I saw (in many cases, multiple times), but failed to photograph... baboon, elephant, giraffe, buffalo, etc, etc. tracks. Sorry! (Pay for me to go back?)
(Small... 1 to 2 cm long? Ish.)
The yellow text in the image says "From dragging tail", which, besides being hard to read, maybe, is wrong. The drag mark is from a spine, although the spine was probably on the animal's tail.
Sadly, we didn't see the beast itself.
The "tracks" consist of the sine wave you see leading away from you. Those are Land Rover tracks to the right of the croc tracks. The wavelength of the croc trail is several feet. Look with the right sort of "use the force" mindset, and you can see where the croc placed his/ her feet, too.
Again sadly, this is as close as we got to seeing this exotic, interesting nocturnal formiciphage.
Our guide drew this diagram for me to clarify the difference between hyena tracks (common) and cat tracks.
The posterior edge of the "palm" pad is the "secret": Two lobes on a hyena track, three for a cat.
Note also that the hyena's claws will probably show.
My note-taking slipped up here. I can't tell you for sure what this is, but memory and OT's guidance suggest that this was made by a hyena.
Again, I failed to note at the time what our guide told us, but look at the size of the thing. (My faithful Swiss army knife is 8cm long.)
If memory and judgement serve, this is, of course, the king of beasts.
(There's some kind of disturbance to the track at "4 o'clock", just behind the imprint of the "palm" pad. That mark isn't part of the track.) (Didn't I do well in resiting the impulse to use PhotoPlus (my image maniulation software from Serif) to airbrush the blemish out?)
There are several things going on here....
The near horizontal lines, dropping slightly as they go to the right, are marks left from a hyena moving some food, dragging it along the ground.
After the hyena passed by, a leopard added his or her track... so said our guide. I have to admit I'm not quite sure, looking at the photo now, which marks are from the leopard. The most likely candidate is at the right hand side, just above the middle. The leopard was moving NW, if you call the top of the photo "north".
The round "thing" (center right) is something that fell off a plant.
I think we're seeing a degraded impala (or similar) track at the lower right, but that could be another leopard print.
The "sausage" or "worm" shaped marks completely baffle me.
Look closely, and you'll also see bird and/ or insect tracks.
Just because you sometimes couldn't see an animal, there was never a time when there was "nothing" to see!
(And, of course, at the lower left, we see the most dangerous animal on the continent... even more dangerous than the hippo.)
© TK Boyd 11/08. Click here to contact him.