In 2024 I was invited to go to the Singing Grass Camp in the heart of the Serengeti. I was flown in by a small plane and it wasn’t long until my guide Raj had stopped the car and said ‘there’s a fresh kill nearby’. Vultures were nearby and Raj was certain something had just happened here. Sure enough after a little bit of scanning he points to the under the branches of a tree ‘There, cheetah!’, and then I see the mother cheetah with three cubs gorging on a freshly killed antelope.
The trip was without doubt the highlight of my wildlife photography career.
The story goes that a long time ago a lazy hunter stole all three cubs from a cheetah mum, wanting to raise them to do all the hunting for him.
The village elders confronted the lazy hunter and he was expelled from the village and the cheetah cubs were eventually retuned to the mother, but by then she had cried so much that the stains could not be wiped away from her face.
The marks have forever remained on the cheetah as a reminder to hunters to be honest and ethical in their hunting methods.
We were out early to try to photograph an animal with the rising sun in the background. After a short drive we came across a small herd of elephants. Unfortunately we got some low lying clouds and couldn’t get the image we were after, but I’m still very happy with the results and experience.
The African Savannah elephants are massive, they’re the largest land animal on earth and an adult male can weight up to 6 tons, even the babies are huge as they can weigh up to 120kg at birth!
As they eat grasses, roots, and fruits they need to eat up to 150kg a day which can take them up to a quarter of the day, imagine eating from the moment you wake up in the morning until the moment you fall asleep at night!
Before we saw the elephants, Raj stopped and pointed out some trees that were looking fantastic in the colourful sky.
We caught up with a few zebras, a few thousand, if not many thousands, I couldn’t quite count there were so many! They’re such amazing animals and so photogenic!
Many theories have been put forth as to why zebras have stripes. Camoflage, warning colours, thermoregulation are a few, but with mixed results when put to the test.
One day some researchers observed horses and zebras in the same enclosure in the UK and noticed that flies were landing on the horses, but not the zebras. So they decided to do an experiment where they dressed the horses up in striped patterns and found that the horses dressed up as zebras kept flies away!!
The researchers thought the stripes creates an optical illusion, but they tested this theory by dressing horses up in a checkered pattern.
And found that the checkered patterns also repels flies!
I wonder if this would work for mosquitos and midges?!?
One day we had lunch by the car and were surrounded by zebras, this gave me an opportunity to get a little bit lower as we were out of the car. In between sips of coffee and some excellent food I got a few images of these stunning animals.
We’re on our way to a collection of kopjes (pronounced ko-pees) where lions are usually found. The kopjes are rock formations like Pride Rock in the Lion King. The lions don’t tend to stand on them and pose dramatically like in the movie, but they like the kopjes as an elevated area to survey from, mark territory, and to catch shade and a breeze.
The roar of a lion can be heard 8 km away. I remember waking up in the middle of he night at camp and I could a lion roaring nearby – the thrill of being in the Serengeti is hard to describe.
As opposed to the elephant which spends about 3/4 of it’s day eating, the lion spends about 3/4 of it’s day sleeping and may only eat once every third or forth day! But when they do eat they eat they can eat about 15-20% of their body weight in one go!
If you’d like to join me on an incredible adventure to the Serengeti you can join me in August or November 2025 or 2026. The August is the high season and we’ll divide our time between the Singing Grass Camp and The Serengeti River Camp where we’ll try to catch the wildebeest migration as the cross the Mara River. In November we’ll visit the Tarangire National Park, Ngorongoro National Park before we spent the remainder of our stay at the Singing Grass Camp in the Serengeti.
Find out more about the trips here!
The Singing Grass Camp is one of the coolest places I’ve ever stayed at. A tent, but a very luxurious tent. My accommodation had a big double bed, sofa area, wardrobe, a big bathroom with inside and outside showers. There’s a bar and hangout area, restaurant/breakfast bar and in the evenings we had drinks around the fire.
One afternoon I was sitting outside my tent with a drink and my camera when a familiar little bird landed nearby, the spotted flycatcher.
One day we went for lunch at a regular stop and these hornbills were there looking for an easy meal. I got down low with my 150-400mm, found a far away vegetated background to blur out and got a few frames.
I thought the trickiest animal to get a good photo of was the hippo. Often half submerged in muddy water and difficult to isolate. It didn’t help that I was much higher than the hippos looking down on them.
We like it when we can put nature into boxes, naming species and relationships, this animal is a carnivorous that animal is a herbivore, but nature just isn’t like that. Evolution of wildlife and relationships in nature are always changing and so is our understanding of it.
I love seeing symbiotic relationship in nature, like the red billed oxpecker on the hippos backs. The oxpeckers get a continuous food source and the host animal gets rid of some parasites like ticks, fleas and dead skin that the birds feed on. The oxpeckers are also believed to act as a warning system to the hosts as they start making alarm calls when predatory animals are about, though this probably doesn’t make any difference to the hippo as they can weigh up to 4 tons.
But this symbiotic relationship between the hippo and the oxpecker is only part of the story. Oxpeckers could also be called vampires, as they will happily drink blood from a hosts open wound. In fact they may also slow down the healing of a wound so that they have a continuous food source for longer.
I used to always believe that carnivores would be the largest threat to humans, but it turns out that the hippo is known as one of the deadliest animal on the planet to humans, and are estimated to kill 500 people yearly in Africa. The deadliest animal being the mosquito.
Nature rarely fits into neat little boxes.
On several mornings we would come across a lone hyena wandering the tracks. I always made sure I had my settings dialled in so I could take advantage of these random encounters.
The giraffe truly has some unique evolved traits to suit it’s environment, but so do the trees they feed on.
The trees have thorns and spikes to make it difficult to feed on the leaves, the trees also produce tannins that makes the leaves taste bitter and can be dangerous to giraffes in large quantities.
Not only that, but trees can communicate with each other, by using pheromones so that other nearby trees can start processing tannins before the giraffe reach them.
The giraffe on the other hand, knows this, and will only feed on one tree for a short time and will go into the wind for it’s next meal as the trees can only communicate through chemical signals released in the wind.
Nature truly is amazing!!!
This really has been a Safari experience of a lifetime and I’ve only scratched the surface, I have so many more photos to share! Be sure to check out future blogs and vlogs from the Serengeti.
Or better yet, why don’t you join me on the next trip?
Noticed most photos were the 150-400 with the 1.25X added. Did you still have to do cropping or did you really get that close with those focal lengths?