Comments by "johanrebel" (@johanrebel) on "Latest Sightings" channel.

  1. The mute button is a great invention!
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  2. And all the people on the boat managed to keep their traps shut for a full minute. Congratulations, well done.
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  3. Nobody is walking. You can hear the vehicle's engine, you can see the tire tracks as well as the vehicle's shadow as it reverses.
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  4. Not necessarily. When a boomslang is threatened, it will puff up its neck, just like in this video. You'll find any number of pictures of this behavior online. I'm not sure that boomslange even eat eggs. I guess they may do so opportunistically, but they are essentially diurnal hunters of live prey. When snakes do eat eggs, they puncture or crush themdirectly after ingesting the egg, after which the contents are swallowed. The egg shell is then usually regurgitated. Grey-headed Bushshrikes are well known predators of snakes.
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  5. That cub was just going on instinct. Simple as that.
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  6. How difficult is it to shut up for all of 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
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  7. That laughing lady has just about the right amount of empathy to have qualified for a job at Ravensbrück back in the days.
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  8. A very young ground hornbill, I bet it learned a lesson here.
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  9. The other obvious lesson here is that artificial nests should be situated in such a way as to make access for leopards impossible, or at least extremely difficult. Indeed, a distinct advantage of artificial nests is that they can be positioned in such a way, as opposed to natural nests, where the birds have very limited choice and have to make do with the least unfavorable option. Having said that, none of the natural Ground Hornbill nests I have seen had an opening anywhere near big enough for a leopard to easily insert its head (and with cats the body will fit through almost any opening the head goes through). Most have also been in sections of straight tree trunk that would have forced a hungry leopard to cling to the tree with all four paws, making it nigh on impossible to insert a paw I to the nest cavity.
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  10. Wow! The humans almost managed to keep their mouths shut for four minutes! Almost is not good enough, but it's a start.
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  11. The cardinal rule when filming wildlife sightings: SHUT UP!
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  12. It's completely baffling. One wonders what goes on in the minds of portrait format filmers. Do they always hold their phones upright, no matter what they are using them for? Have they ever asked themselves why TV screens are shaped the way they are? The screens in movie theaters?
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  13. In case anybody wondered if you get snowflakes in the South African summer, here's your answer!
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  14. Nothing in nature is cruel except in human perception.
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  15. Goes for you too, whether you are in the wild or not.
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  16. Not a single word spoken - just birdsong. Wonderful!
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  17. What a relief to learn that this was witnessed by a "34-year-old commercial and industrial property broker". Truly pertinent and crucial information like this truly helps viewers understand what happened. Just imagine if it had been witnessed by, say, a 27 year old non-profit and agricultural property breaker! I would not have believed my eyes.
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  18. Time to trade in your teachers and elders for some that don't belong to the Fake News brigade.
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  19.  @freedfromdesire466  Giraffes are predominantly browsers. According to Skinner et al, "they graze very occasionally on fresh sprouting palatable grasses". If you describe a giraffe as a grass-eater, then you could also describe a lion as a grass-eater. After all, lions also very occasionally eat grass.
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  20.  @Crocutaalpha  Are you advertising your ignorance? Not all male lions live in coalitions, and even those who do don't always stay together. If you see a single male lion, it most certainly does not mean there are other males around. That Ngorongoro male was entirely on his own, and over the years I've seen more single males than I can count. In the flesh, not on YouTube. I've also witnessed any number of fights between lions and hyenas. Who wins depends on a host of factors, including numbers on either side. But male lions generally punch well above their weight, and usually easily tilt the scales. All it takes is one. You need to read up on lion ethology instead of spouting nonsense.
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  21. It croaked for sure. That first strike injected enough venom to kill the chameleon several times over. I've watched kills like this before close up. The boomslang just hangs back and waits for the chameleon to stop moving, which might take ten minutes, then grabs it, and swallows it. If left undisturbed, that is. A vehicle full of yelling, hollering and screaming people doesn't exactly help. If, on the other hand, you keep quiet and don't move, you can watch the whole spectacle at close range. I've had a kill like this right at the pool, the swallowing part took ages.
