Ngorongoro Crater

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Wonderful safari drive today in the Ngorongoro Crater.  Although the day started off cold and foggy, the fog burned off and the day turned sunny & gorgeous.

I do have mixed feelings about the crater -- fantastic animal viewings -- but way too many people.  At times, there were 30 jeeps lined up along the road.  You are also not allowed to go off-road in the park (to get closer to the animals) --- so binoculars are required!

Approximately 25,000 large animals, mostly ungulates, live in the crater.  There are no giraffes, crocodiles, topi, or impala in the park (there are elephants and leopards up higher along the crater rim).  During the day I encountered:
Highlights of the day were watching the zebra (they can be quite amusing), trying to spot a black rhinoceros (very elusive), and watching three male lions.  

The three male ions are brothers.  They spent quite awhile sleeping -- we were about to leave when they decided to get up to hunt.  One of the lions walked right up to my jeep (I was rather happy that I was in an enclosed jeep), walked around the jeep, and then lay down on the other side.  It's against the law to disturb wildlife in national parks / conservation areas -- so we would have had to stay put for as long as the lion was there.  Fortunately he only stayed for a couple of minutes.  They also didn't really hunt -- they just stared at some animals -- and then went back to sleep.

The crater is a caldera in the Great Rift Valley.  It measures between 10 and 12 miles across and has an area of 102 square miles.  Its heavily forested rim rises 2,000 feet above the caldera's floor to an elevation of 7,500 feet.  Ngorongoro is though to have formed about 2.5 million years ago from a large active volcano whose cone collapsed inward after a major eruption, leaving the present vast, unbroken caldera as its chief remnant.

The crater floor is predominantly open grassland.  The local Masai people also graze their livestock in the crater (which is why it's a Conservation Area instead of a National Park).  

I originally thought this was a jackal -- so I left it out of the video.  After further research, I've discovered that it's actually an African Golden Wolf.  This animal was previously classified as a subspecies of the Eurasian Golden Jackal.  But in 2015, a series of analyses on the species' DNA demonstrated that it was in fact a distinct species from the golden jackal and more closely related to grey wolves and coyotes.

Or, upon even more research, it's possible that it's a side-striped jackal.  ☺

Video alerts:  none!



Location: Ngorongoro Crater, Tanzania

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