Wild dogs, rhino charge, and white spaces

A flash of impala across the road in the headlight of the car on the way home. Something chasing it. A leopard? Am I going to see my first leopard in Kenya? No, wild dog! A mad chase after the mad chase and we end up looking straight at a pack of about a dozen wild dog eating still moving impala. Our hearts are pounding. The view is both gory and glorious. Nothing, not the headlights of the car or the clicking and flashes of the cameras, can distract them. Dan says by the time they are done only the horns and the top of the skull will be left. Unless they are chased of by hyenas. Which is what happened with this ones, evidently.

So until this point the most exciting event of the day was being charged by a rhino about half an hour prior, at Ol Pej almost out the gate. We were watching a typical ate afternoon scene: impala, zebras, hartebeest, all alert for some reason. There are three jackals near by but we don’t think that all those animals are concerned about them so we keep trying to find whether there is another predator. Nope, doesn’t seem so. We are so absorbed by the jackals that we don’t notice for a while that there is a family of rhinos a bit further away. We drive to them: a big male, two females and a calf. The male is guarding the family, alert. We are taking pictures of the rhinos when suddenly the males decides to charge. Fast, gaining speed. Jakson quickly responded by starting the car and accelerating away. The rhino kept up for a while but finally stopped. Our hearts were punding.

Until this point the most exciting part has been the meeting with Malcolm Brew and Sid Roberts from Microsoft 4Afrika White Spaces Mawingu project. Looks like this project may be able to provide the bandwidth necessary for the server to go on Azure cloud and to be accessible remotely.