Our walk today ventured even further downstream - we had great views of the river and water birds - but interestingly saw fresh human footprints which was apparently the sign of local fish poachers which Moli later reported to the authorities.
As we continued we watched a bushbuck, oblivious to our presence, as she walked across the sand islands in the river. We saw lots of evidence of Ellie's but didn't see any, we also drew a blank on new birds although our list is over 100 already. We did however walk past a water hyacinth covered pan with hippos nestled beneath it wearing hyacinth covers!
Over lunch we saw an amazing flock of migrating alpine swifts over the river.
Our afternoon drive took us back upstream and we saw a wonderful pale chanting goshawk, quite close ( today's photo) and a few more birds for our list - hildebrandts francolin, speckled weaver, tinker bird and the yellow fronted canary. The highlight was a mega herd of around 200 elephants making their way from the river back to the hills - this is a unique phenomena and special for this part of the park. As darkness fell and we made our way back to camp we saw not one but two white tailed mongoose. ( On our walk to the fly camp I asked Moli, as mongoose were the subject of his university research, whether the plural was mongooses or mongeese......the answer, and he had confirmed it with the world expert, was mongoose i.e. the single is the plural one mongoose , two mongoose etc!
When we got back we had a lovely shower followed by quick packing,as tomorrow we walk back to the main lodge. We then had a final fly camp BBQ on the sandy spit in the river!