Botswana has a wide variety of landscapes and therefore a large diversity of birds. The same goes for Chobe National Park. Botswana has around 500 species of birds and we probably saw at least 100 of them. The large animals in Africa seem to get most of the attention but the birds can really be show-stealers. Many of the birds are really beautiful with great colors and can be highly entertaining.

These birds are all small birds, which are the most colorful birds. The large birds were around in abundance, but mostly browns and whites for color. So I’m sending some photos of smaller more colorful birds this time, though the guineafowl is not that small, just colorful.

This is a Southern Carmine Bee-eater that I caught in mid-flight, mostly thanks to my son, Andrew, for loaning me his camera. Carmine Bee-eaters are migratory birds and breed in this area along the larger rivers, such as the Chobe. They are insect eaters including of course, bees. They are attracted to things like brush fires and vehicles which helps them catch insects. For this reason, we saw lots of Bee-eaters while we were driving on safari.

This is a starling, also in mid-flight, which I think is the Greater Blue-eared starling. Our starlings at home are black, so I really appreciated the African starlings. These songbirds were mostly seen in the open woodland and savanna areas, sometimes in large groups. They seemed to spend most of their time on the ground, looking for insects.

These are guineafowl. They are around the size of a chicken and are quite colorful. We must have seen over a thousand guineafowl usually in groups of fifteen to forty or more. They seemed to be everywhere. They were always on the ground eating bugs or seeds.

This colorful bird is the Lilac-breasted roller which they say has seven different colors. They usually perch on tree tops and bushes and we saw lots of them, frequently very close to our vehicle, perched and scanning the air for large insects.

This bird is a bulbul. We heard these birds more than we saw them, so I was happy to get this photo. I also included this photo because it was reported to be spring time in southern Africa when we were there, but you could not tell. At least in this photo, you can see some buds breaking on the branches, which was rare. This area is in the second year of a severe drought, much like California.