Serengeti! What mission to Tanzania would be complete without a safari to the Serengeti? The name means endless plain in the Maasai language. And the endless plain is home to countless animals. We excitedly watched a herd of 36 elephants walk around our car. A lone cheetah, spotted in the morning mist on the distant horizon, slowly strolled closer and closer until it crossed the road in front of us and lay down to rest in the shade of a tree not 30 meters from our car. We looked eye-to-eye with a male lion and his entire family group – and understood why it is called his pride. We didn’t see all the animals of the Serengeti, but we saw enough to make us marvel at the variety of God’s creation. The zebra has his stripes, the giraffe her astonishing neck, and the hippos soak in the pool all day long. Each animal equipped in some special way for life in this marvelous place.
Of course, the birds hold a very special interest for us. Our guide, a most friendly Tanzanian named Ben, was able to show us not only lions, cheetahs, leopards, serval, African wild cat, and a myriad of hoofed animals, but also well more than a hundred bird species. Most of them so new to us that we struggled to find them in the bird book. Often so many appeared at once that we had to look first, and hope we could identify them in the book later. African ground hornbills, lilac-breasted rollers, white-crowned shrikes, fawn-colored lark, cinnamon-breasted bunting, and on and on. Secretary birds that somehow do not remind me of the office. Starlings so striking they are named “superb” – astonishingly beautiful to our American eyes so used to seeing only the boringly drab Eurasian starling. What fun it was!
Two days in the Serengeti makes me want to rush right back. Next time, maybe the wildebeest migration will be in the northwest part of the park where we can reach it easily from Mwanza. Or maybe the cheetah will show off his speed. Or maybe the leopard will change his spots. Or maybe not. Whatever we see the next time, it is sure to be very, very special.
