More Leopard Sightings!?!?

Tuesday January 7^th; I hadn’t been in Thabo Tholo a week as of yet. I woke up late, about 07:30, but thankfully we didn’t have to be anywhere that morning and just had some office work and a few chores scheduled. But suddenly we had a radio call that a Leopard had been seen not too far away, and could we please find it and stick with it so the VIP guests that were staying on the reserve at that time could get to see it; what a horrible request!!!!

So we got all our gear together and headed off in search again. Later on we were able to ID the cat as the smaller of the two cubs. In my first two sightings, one of each cub, and not that I’m complaining in any way, shape or form about seeing a leopard, I’d not seen enough of the first to get a picture and it was so dark come the second that it was pretty much impossible to get a decent shot. This was my chance; it was about 8 in the morning and pretty bright. Considering how infuriatingly difficult it can be to see a leopard (see first blog), we found him pretty much straight away, just casually sitting up in the grass 20-25m away. Absolutely incredible!!

So, out came the camera, switched it on and……bugger!! Not quite the phrase I used, but you get the point. For some reason it was completely locked on to one screen so none of the dials worked, you couldn’t zoom and you couldn’t refocus. So here, at my fingertips, was possibly the most perfect shot of a leopard I may ever see in my life, and for an unknown reason my camera was broken. I know for me this isn’t unusual, but seeing as I was using it the night before and it was working fine, I hadn’t touched it since then, hadn’t dropped it or bashed it, this was incredibly frustrating. I did manage to get some snaps of it where it sat, and to be honest despite the massive annoyance of the camera breaking, I was still in awe at what we were seeing.

We sat with him for about 20 minutes, and then he began to move. Not too far behind us were some impala and he began to skirt around us in full stalk mode; he was walking through very tall grass that made it really difficult to spot him, even when he stood up to get a look at the impala. We turned the car in time to see him cross right in front of us, not 20m away now, with his body pushed low to the ground. He moved down and stopped in some bushes to think through what he was about to do. He then moved down the hill towards the impala, before suddenly they started alarm calling. This comes out as a bark, and when one is heard the whole herd will stop what they’re doing and intensely scan around for danger. Our cat had been spotted and the impala fled; he was way too far away for it to be worth chasing and so returned to the bushes by the side of the road.

Although unsuccessful it was amazing to see the concentration, the movement and the planning that goes into a hunt. When they’re full into hunt mode every step has to be perfect so they don’t make a sound; the angle they attack from has to be perfect so their prey can’t smell them and they have enough cover to get close, and the timing has to be perfect so they can propel themselves forward at the right moment and so they’re perfectly balanced when they do so. The cubs are still young and perfecting their techniques, but even adult leopards only have about a 30% success rate.

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As a side note, towards the end of January we had ANOTHER one. It was the first drive for some awesome safari guests Roger and Patricia, who had themselves run a reserve in India and had loads of hilarious stories about Ian Botham regularly going out and staying with them. They were lucky enough to spend the best part of an hour with one of the cubs, but just after we got to the sighting he decided he’d had enough and moved off. We were still buzzing about seeing one of them again, and I’ve recently had some VERY close “sightings” with what we suspect is one of the cubs who may actually be setting up a territory around our camp!! 

Office Visitors

I guess most people who work in an office occasionally get visits from people, welcome or not, throughout their normal working day. Out here a big part of the work we do takes place in our “office”. This normally involves sifting through thousands and thousands of pictures taken on our camera traps or inputting data from the walks and sightings we’ve had.

We get regular visits from the heard of Nyala that live on the reserve. Originally there were 30+, but the Leopards went to town on them so now there’s only a handful. They’re a medium sized antelope, who show a massive sexual dimorphism, with the males being much larger, with darker coats and relatively long horns. We don’t see “our male” too often because most of the time Nyala bulls are solitary, only interacting with female groups to see if any of the females are in heat. These pictures were only taken on an iPhone, so again, apologies for the low quality.

Our regular visitors are 3 females, a couple of very young babies and a young male who goes by the name of Sammy. Sammy hasn’t yet developed his dark coat or grown his horns out; this only begins to happen when they’re 14 months old. We can just be working away in the office, and if you hear a crunch on the stones than mark out our walkways, the chances are it will be this lot.

Now, they have been coming here for long enough that the guys here have managed to have them literally eating out of their hand!! I had heard about this before I came, but it was still cool to see it happen and to actually feed them myself. Sammy’s a cheeky sod who absolutely dominates this little feeding ritual, and will very quickly push himself to the front of the queue to try and get all the pellets for himself.

They’re very welcome visitors to our office, and when we haven’t seen them for a few days we do wander how they’re doing, especially with a lot of hungry leopards having been seen in the valley recently. The youngest baby made it’s longest appearance to-date around camp yesterday and I managed to quickly get some pictures with it on my phone; it is tiny!!