"The Big Five" a Kruger National Park Travel Page by brancolini

Africa is home of five of the most imponent and majestic wild animals the Earth has seen.
In my travel to the Kruger National Park, I was lucky to see them all

Panthera leo, or lions are among the great or roaring cats of the family Felidae. Though the male lion is called the king of beasts, it is the less heavy and majestic female lion that does most of the stalking and killing of prey and is the center of the lion pride and family.

The leopard, Leo pardus, is one of the largest members of the cat family, Felidae. Leopards are chiefly nocturnal and solitary, but a male and female commonly hunt as a pair during and for a time after the mating season.

African elephants are the largest living land animals, although some forest-dwelling African elephants are small. The most distinctive external feature of the elephant is the flexible, muscular trunk, or proboscis, an elongated nose with nostrils at the end as well as two fingerlike projections with which the elephant can examine, or even grasp, small objects.

The once numerous rhinoceros family, Rhinocerotidae, in the order Perissodactyla, now contains only five living species. All are threatened with extinction, some imminently. Rhinoceroses are large mammals with large heads, small eyes, one or two horns on the snout, and three toes on each foot. The rhino's horn is composed of keratin, as is the cow's horn, but unlike the cow's horn it is of a fused, fibrous construction and solid throughout, with no hollow for a core of bone.

The African buffalo was widely distributed in Africa south of the Sahara prior to 1890, but the cattle-virus disease called rinderpest spread through the herds and nearly exterminated them. Hunters' tales at one time indicated that this buffalo was one of the most dangerous of African mammals. Investigators now describe it as a peaceful grazer.