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We stayed at B&D for two nights on 18/12 and 19/12. Herewith a few amazing (and not so amazing) moments:

18 December 2005
Entered at Phabeni. Travelled to B&D via P’Kop. Very cold, raining all day. Not a lot of animals – few elephants, large buffalo herd. However, as first time birders in KNP took us until 14:00 to get to B&D. Stopped every km or so – binoc's out, id new bird (almost all birds were new to us ), camera out, take picture, tick of on our list and off we go to the next one. Bird watching really adds a new dimension to the Kruger experience – even without spotting lots of animals, we still had a memorable morning. We only know the Afrikaans names for the birds, so would be useless to post our list – most of our sightings should in any event be old news and boring to the seasoned pros - e.g. we found the “bosveldvisvangerâ€Â

What a beautifully worded report of a stunning few days in the park. How sad that the special moments had to be spoilt by those wretched jeep jockeys. I agree something really does need to be done about them and the abysmal night drives in some of the camps.

BTW welcome to the world of birding!!

Nice report, thx for sharing your impressions.

At the moment our undisputed list for the trip is only in the 40's (still quite a few outstanding where we're trying to do a positive ID on the photo - the deal with Asterix: no tick off unless we both agree 99% - the 1% is the "beginners margin"). May not sound like a lot to you all, but believe me we're proud of every single one. Baby steps all the way. We gave up on the birds of prey and the LBJ's - next time!

Did a quick check in the SASOL guide for the English names of some of our exciting sightings - see list below, keeping in mind we're first timers, so we got excited mainly about the colourful birds, even though basically all birds on our lists are seemingly very common in KNP.

African Fish Eagle
Marsh Sandpiper
African Scops Owl
Woodland Kingfisher
Brown-hooded Kingfisher
Pied Kingfisher
Heuglin's Robin
Red-headed Weaver
Grey Hornbill
Red-billed Hornbill
Yellow-billed Hornbill
European Bee-eater
African Hoepoe
European Roller
African Jacana
Crested Barbet
African Pied Wagtail
Water Dikkop
Blue Waxbill
Marabou Stork
Woolly-necked Stork
Swainson's Francolin
Natal Francolin
Crowned Plover
Black-winged Plover

Asterix is working on it for now.

To everyone else, thanks for all the "thank you's".

We honestly wouldn't know. Saw it at Gardenia Bird Hide and also got a nice photo. It completed the Dikkop (Thick Knee?) set for us, together with the Spotted Dikkop (Thick Knee?)

Phew, OK lets give this a shot. My first attempt at posting a picture (with much help from Asterix):



Someone please let me know if this works, then I'll upload a few more.

Some of our bird pictures:






Help needed with this one please? ("bruin arend"?)


Some animal pics (including the leopard) to follow later.

Even though only impalas and a kudu, we just love these first two pics:



Rhinos near and far...



And to conclude, some carnivores:

Nooooo, not us unfortunately. I spoke with the kid who saw it.
We where at the waterhole, 2kms from the camp when a man told us about the leopard at Berg and Dal. We drove as quickly as possible and allowed. And there it was...
What a shame you're night drive wasn't as good as ours (2 leopards).

this is our best picture of the one at BnD