A Glorious Evening

BlogPosts

We walk with the dogs most evenings, unless there’s a good reason not to.

This evening I set off on a walk with 2 of our dogs, a bit earlier than normal, as usually we can only go when we get back from work.

I headed off by myself of the walk, and the light was absolutely phenomenal.

It was just at that right angle to make everything on the ground stand out, and to make the grasses and leaves shine copper and gold.

As we were trotting along, a track popped out in front of me, and I stopped the dogs and bent down to have a look. At first I thought it was civet, as it was quite small and fairly rounded. So I took a few pics, and then I noticed another tiny little track next to it. A very cute little track, which I think is a murid (rodent family) track. The dogs waiting impatiently, I couldn’t really linger too long at the track.

On later reflection and relooking at the track in the picture, I am going to settle for jackal rather.

We carried on, and while I was still thinking about the tracks, I wasn’t really concentrating on looking ahead, and as I looked up, I saw some movement and heard a snort or two, and for a nano-second my thought went to buffalo, which of course was ridiculous, as we don’t have buffalo, but it was actually a pair of wildebeest, with a youngster, who were also startled at us coming along, got a fright, looked like they were bumping into each other and then charged off in the other direction, dust flying.

I stuck to the roads on this walk, and the sun starting to set really did light up the road and the grasses in the most magical way.

The dogs were alerted to a sound behind us, and I turned around to look, and caught an image (not on camera) of one duiker being chased by another, which was pretty cool.

There were a whole lot of guinea fowl on the road ahead, doing their thing, so I also stopped to look at their tracks along the way. Did you know that the collective noun of guinea fowl is a “confusion”. I googled this, and I had a good giggle, as this is very apt.

It seems the 2 duiker were still intent on doing their thing – one chasing the other, as they crossed our path further along the road again, and this time by pure luck, the duiker photobombed my picture.

We carried on, the dogs sniffing and enjoying whatever scents were out and about, me enjoying the beautiful light, the cool of the evening and the calm energy. It was one of those amazing peaceful walks where everything was just perfect.

Heading home along our driveway, I bent to pick up a feather of a green wood-hoopoe, and again was focusing on this, when I heard something to the right of me. We have 3 zebra who are always around, and the male was now looking rather intently at me. The male is known to have a bit of a naughty streak in him, so I took a quick pic, and hurried the dogs on our way.