We saw two species of fox in Botswana. Our favorite was the Bat-eared Fox, Otocyon megalotis. Here are four from a distance (in the Kalahari), either a pair with two cubs, or possibly two pairs.

They weigh about 4Kg, and are the only truly insectivorous canids, eating mainly termites. Their teeth are adapted for this diet, and they have no really close relatives, being the only members of their genus. The rest of these pictures were taken in Makgadikgadi NP.

They have enormous ears, which help in thermoregulation;

and they have charming faces:

This one was motionless*,

giving me time for a second close-up:

They are socially monogamous, these two were part of a family of three,

The cub was fascinated by us and sat down close to the vehicle to study us more closely:

Socially monogamous species are not always sexually monogamous, as shown by studies of Extra-Pair Paternity (EPP). In these foxes, though, the level of EPP is low, under 10% of cubs (Wright 2010). This may be one reason that males invest large amounts of time in caring for the cubs: more than the females, in fact. In socially monogamous birds there is known to be a correlation between low rates of EPP, and high rates of paternal care. (Søraker et al 2023).

To close, the other fox species we saw, the Cape Fox:

* We Brits love a good pun.

The omnipresent soundtrack of the Makgadikgadi grasslands was this:

Loud, insistant, and everywhere. The male Northern Black Korhaan, aka the White-quilled Bustard, Afrotis afraoides, attracts the girls by flying along, squawking as he goes, then suddenly dive-bombing her. The guides call them Suicide Birds.

He is quite handsome when strolling calmly along:

But once he’s in the mood for love, his recitative begins:

Take-off, still singing:

Once he reaches maximum altitude, he begins to plan his descent, and his legs go down:

Here he is in closeup, still mouthing off. He will keep it up all day.

If I were a female Black Korhaan, I’d succumb: anything to get him to shut up, rather like tipping strolling minstrels not to play at your table in an Italian restaurant.

The Steenbok, Raphicerus campestris, is a miniature antelope, 24″ tall at the shoulder. The grasses that barely reached the giraffe’s knees rise over the steenbok’s head:

They can melt into the grasses in an instant:

but sometimes they emerge amongst shorter plants, and you can see one entire:

Only the males have horns, short abrupt black prongs just visible here:

And here is a female, one ear folded back, with long eyelashes, and a gland beneath the eye that looks for all the world as though her mascara has run.

By and large, you see only one steenbok at a time, which suggests they are solitary, but our guide told us that there are usually two of them in the neighborhood, staying loosely in touch but not joined at the hip. We did once see a second one appear after the first one startled, which fits his explanation.

The sere Makgadikgadi is an unforgiving environment but steenboks can survive almost entirely without water, getting all the moisture they need from their browsing.

I have just returned from Botswana, on a trip that turned into more of an adventure than we had planned. I’ll tell the story gradually, and I’ll start in the Makgadikgadi Pan grasslands, a vast plain with a 360 degree horizon:*

The endless vistas were covered in a tapestry of grasses and wildflowers, sometimes with flocks of tiny queleas:

The land is dotted with salt pans, a few with water,

but most dry:

The National Park itself covers nearly 5000 sq km, and the entire pan system is 16,000 sq km.

The flatness produces distorted mirage-like sunets:

I was with five friends, and our guide TJ, camping. For three days we saw not a single other human being or vehicle, our own private wilderness. Jane, who has eagle eyes, found us five giraffe, four of which are in this photo if you look hard:

As we got closer we got the once-over:

There were two adult females, and three youngsters, two of whom were very young indeed.

These are Southern Giraffe, widespread in Southern Africa. Adults can reach 6m (19 feet) and the babies are six feet tall at birth.

The two smallest are roughly the same age, so the likelihood is that they are from the two different mothers, since twins are extremely rare. One of them kept trying to nurse, and eventually its mother let her/him:

You can tell the sex of the adults by the state of their horns, or more precisely their ossicones. The males fight, so the tops of the horns quickly lose their hair and become shiny:

Males like the one above also have a third ossicone in the middle of their forehead that develops as a sort of callus from head-butting their rivals.

This video is of a male, showing both these badges of combat; the third ossicone can be seen in profile at the end of the video:

At birth the ossicones are cartilage, folded down, and then they straighten and harden as the animal grows. Something went amiss for this female, but luckily she doesn’t need them for fighting:

As the sun went down I stuck the camera out of the moving vehicle, and captured the flavor of the place.

PS Jane is using her phone to try and ID birdsong with Merlin, not to make a call. We were several hours drive from cellphone reception. Merlin was, sadly, pretty hopeless in Botswana