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05/09/2026

He came down the middle of the road with his ears thrown wide and his head held high, kicking up little puffs of dust with every stride. Nothing about his walk was casual. He wanted us to know he had seen us, and he was not impressed.

Watch the ears. A calf this size, maybe two or three years old, spreads them to make himself look twice as broad as he actually is. It is theatre, learned by copying the older cows in the herd, and almost always pure bluff. A genuine charge comes with the ears pinned flat back against the shoulders, not fanned out like a sail.

What you are really watching is a young elephant practising. Calves rehearse these mock charges for years within the safety of the breeding herd, testing their nerve and reading how the world responds before the day it ever matters. He kept a careful eye on us the whole time, and the moment he had made his point he swung off the road into the grass and carried on.

The elephants of the Greater Kruger move across an unfenced landscape stitched together by private reserves and the national park, one of the last places on the continent where a herd can walk that freely. Every relaxed calf like this one is the product of decades of vehicles that never once threatened him.

Have you ever had a young elephant call your bluff?

We had been sitting quietly at the water for a while, watching the finches come and go, when these two eased out of the ...
05/09/2026

We had been sitting quietly at the water for a while, watching the finches come and go, when these two eased out of the dry thornveld and stepped down to drink. The bull on the right barely lowered his guard while the other pushed his muzzle into the green water, those long ringed horns sweeping back until they nearly touched his own flanks.

Look closely at the horns on the one drinking. Each of those raised rings, called annulations, is laid down as the horn grows, and on an old bull you can count more than sixty of them arcing back over a metre in length. The heavier, blacker the coat and the deeper that white facial mask, the older and more dominant the animal.

What few people realise is how tied a sable is to the trees behind it. They are grazers, but fussy ones, favouring the medium height grasses that grow on the nutrient poor sandy soils around miombo and broadleaf woodland. Clear that woodland or overgraze it with cattle and the sable simply vanishes, which is exactly why they are so scarce across their former range.

Southern Africa lost enormous tracts of sable habitat to farming and disease through the last century, and today thriving free ranging herds are found on only a handful of well managed reserves. Watching a bull like this drink undisturbed on his own ground is rarer than most of the big cat sightings people chase.

Have you ever had a proper look at a sable bull up close, or do they always slip back into the treeline before you can?

04/09/2026

The dashboard read 6:30 when he stopped mid-stride and turned to face us, ears fanning out into that flat silhouette against the last orange of the sky. We had already begun easing back, but he wanted us to know he had noticed.

Watch the way he squares up rather than charges. A bull spreading his ears wide and lifting his head is not attacking, he is making himself look bigger and giving you the clearest warning he can. The trunk raised toward us was him tasting the air, reading our scent and our intent long before his eyes finished the job.

What most people never realise is how much of this conversation happens below our own hearing. Elephants communicate in deep infrasonic rumbles that travel through the ground itself, and a bull like this can pick up the low vibration of another elephant kilometres away through the sensitive pads in his feet. The moment we crowd him, we are stepping into a language we cannot even perceive.

Giving him space is not caution for its own sake. Reserves across the Greater Kruger run on the trust built over decades, teaching elephants that the vehicle is a harmless grey shape that always keeps its distance. Push that trust once and you undo years of careful work in a heartbeat.

When a bull tells you to back off, do you think most people know to listen?

We had been looking for them all morning.A cold front had rolled into the Kalahari, making it bitterly cold. Somewhere o...
04/09/2026

We had been looking for them all morning.

A cold front had rolled into the Kalahari, making it bitterly cold. Somewhere out there was a pack of African wild dogs, but for hours we had no luck finding them.

Eventually, the temperature began to lift.

And so did they.

The pack started moving through the landscape, that unmistakable restless energy returning as the morning warmed. At one point they passed a group of sable antelope without giving them much more than a second look.

Whatever was on the agenda, hunting sable wasn’t it.

They kept moving until they reached the water.

This was at Tswalu in the Kalahari, and after spending the morning searching for them, suddenly we were sitting quietly beside a waterhole watching the entire pack gather along the bank to drink.

Moments like this are what make wild dogs so fascinating to spend time with.

A pack is an extraordinarily tight family unit. They travel together, hunt together, care for their young together and look after pack members that cannot keep up. Even when they appear chaotic, there is a remarkable amount of cooperation holding everything together.

But sometimes the best part of a sighting isn’t the biology or the statistics.

It’s knowing what it took to get there.

Hours of searching in the cold. No guarantees. No sign of them.

And then the Kalahari warmed, the dogs started moving, and for a little while we got to move with them.

How many wild dogs can you count along the bank?

03/09/2026

There is something completely different about seeing an elephant from water level.

At Mashatu, the underground hide puts you right at the edge of the water, with your camera almost at ground level as elephants come in to drink.

When a herd arrives, everything changes.

Suddenly the frame is filled with enormous feet, trunks curling down towards the water and calves disappearing between the legs of the adults. From this low perspective, you stop simply photographing elephants and start noticing the smaller details of how they drink, interact and move around one another.

And then there is the scale.

An elephant is impressive from a safari vehicle. From water level, with those enormous legs towering above your camera, it feels completely different.

For a photographer, that is the magic of a hide like this.

We spend so much time searching for extraordinary subjects, but sometimes the subject doesn’t need to change at all.

You just need to change your point of view.

A great safari is rarely the work of one guide.As a private guide, I travel with my guests from one place to the next. I...
03/09/2026

A great safari is rarely the work of one guide.

As a private guide, I travel with my guests from one place to the next. I help connect the landscapes, wildlife and stories along the way. I teach photography, add context to what we are seeing, and make sure the journey as a whole runs smoothly.

