After visiting Cape Town, we spent the next leg of our trip at the MalaMala Game Preserve which shares a twelve mile boundary with Kruger National Park. We had a great guide and managed to see the “Big 5” on our first afternoon at the camp.
On our second day in the preserve, we got to track this Leopard for about a mile before she settled down in a tree.
Flaco had been out of the zoo for two months on Sunday night It’s been fascinating to watch him acclimate to life outside of his zoo cage. He surprised everyone by how well he’s been doing adjusting to life in the wild. He’s carved out a niche for himself in the north end of Central Park, and has fallen into a fairly consistent routine.
This next month will be an interesting time to watch him. The trees are going to be leafing out and we will have numerous spring migrants arriving. How theses changes impact him, and how he impacts our spring arrivals and nesting birds will be what I’ll be studying this month.
On Sunday night, Flaco flew all around the north end of the park for at least an hour. The three of us watching him certainly got our “steps in”. Eventually he settled down and parked himself on a small mound opposite a dumpster, but flew off when a park truck came to offload some recyclables.
Later he flew to a Black Locust and after about fifteen minutes, flew across the East Drive and onto a small lawn. We thought he was just going there to hunt, but he had caught a small rodent, either a White-Footed Mouse or an immature Brown Rat. It was only when he started to eat it, did we realize he had caught something he had seen 100 yards away.
We had invited two police officers to watch with us, and two of their colleagues joined us. They all got to see Flaco eat and fly off, via a monitor mounted on my tripod. They were excited to see Flaco, and they shared news that they had seen a coyote earlier in the evening.
I was in Southern Africa for two weeks in the beginning of March, and I’m going to be slowly posting photographs from the trip. I thought I would start with pictures from the Boulders Beach Penguin colony. This colony established themselves in a residential beach community starting in 1983, south of Cape Town changing the neighborhood! African Penguins used to be known as jackass penguins because of their distinctive braying.
After dinner, I caught up with Flaco, Central Park’s Eurasian Eagle-Owl. He was hooting from a Black Locust, the Snowy Owl used over two years ago. He was holding a half-eaten Brown Rat. He was in no rush to finish off the rodent, and hooted from a few trees, moving between them every so often. Occasionally we heard a hoot with a different pitch, and after looking at the video feed realized it was because he would sometime hoot with the rat in his mouth, which altered the note.
Eventually, he finished off his meal. When we left the park, he appeared to have begun hunting yet again.
His hooting was a few blocks away from the Red-tailed Hawk nest on the Museum of the City of New York and we wondered what the Red-tailed Hawk pair thought about the presence of the owl.
A very nice surprise on Tuesday to find an Eastern Coyote in Central Park. It was using a location that a coyote used a few years ago. A few observers tried to keep track of it after it went off for the night, but we quickly lost track of it.
A few days ago, it looked like everything was in place for the Pinetum Red-tailed Hawks to begin nesting. Copulation, nest building, visits to the nest. Everything looked good to go. But today, I saw a raccoon in the nest. It will be interesting to see who wins and if the Red-tailed Hawks end up building a new nest in a new location.
