Steenboks are cute little antelopes that stand 52 cm tall.  They live in dense forest and feed on mainly leaves.  However steenboks have no glands to hide their scent from predators so they are an easy target for lions, carcals, cheetahs, pythons and even marital eagles.  But being a fast runner the light weight steenbok can run faster than a jackal.  

They only weigh 9 - 13 kg but have a short life but for females, their gestation (6 months) is 1/12 of their lives (6 years).  Steenbok don't need water they get enough from food but they will drink when water is offered.

The photos are of a male.  You can tell because he has horns and females don't, but females are heavier.

Poaching is when people want what animals have like a rhino’s horn or an elephant’s tusks.  

Just like blood diamonds people forced children to find diamonds and they used those to buy weapons.  With elephants now in some places its blood ivory not blood diamonds.  

But that’s not as bad as the rhinos.  Their horns are worth a fortune.  In Vietnam they make medicine and use that to cure illness.  To stop this people have started poisoning the horns so the rhinos aren’t affected but the people that take it die.

Now the horns of a rhino are the same as your toenails.  A lot of people in Africa sent their toenails to the Vietnamese embassy.  But people that shoot them get about 50,000 Pula / Rand which is a lot of African money.  People have to get into the parks by air so some people are kind of addicted to killing elephants and rhinos which is pretty stupid.

I would do anything to save rhinos and I’m pretty sure my sister Meg would do the same for the elephants.  In a few years rhinos might be extinct but rhino parks and nature reserves will keep rhinos safe I’m sure they will do all they can to keep the rhino species around.

Right now we are in the Okavango Delta.  The delta is where the Okavango River expands then sinks into the Kalahari saltpans.  Saltpans are huge patches of salt.  Some forms of salt get up to one meter thick.  Imagine having that on your food.  I have some smaller ones about 1cm.

Okavango Delta is the largest inland river delta on this PLANET.  It covers 16,000 square km.  This is where lots of wildlife lives.

Today we went on a river cruise and saw baby crocodiles and king fishers and coucals.  We went to a swimming hole and a village.  We saw fish eagles and hamerkop nests.  There were fish and lizards and at the end we saw a rock monitor.  It’s a type of lizard about two meters long.  

And Muffin the gecko got out of the car finally.  Muffin is a gecko I caught and released and found him and he crawled on my back.  I didn’t see him until two weeks later (he travelled in the car from Namibia to Victoria Falls to Botswana).  Now he is the campsite mosquito spray !