I sure got around today trying to get in touch with everything as the days are now really hot and most activity is to be found around the waterholes. But the elephant stayed away till after dark except for a couple of bulls drinking at Hwata pan in the heat of the day.
Early morning and late afternoon had me searching for any signs of the dogs. Again I came up short.
In the afternoon I took a walk to Sosigi hill from Nhoro pan walking through really dense bush and half the time walking bent over to get through narrow pathways in the thick bush. Luckily I didn’t encounter any beasts using the same paths as me coming the other way. It’s really dense in there and I hoped by chance if the dogs did have a den there I’d bump into it. But it was just more bush after bush.
Driving through the hills the Ochna bushes are in full flower at the moment. The flowers only last a few days but they litter the rocky floors adding magical colour.
I was nearly home when I saw all these, and more, vultures perched in trees. I didn’t search much in the area as the vultures might just be roosting communally or if there is a kill they’ll be waiting it out and at dawn I should know what’s happening. Till tomorrow….
It was only as the sun was setting that I realised I hadn’t filmed anything all day. And all that was left to film was another African sunset.
I just wrote a post about Aardwolves and was wondering if you knew what the prefix AARD meant, as it is in both Aardwolf and Aardvark. Just curious.
It means Earth
Aard means earth in Afrikaans.
The aardvark’s common English name comes from obsolete Afrikaans naam Aardvark. This again is derived from the two words ‘aarde’ — meaning earth — and ‘vark’ — meaning pig. The word “aarde” is related to the greek word “Era” which means ground/soil (known as “grond” in Afrikaans).
Afrikaans has evolved since the name slipped into everyday usage and the current Afrikaans name for this animal is ‘erdvark’, where the word ‘erd’ is, strangely again, an obsolete word, the current word for ‘earth’ being aarde. The scientific name is ‘Orycteropus afer’ and means ‘digging foot of Africa’. (The genus name Orycteropus is a concatenation of Greek words — meaning miner and foot and the epitheton afer is the Latin word for African). All of these names refer to the aardvark’s ability to dig in the grond/soil, while the common names also note its pig-like appearance - at least on superficial examination.