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  22. ​ @EarthIsFlat456 Large elephant bulls may reach 6.8 metric tons. Sclerocarya birrea wood has an air-dry density of ±590 kg/m3. The wood of that tree was obviously not air-dry, and it had lots of leaves. Now go do the math, and then let us know whether your assertion stands up to scrutiny.
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  23.  @EarthIsFlat456  You made a claim, feel free to corroborate it. I'm certainly not going to do the work for you. I already provided two key data points, that's as far as I'll go.
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  24. ​ It's weirdly truncated, though. Cuts out before the giraffe is finished off.
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  25.  @lloydchristmas3637  In that case she must be narrating for blind kids.
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  26.  @sidneywilder2731  Tutti Frutti Dutti doesn't know what he's talking about. His entire "knowledge" of the universe probably comes from YouTube and TikTok. Scary.
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  27. This one gets an Academy Award for the most inane commentary ever. I thought only American teenage girls were capable of saying OMG that often.
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  28.  @MartensAD  With their loud and distinctive call grey-headed bushshrikes are often heard, but nevertheless often a challenge to see. They may be colorful, but they are also wary and rather secretive. When hunting they are bold and aggressive, though. I agree that they are more likely to pick on smaller snakes, as well as anything else they can swallow whole, or impale and dismember. What exactly happened here we'll never know, it may have been an opportunistic attack, or something else.
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  29. So now we know that even an advanced degree in particle physics is no guarantee that a video will be shot in landscape format.
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  30. Only until the venom did it's lethal work.
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  31. Best part of this video is the cacophony of inane comments, starting with "that's a snake, guys!" This must've been a game drive organized by Bright Sparks Safaris for the Association of Ignorant Naturalists.
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  32. Accepted his fate? What other options were there? Filing a written complaint with the SPCA? Asking his congressman for help?
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  33. Typical Kruger sighting: more cars than hyenas.
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  34. ​ @Crocutaalpha All depends. I've seen a single male lion effortlessly hold off 34 hyenas (yes, I counted 'm) that were after his wildebeest kill in the Ngorongoro crater. Generally, hyenas give male lions a wide berth, and approach too close at their peril.
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  35. Indeed, she was just ambling along when she suddenly caught sight of the dogs. She may or may not have detected olfactory signs of the dogs as she was sniffing around earlier, but that doesn't prove she then purposely set out to track them down. Lions are fast walkers, but 4 kilometers would have taken her about 40 minutes, even when walking along a smooth road and not stopping too often. It strikes me as unlikely that a lion would go 4 km out of its way just to pick on some wild dogs, which doesn't bring any immediate benefit.
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  36. Filming this in portrait format is absolutely brilliant. And as usual, LS insults viewers with a risibly bad clickbait thumbnail.
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  37. Portrait format and inane narration, what a fabulous combination! Congratulations, a true winner.
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  38.  @Crocutaalpha  I'm not saying male lions are solitary animals. Try getting your head around the facts for once. Lions are born in prides (almost always, very rarely they are born to single mothers. I've seen several single lionesses with cubs that were not part of a pride). At a certain point the young males will be chucked out of the pride. If they happen to have (half)brothers, they can band together. If not, the evicted male is entirely on his own. He has to catch his own meals, look for a suitable territory, and if he can't immediately find one he needs to give territorial males a wide berth. With luck and effort he may find other young males to form a coalition with, or else he make take over a whole pride entirely on his own. Yes, that happens. Incumbent males die, or become old and decrepit to the point where they can no longer defeat a young and healthy male. Then you get coalitions. Here's some surprising news, the members don't always die at exactly the same time. So guess what? At some point there will be single male left. If his pride is then taken over by the competition, and he survives the experience, he will be on his own. Yep, a solitary lion. His prospects are of course not good, and he's not likely to survive for many years. But the occasional lion does.
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  39. One of my favority anecdotes: lions kill zebra foal, start eating it alive. American lady on the truck starts crying. Her husband is filming. Lady keeps crying. Husband keeps filming, but out of the corner of his mouth tells her "close your eyes, put your fingers in your ears, and shut the fuck up!".
