Queen Elizabeth National Park

So it's been forever since I've posted any pictures, largely due to the fact that my digital isn't back yet (but oh how happy I am that it will arrive in the country on Monday morning). But to make up for post after post of text upon text without any images, here's a deluge of scanned photos just recently developed.

These particular shots are from my second trip to Queen Elizabeth National Park. I didn't post any after the first trip because just about all of them were crud, partially because I had never done any wildlife shots and so learned a lot from them, but also because your first time in a game park you just take shot after shot of anything and everything and don't think as much about composition, lighting, and the fact that the hyena in the grass is going to come out mostly as grass with some brown thing in it. Hopefully I'll get a few more opportunities to improve and get better pictures, especially as I hope to travel to Maasai Mara National Reserve (where the Great Migration migrates to) and maybe Amboseli National Park (in the shadow of Mt. Kilimanjaro) in Kenya next July.


The sunrise as we drove into the park. See the cloud of dust coming up from the road? Yeah, that's Africa. Unfortunately I couldn't get the scan to look as good as the print, but I still think it's pretty dang good.


A male Water Buck. These things are everywhere in the park. They're kinda like giant massive deer with funny antlers.


A Cape Buffalo, one of the "Big Five," with the Rwenzori Mountains in the distance. The Big Five are the five large animals that game hunters considered the most difficult to bag. The easiest to find by far, their difficulty comes more from the fact that they're mean as can be if you get 'em goin. I have a couple of better shots, but the developer messed up the prints.


An African Elephant, also one of the Big Five (the others, not pictured as not seen, being Lions, Lepoards, and Rhinos...rhinos not found in Uganda). These are what you come to QENP for. This one has his ears out because he's saying, "You're too close...get back in your car you freakin' idiot or I'm going to charge." So getting out of the Land Rover and getting as close as I did to this elephant to get some shots may be (scratch that...is) the dumbest thing I've ever done (one of the girls got a picture of me that'll show just how close I was...if I get ahold of it I'll be sure to post), but hey, at least the shots turned out well. And I did get back to the car, quickly but in a slow, non-startling manner.


A herd of elephants on the banks of the Kazinga Channel (this time no chance of getting charged as I'm on a boat). We saw elephants everywhere this time around. We even had 6 (two adults and 4 babies) cross the road right behind Kari's car (pictures lacking, unfortunately, due to technical difficulties).


Two more elephants in the water. Elephants elephants everywhere. And it's truly amazing to see them just wandering about in their natural habitat. Zoos have nothin on game parks. You've probably noticed that the tusks on all of these are kinda short. Well, thanks to Idi Amin feeding his army by way of elephant poaching, there were fewer than 100 elephants in QENP when Museveni came to power 26 years ago. There are now over a thousand elephants in the park (a phenomenal turn around...one of the greatest in all of Africa), which means the elephant population is very young and their tusks have not had all that long to grow.


If there's anything you'll see at QENP more frequently than Water Bucks, it'd be Wart Hogs. In fact you can usually find them all over within the grounds of the Mweya Safari Lodge themselves. I got a much, much, much closer shot of one there, but it's so dang ugly I just couldn't bring myself to put it up. They're pretty much the ugliest animals God made.


A Ugandan Kob, a very common type of antelope found in the grassier areas of the park. A very pretty gold color, but unfortunately I don't have a warming filter for my telephoto lens to take into account the overcast lighting so the color didn't come out that well.


Sorry, no photos of hippos. I had some ok ones last time, plus I only had one roll of film left for the boat ride (and most of that got used on elephants, with a few reserved for attempts at getting yawning hippos...which I failed to get, but would have gotten had I not run out of film before the hippos had a yawn-fest). And I didn't think to bring any of the older shots over to the Wilks to scan. Maybe next time.