.

The beginning of the story can be found here.