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  40.  @rthfalconer1306  Surely this is a juvenile African Goshawk ([i]Accipiter tachiro[/i])?
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  41. Crocodiles most certainly are scavengers. For starters, they commonly scavenge from other crocodiles. A kill by one will attract all the others in the vicinity, all vying to tear chunks off the victim. They will also eat other dead crocs, or anything else they can lay their jaws on. Moreover, crocodiles have an acute sense of smell, and can pick up the scent of blood from a considerable distance. I recall finding a lion kill by following the tracks of a large crocodile that had headed inland from the Luvuvhu River. Despite its size, the three lions had no difficulty seeing the croc off.
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  42. Very knowledgeable conversation too. A "deer"? Really?
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  43. How do we know it was her cub? Also, the assertion that " lions form a large majority of the predators" in the crater can't possibly be correct. It's highly unlikely lions constitute a majority, let alone a large one. It wouldn't surprise me if spotted hyenas alone outnumber the lions. I'm not aware of any predator census data for the crater or the NCA, but 65 seems to be a common estimate for the crater lion population, a number that no doubt fluctuates considerably. I've seen 34 hyenas together in the crater, i.e. about half the estimated lion population in a single sighting. That was in broad daylight to boot, even though the species tends to be predominantly nocturnal. Then you get all the leopards and jackals.
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  44. Unborn?!? Huh? Either the ewe had just given birth, or the dogs performed a kind of rough & ready cesarian. Whatever the case, it was born. I also doubt it saw much of anything, but it certainly didn't understand a thing of what it possibly did see.
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  45. No need to kill before eating. This buffalo was obviously injured or ill, requiring little effort on the part of the lioness to "emerge victorious". That male lion should ask Santa for a new tassel for Christmas.
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  46.  @Tanks-In-Space  Neither you or Sarlat seem to be well familiar with the KNP. Gezantfombi is not right next to any entrance gate, it's over four kilometers from Croc Bridge. No hotel there either, let alone two. Just a small rest camp. As for letting "too many" vehicles into a small section of the park, the KNP is not divided into distinct sections for tourism purposes. Once in, anybody can drive on any public road in the entire park. That there are far too many vehicles driving around in most of the KNP most of the time is another matter. Wasn't that way in the past, except for the July and Christmas school vacations, which any sane person would have avoided anyhow.
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  47.  @tom11zz884  a baby hare is called a leveret. I bet the kind of people YouTube employs as content moderators have never heard of the word, and their algorithm can't make sense of it either.
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  48.  @Crocutaalpha  You are right, anyone can claim anything. But here's the thing: Some claims cannot be verified, but some can. It's not a very bright idea to make ignorant and untruthful claims that can be fact-checked by those with personal knowledge and expertise or who are au courant with the relevant scientific research and literature. To repeat incorrect assertions is simply boneheaded. You can easily verify the accuracy of what I state about lions if you have the requisite cognitive skill and can be bothered to consult the literature. Getting yourself an education is really not a bad idea, you know. In your case it might of course be a waste of time to try, I wouldn't know.
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  49. "The wildlife authorities were alerted to the situation, and sadly, Henry the hippo passed away during transportation the next day." Huh? How about letting nature take its course?
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  50. I've known this to happen on one single occasion in 33 years. This was in the Manyeleti. Ranger shot a very badly mauled zebra right from the game viewer! The zebra was a goner for sure, but had somehow escaped the lions, which were nowhere to be seen. The bleeding-heart ranger shouldn't have done it (and because he shot from the hip (!!!) the recoil injured the fingers of his hand), but hey, the zebra was as good as dead already. On the other hand, I recall an elephant being eaten alive by three lionesses at Savuti. They were tunneling in from the anus, and looked very funny because the front half of their bodies was literally blood-red. People were begging the rangers to shoot the elephant, but no joy. It took approximately 24 hours for it to die. A lion can only eat so much, so they took long breaks between bouts of feeding.
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