I have returned from my African vacation back to the ugly reality (which seems to be getting uglier every day). In Africa I went to two national parks, South Luangwa in Zambia and Liwonde in Malawi. Both are excellent, each in its own way, and well worth a visit.

I had good photographic equipment with me and took a lot of pictures. Here’s one of a lioness feeding on a buffalo that her pride killed the night before:

There is a lot of meat on a buffalo, enough for a pride of ten lions to feed on for two days. They stuff themselves so full that they only can lie down belly up:

And here’s one of a leopard:

I also learned a new bit of ecological lore (which I’ll use next time I teach my ecology class). It’s well known that elephants are one of the most destructive species (perhaps the most destructive, after humans, of course). It turns out that it’s not just because they are large and require a lot of food, but also because their digestion is extremely inefficient. They consume large quantities of low-nutrition vegetable matter, like this guy eating cattails:

But because they are not ruminants, they manage to digest only 20% of what they swallow. The ground in both South Luangwa and Liwonde is literally covered with elephant dung, and because it is so poorly digested, it provides a great resource for other animals, like this yellow baboon:

He is probably looking for marula seeds like these ones, which we found by picking through a large pile of elephant droppings: