My Leave: Part 1

After a quite incredible last evening in camp (see previous blog), I was now a little gutted to be leaving camp for the best part of two weeks considering we still had a leopard knocking around. But, I thought, sightings like that are so rare that there could surely be no-way he’d pop his head up again while I was away…HA! It turns out he did, more than once!! And it turns out he may even have made himself comfortable in a spot very close to our “loo-with-a-view”…which has no door…

But on leave I was still to go. For the first week I was staying at the house Will and Carol, who started the leopard research 10 years ago, are renting on the other side of the reserve. It is in a stunning spot, with breath-taking views of Thabo Tholo.

All along the front of the house is a huge veranda which provides the setting for the aforementioned views. For the week I was there I spent most of my time sitting there trying to study, but often finding myself easily distracted by the wildlife around the house. Swallows were a constant source of entertainment while sitting out on the veranda. They were constantly dive-bombing around trying to catch little flying insects, and I spent far too long trying to get a decent video of them in action. I’m not yet a brilliant wildlife cameraman, but I will get there one day J 

In the garden immediately in front of the veranda were some small flowering bushes which also attracted a lot of interest from birds and insects, including Sunbirds. Unfortunately I only saw a pretty drab looking female White-bellied Sunbird the whole time I was there, which was a huge shame because the male Sunbirds tend to have incredible colourations. Although they don’t have the amazing colours of the males, female sunbirds do have to characteristic long, thin, curved beak and flickering tongue which they use to get nectar from flowers.

There were also a huge variety of insects and butterflies attracted to the bushes.

You could also often see animals, such as these zebra, silhouetted on the ridge lines surrounding the house.

Not far from the house was a recently excavated aardvark hole, in front of which Will had placed a camera in the hope of seeing this incredibly elusive creature. Unfortunately there was an issue with the camera, so we sorted that out and I wandered out to replace it in front of the hole. The next morning as I was sitting on the veranda of the house having my breakfast I heard some incessant snorting from Walter, who was standing staring intently into the tree line just in front of the house. Walter is a Wildebeest that holds a territory around the house.

So I started filming him just in case he’d seen anything interesting, and suddenly he broke into a run and off he went. Not long afterwards Will came back from his early morning bike ride, claiming to have found very fresh leopard tracks heading in the direction of that very tree line, right in front of the camera placed opposite the aardvark burrow. So there was the reason for Walter’s skittish behaviour!! When I finished my breakfast I went down to collect the camera so we could see which Leopard had been wondering around…only to find the sodding thing hadn’t been caught on camera!! Unfortunately the cameras do miss things, and frustratingly this was just one of those times. However, it did manage to catch some Warthog checking out the freshly dug burrow; they are one of many species that utilise aardvark burrows when they have been abandoned, so this could become their new home!!

A warthog investigating its potential new home? 

There is a drinking pan a few hundred metres away from the house which also provided a steady stream of wildlife to watch, mainly in the form of Impala, Kudu, Waterbuck and Wildebeest who regularly visited it to quench their thirst.

Kudu at the drinking pan

On my final morning at the house I was treated to finally seeing Vervet Monkeys on Thabo Tholo. I’ve seen them on both my previous trips to Africa, but I’d only seen glimpses of them on camera trap pictures since I’d been here. It’s always a treat watching them interacting and flying through the trees.

Vervet Monkey "Flying"

The first half of my leave had just flown by!! And just as it was ending, that was pretty much when the heavens opened across a lot of this area of South Africa by the sounds of it!! And they haven’t really shut since, so I’m very interested to see the state of the roads when I get back to Thabo Tholo on Monday!!