There are many baby animals in the park of all species this time of year.  This very young baby elephant was napping under the shade of his mother.  It got up, had a stretch, and then started to nurse. This young male lion has just finished eating his share of a zebra, and is off looking for shade to digest his meal while the three female lions in the pride eat the remains of the kill. Even though the females hunt, the male eats first.  We watched him swat off the females until he had finished eating. Male lions mostly lie around all the day ... interesting to me that the females tolerate it.   This springbok nibbles the leaves of an acacia tree with 2 inch long thorns.  Springbok travel in large herds, and when they are frightened they bounce high in the air and run with huge high leaps off the ground, moving amazingly fast considering how high they jump with each stride.     Lone male Red Hartebeast.  Many of the antelope species have one dominant male in the herd.  He forces the other young male out of the herd, and you see them either wandering alone or in small groups of males, away from the breeding herds of females and young.     The birdlife in and around the park is also extraordinary.  This Lilac Breasted Roller is just one of the incredibly beautiful birds - many which adopt incredible nesting and survival techniques to survive in the desert.   Red Breasted Shrike - formerly the National bird of Namibia until they won independence in 1990.  They replaced the lovely shrike with the fiercer Fish Eagle.   This Bee Eater has caught a juicy dragonfly.  It takes a while to choke it down, but it eventually manages.

Etosha National Park in Namibia had an incredible concentration of wildlife.  We camped here three nights, and had one amazing wildlife encounter after another.  This park is enclosed by a huge electric fence, and the animals congregate around the waterholes, making them easy to spot and observe their behavior. Many animals share the waterhole at the same time - often making uneasy eyes at the others as they all try to drink.  The waterhole was like the Switzerland of bush ... a cautious truce is the unspoken rule as hyenas and jackals drank within meters of antelope and zebra.  The truce even seems to hold true for the lions ... we saw two male lions lounging back from the waterhole while their prey drank nearby.  If the females had been there, it may have been a different story.   At one waterhole we saw seven different species drinking at the same time.   The young animals have much less fear than the adults, and they interact and play with young animals from other species.  We watched a baby zebra running around kicking up its heels ... bucking in circles and trying to torment the grown up zebras.  When none of his own kind wanted to play, it ran up to a baby kudu, and started chasing it, and the two of them tore around in animal play scattering the impala in a game of interspecies tag. Spotted Hyena Many animals are extremely vulnerable to attack while drinking - especially the giraffe which is very slow to approach the water and usually posts a lookout to keep an eye out.   The oryx must either wade into the water or drop to their knees at the edge to get their heads low enough to reach the water. They are also easily attacked while drinking, and are very