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!!