But every time we arrive somewhere new, there is someone I rely on.

The local guide.

In the Okavango, that knowledge runs incredibly deep. These are guides who understand the channels, floodplains and seasonal movements because this is their home. They know which waterways are still navigable, where elephants have been crossing, which pools the hippos are using, and where animals were seen yesterday, or sometimes only an hour ago.

That knowledge changes a safari.

My job is not to arrive and pretend I know their wilderness better than they do. It is to listen, learn and work alongside them.

Over the course of a few days, we become a team. The local guide brings an intimate understanding of the place and its wildlife. I bring my knowledge of the guests, their interests, their photographic goals and the bigger journey we are building across several different ecosystems.

When that partnership works, the guests get the best of both worlds.

And for me, that is one of the great privileges of guiding across Africa. No matter how many years you spend in the bush, every new place gives you another guide to learn from.

The best guides do far more than find animals.

They help you understand where you are.

Who was the local guide who changed the way you saw a place?

02/09/2026

The first thing you notice on foot is how quiet you have to become. No engine, no metal shape between you and them, just your own breathing and the soft rip of grass being pulled as a breeding herd fed across the open ground ahead of us. We eased up onto a low termite mound, not to hide, but to lift ourselves into cleaner air where our scent would carry above the herd rather than down into it.

Elephants live in a world built almost entirely of smell. That trunk holds around 40,000 muscles and a set of scent receptors so sensitive that a herd can pick up water, or a human, from well over a kilometre away on the right breeze. Wind direction, not distance, is what keeps you safe out here.

Watch how the matriarch never fully drops her guard even while feeding. She is the memory of the herd, the one who remembers where water sits in a drought and which humans on foot have meant harm and which have simply watched and left. That institutional memory, passed down through generations of females, is exactly what poaching destroys when it removes the oldest animals first.

Botswana still holds the largest elephant population left on the continent, somewhere around 130,000 animals, and a herd this relaxed with people walking nearby is the quiet dividend of decades of keeping them safe. Standing level with them, no vehicle, no barrier, rearranges something in you.

Would you trust the wind enough to stand here on foot?

A silverback’s chest beat is not just about strength.It’s also about sound.Gorillas have inflatable laryngeal air sacs c...
02/09/2026

A silverback’s chest beat is not just about strength.

It’s also about sound.

Gorillas have inflatable laryngeal air sacs connected to the respiratory system. In adult males, these sacs are particularly well developed and help amplify vocalisations and the extraordinary sounds produced during displays.

When a silverback chest beats, he isn’t pounding his chest with clenched fists. He cups his hands and rapidly strikes his chest, producing that deep, resonant drumming sound that can carry through the forest.

The air-filled structures in the chest and throat help create the resonance that makes such a display sound far bigger than you might expect from the movement itself.

And that is exactly the point.

Chest beating is communication.

A silverback can use it to advertise his presence, signal to other gorillas and potentially communicate information about his size and competitive ability. In dense forest, where visibility can disappear within a few metres, sound becomes an incredibly effective way of announcing yourself without needing a physical confrontation.

It can look aggressive to us, but these displays are part of a much more complex social language.

That is one of the privileges of spending time with gorillas. The longer you watch, the more you realise that the dramatic behaviours are often doing something far more sophisticated than they first appear.

Sometimes the most powerful message in the forest doesn’t require a fight.

It just needs to be heard.

The soft splash of a trunk breaking the surface reached us before the herd even came into view, and then they filed down...
02/09/2026

The soft splash of a trunk breaking the surface reached us before the herd even came into view, and then they filed down onto the sandbank, two cows and two calves settling in to drink in the low morning light.

Watch the younger calf tucked in beneath the nearer cow, reaching up for the teat between her front legs. Unlike almost every other mammal, elephants suckle from breasts positioned high on the chest, not along the belly, and a calf can go on nursing for four years or more while still learning to feed itself on grass and bark alongside its mother.

What holds a group like this together is memory carried in the oldest female. She knows which bends of this river still hold water in the leanest months of the dry season, knowledge she inherited from her own mother and will pass down in turn. When a matriarch is lost, that map of the landscape can vanish with her, and the whole family suffers for it.

The elephants moving through the Greater Kruger belong to one of the last truly free ranging populations left on the continent, crossing unfenced ground between South Africa and Mozambique the way their ancestors always have. Every calf that reaches adulthood here is another line drawn on that inherited map.

How long did you think an elephant calf keeps nursing?

01/09/2026

The forest had gone quiet in the heat when we found him, stretched out on his back across a moss covered log, one hand working slowly at an itch on his chest. He yawned wide, showing the pink of his mouth, and let his head loll against the wood as if the log had been placed there just for him.

Watch how utterly relaxed he is. A chimpanzee flat on its back with its belly exposed is a chimp that feels entirely safe, and that only happens in the middle of the day when the community drops into what researchers call a rest bout. After a hard morning of feeding on figs they gather in the cool understorey and do very little for an hour or two, grooming, dozing, and simply lying about.

Those rest bouts are where a great deal of the social glue is made. Chimpanzees build and repair relationships through grooming and quiet contact far more than through drama, and a bout like this is when tensions from the morning are smoothed over. The scratching you see is often the opening move, an invitation for someone else to come and pick through the fur.

This is Kibale in western Uganda, home to one of the densest populations of eastern chimpanzees left anywhere, and the reason habituated communities like this one matter so much. Every hour a group of visitors spends sitting quietly with them turns a stretch of standing forest into something worth more alive than cut down.

When last did you let yourself do this much nothing?

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