Tarangire National Park

I’m writing this offline because the area I’m in is fairly remote and doesn’t have internet access of sufficient bandwidth to do any useful work. It’s a real chore even getting simple emails in or out. The last couple days, I have been at Tarangire National Park. It’s a great park with loads of animals. There are tons of Elephants, I’ve seen at least a couple hundred. Lots of Zebra and Giraffe. Plenty of smaller animals like Warthogs and Baboons.Lots of Antelope species, Cape Buffalo and we saw two prides of Lions today, about 8 in each pride. The last pride was hunting a group of Waterbuck and wound up chasing them up a steep hill without making a kill (good if you’re a Waterbuck, bad if you’re a Lion). They were too far away to shoot effectively, but we looped around and found four of the Lions making their way back down and they passed within about 30 feet of us. Speaking of close, We had one big bull Elephant walk past our 4x4 and stop so close that if it had wanted to tap me on the shoulder with its trunk, it would not have had to stretch to do it. Since I was standing in the pop top at the time, I was eye with it. After watching me for a minute, it sauntered off. The other cool thing about Tarangire is the interesting terrain. It is a mix of plains, hills and a small (mostly dry at this time of year) river. In addition to the iconic Acacia trees, there are loads of beautiful giant Baobab trees.

Yesterday I had an incident with the DJI Inspire. I was trying to film Zebras drinking in the Tarangire river and lost my radio signal (and FPV video signal). When the Inspire loses signal, it will come home on it’s own, but in this case there was an Acacia tree between it and home so it wound up stuck high up in the tree. There are three really good reasons you don’t want to fly into an Acacia tree: 1. They are tall. 2. They are covered with long thorns (see Arusha NP post for a prophetic closeup). 3. they are surrounded by wild animals. To make a long story short, we did manage to get the Inspire out of the tree and it only suffered minor damage, but it might affect future flights unless I can do some magical field repairs. A side note: Zebras don’t like Quadcopters, even when they are quite far away. I don’t know yet how other species will fell about it, but if they react the same way, I’m not going to fly it around animals. I don’t want to stress anything out just to get a video scene.

I shot mostly video scenes, but here are a few stills.

Lots of trees in Tarangire including Acacias and Baobabs:


You see different animals mixing together which makes for unique photographic opportunities:




I learned something interesting. Zebra frequently stand together head to tail. This apparently serves two purposes, first it lets them watch a larger area for potential predators, and second, it allows the tail of one the keep flies away from the face of the other. Sort of cooperative fly swatting: