At this point, I chose not to run around the outside of the tree and start calling the leopard names. This was one of my better decisions… We had tracked this gal for about a week and then she was finally spotted (no pun intended).
Here’s another one of the images from my 1000 Stories from 1000 Places NFT drop. It sold out in minutes, but they are now available to trade on OpenSea and X2Y2, etc so be sure to check them out.
A great revelation I came to in Africa was how much I loved elephants. It’s not like I hated them beforehand… who could hate an elephant? But my care-level for them was somewhere between indifference and like. What ended up quite surprising me was how peaceful and interesting I found the creatures to be. I think they operate on a different time scale. I also sometimes wonder if they are in another universe, but just appear to be in ours.
Okavango Delta, Botswana
Just a couple of African buffalo doing their thing…
My NFT drop from earlier in the week is going super well with the sales now in the high six figure range. From my experience so far (and I’ll be documenting it all, positive and negative) in upcoming videos, it looks like this will be a significant marketplace for artists going forward. You can see the drop here and then I recommend reading this Twitter thread for a collector’s view.
I actually don’t know if that’s a female adult or not. I can’t really tell the difference. But I’ll tell you one cool thing about elephant ears. The blood vessels follow a perfect Fibonacci sequence… the same pattern you see in river deltas. This pattern maximizes the cooling of the blood.
Even though elephants are my favorite African animals (btw did you know a group of elephants is called an “intelligence”?), lions come a close second. I thought, for whatever reason, that watching animals would get kind of boring after ten minutes or so (like at the zoo) – I was totally wrong – I watched this family of lions for hours and hours.
It looks like this lion is just kind of naturally angry. I suppose that is some sort of a natural selection trait. Lions that look super friendly and happy may be easily slain by other lions. However, I wonder if animals that look happier (like dolphins and dogs) are actually the ones surviving more because humans think they look more cute and affable, so we kill less of them.
We found a beautiful tree in Botswana where we decided to have a picnic in the wild while we waited on elephants. We didn’t know if they would actually come by, but, lo and behold, they did. There must have been about 50 of them, a collection of a few families. They would walk a while, get a drink, take a bath, and get back in the convoy. Fun fact you may not know… what is a grouping of elephants called? A memory. Maybe one of the greatest names of a group of animals ever.
Wow I wish I knew my animals better. When I roll around Africa, I’m constantly asking, what is THAT animal called again? And the guide is like, “Oh, that’s an ELEPHANT, Trey.” I’m like okay… since when did they have trunks? I think the guides think I am dumb or something… but, actually more, seriously, there are about 100 deer-like creatures with different horns. This one is called like a Springbok or something. Or maybe not. I really don’t know. It’s not an elephant, though.
I think elephants must be my favorite land-based animal. I’m really looking forward to an AI that lets us talk to animals. Surely an AI can make something like that, you know? It can’t be too impossible… But as soon as that works, I’m gonna have to figure out how to do a zoom call to Africa or something because I have so many questions!
Most of the sunsets in Africa had this perfect yellow “Lion King” moment. On this particular day, we jumped out of the car (the guides really don’t like that much) – and I ran around a bit just to get this angle. Giraffes can move pretty fast! I wasn’t too worried about getting munched up by a lion or something… well, I was a little worried!
