This post is just some odds and ends from Kafue National Park. It will just round out the safari trip a bit.

Bee-eaters are bright-colored birds that specialize in catching large, flying, stinging insects. After banging a bee or wasp dead, they squeeze the venom out and remove the stinger. There are 24 species of bee-eaters worldwide and there are 19 species in Africa. We saw at least a half dozen different kinds of bee-eaters. This is a bee-eater high-rise apartment house. It’s built into the side of a hill. Our guide said these were Bohm’s bee-eaters but I couldn’t find that name in our field guide. At any rate, this area had lots of busy bee-eaters flying about. They were very colorful and entertaining.

I haven’t gotten down to the insect level, but sometimes even the insects were colorful and entertaining. Right in the middle, you can see a red dragonfly. This was on the edge of the river. We saw lots of these and watched them for some time. Africa has plenty of colorful insects.

We frequently had a lecture from one of our safari guides in the afternoon. Our lecture was usually after lunch and before our afternoon game drive. These lectures could be about animals, conservation, local culture, people or governments. The guides were very clear on their thoughts and positions but also ready to admit that many times, no one knew the right answer. We usually were served a drink and snacks during the lectures.

I indicated in an earlier post that we did not hunt on our trip, except with our cameras. That may not have been entirely true. Kafue National Park is tsetse fly country. This was the only one of the four safari parks where we had to fend off the tsetse flies. Tsetse flies are about the size of one of our horse flies, a half-inch or slightly longer. They look about like a horse fly too. They weren’t a huge bother as they tend to be a bit slow for a fly. They are very hard to kill and they bite rather quickly. Since I found them so hard to kill, I generally opted to brush them off when one landed on me. I only got bitten a few times but when I did, the bite was so painful that I tended to slap them as hard as I could. It was really just a reaction to the painful bite. Our guides burned dried elephant manure in a bucket on the front of our land rovers to deter the tsetse’s. That seemed to work somewhat. The other thing our guides told us was to wear light colored clothing. They said the tsetse flies are attracted to dark colors. I followed all the directions. But late one afternoon on a game drive, I got bitten twice in a short amount of time. Each time, I slapped hard where I felt the pain. You can see the results in this photo.

Before I leave the tsetse flies, I would like to point out one more thing. We had sixteen tourists, three guides, and over a dozen staff members, and I was the only person to get bitten by the tsetse flies. If you look at the last photo, each splotch of my blood from one of the tsetse bites was about the size of a nickel. Now for my point. My wife has indicated that in recent years, I might be losing a bit of my sweet disposition and be getting a bit curmudgeonly. Well, I would submit that the Kafue National Park Tsetse fly vote is in – and the tsetse’s think that I’m as sweet as can be…