Thanks Peter! Lots of good shots on your flickr as well. And good points. Happy travels!

You don't say where you are looking at going in Africa, but as you mention, some months are quite dry and dusty whereas others some have some rain and others are very rainy. After the "light" rains the grasses become green and there are more bugs, which means more birds. Also it is often cheaper then plus sometimes more newborn animals. Since you mention only large game, presumably you aren't interested birds? And for gorilla's, there are only a few countries that you can see them (Rwanda, Uganda and the Congo I believe). Personally I wouldn't go to the Congo, to dangerous IMO. Your 300-1200mm again IMO is way too long for gorillas in Rwanda and Uganda, you will need a different lens. The jeeps in other areas are often fairly open but I would change lenses and add or remove TCs and would do it when we were stopped. Also would try to keep my camera/lens covered so during the sprinkles and dust I never had a problem (for example, would slide my camera/lens into a pillowcase or open backpack when not in use). I did of course take two bodies which I would strongly argue everyone should. Even new cameras can have problems. So you can put a closer lens on one body and your 300-1200mm on the other. You can have many animals, especially the large ones like elephants, giraffes as well as lions and leopards and cheetah extremely close to the vehicle. So a lens that can photograph at 50-300mm 35mm equivalent would be perfect to complement your other lens. And of course this should be on a separate body so you don't have to switch lenses.
Besides deciding when to go, you need to decide where (ie. private, public, vehicle or walking safari, etc). But Africa is amazing and no matter what you decide, I am sure you will have a fantastic experience!
PS. My wife and I first went to Africa 15 years ago (to South Africa and Botswana) and we thought we would never go back. Now we have gone back several times (Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, Madagascar). It is addicting for sure. And for wildlife photography, there is nothing that come close. Some of my pics are on flickr if interested and you can see the focal length I used for each shot. Our most recent trip to Tanzania where we went during the short rainy season inhere:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/60519499@N00/albums/72177720312511178

Thanks for looking and commenting. We are fortunate to have Western bluebirds near us too. A group put out a bunch of boxes for the bluebirds to nest (they usually nest in cavities), and the number of bluebirds have increased substantially. So we get a chance to photograph them all year:

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Just waiting a couple weeks to hear if anyone has problems, etc. Meanwhile I love both my Z8 and Z9. Never tried Canon or Sony but the people I trust, like Steve Perry, who shoots both Nikon and Sony, feel that the eye focus for birds on the Nikon is as good if not slightly better than Sony under some conditions. See for example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Va1kNNGp7pU

So hope everyone is enjoying photography as much as I am. Currently we have lots of hummingbirds to shoot, which are small and fast! When a photo is off, it is more often than not something I didn't do correctly.

Thank you very much!

Beautiful! Missed seeing any this year.

Not sure if my reading is correct? But looking at the list of fixes and improvements, didn't see anything that jumped out to me as. But maybe I missed something. So would be happy to hear from others who thought XXX was a big deal, enough to convince me to upgrade.

Thanks! Maybe look for a walking tour in Africa? Think these are more common in Zambia but they have grown in popularity and there are many throughout Africa.

Thanks Steve!

To follow on Steve's post, there are now walking safaris in some places. You may have seen a recent Youtube video by a (in)famous YouTuber (TML, initials), on getting on the ground so you can shoot at eye level lions and the painted dogs. Not sure personally I would do this (with a lion or painted dog) though for the first time ever our guide in Tanzania allowed us to do that with a cheetah (we stayed next to the vehicle). It was quite a thrill when it ran by us. Got some of my favorite shots that way, like this one:

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Thank you very much Joe for looking and your kind comments!

Yep, but don't use Wi-Fi and don't at the moment have any problems. Many times when I have updated my operating systems on my phones and computers I regretted it. I did the last update on my Z9 and Z8 immediately, but will wait a bit since I don't see any feature that I can imagine using. Will hopefully hear from people like you that everything is fine after the update.

I think you and I read it differently, it said "When [AF-area mode] is set to [3D-tracking] and the human subject is large relative to the frame and multiple eyes are detected near the tracking focus point, the camera will assign priority for focusing to the eye closer to the point."
I do use eye focus on animals (this said human subject) and it said when multiple eyes are detected it will pick the closer eye. Not sure that is how I actually would want to. So that is not to me a great improvement. Also my bird eyes are not large relative to the frame. I probably will update, just don't see that there is much improvement. Maybe I am missing it.

Thank you very much. Yep definitely spring here.

Thank you for looking and your nice comment!