Christmas is a BIG deal in Uganda, and camp has been very quiet because most of the Ugandan researchers and field assistants have gone home to their villages to spend Christmas with their families. With so few people in camp, a few other researchers and I decided to spend Christmas at Queen Elizabeth National Park in South Western Uganda. We had a great buffet-style lunch (there was even salad and chocolate mousse!). Then a few of us went on a boat safari. It was an excellent Ugandan Christmas. We saw tons of hippos, birds, African buffalo, crocodiles, a few elephants, and even a hyena (…no lions though)! The song “I want a hippopotamus for Christmas” was playing on repeat in my head – it was a childhood favorite :) Below are some photos from the boat trip. I only remember names for some of the birds – so I’ll leave it up to my birder friends to chime in with bird IDs :) Merry Christmas!
Elephants:
African Fish Eagle:
Pied Kingfisher:
African Buffalo:
Don't know what the little guys are (help me out here), but the tall colorful bird is a saddle-billed stork:
Saddle-billed stork, yellow-billed stork, and the same little guys:
Maribou Stork - these birds are all over Uganda:
Hippos:
Cormorant is all I got for those birds...
ReplyDeleteFantastic pictures!!
White-breasted Cormorant (Phalacrocorax lucidus), formerly a subspecies of Great Cormorant. There's a Sacred Ibis among them in the first photo.
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