Cats

Some days I go out and it takes hours and hours to track down the animals and then you don’t even get to see them because they are hiding in the long grass or just behind some trees. The only thing telling me that there is a cheetah or lion in the area is the beeps coming from the Telemetry set. Well, today was not one of those days. We, me and the group of volunteers, started out in the usual area and had just t-lemed for the cheetah boys but had only a faint signal in a Northerly direction so we started to head that way when we noticed two jackals on a dead wildebeest on the side of the road. Obviously the jackals did not kill the wildebeest so we sat and waited in hopes that the lions would return to the kill. It was an incredible sight watching the very skittish jackals pick there way through the carcass. Then we here a loud roar and the jackals take off as Zero walks down the road. Sauntering in like he owns the place, such an impressively terrifying look on his face it almost sent shivers down my spine. He reached the wildebeest where he picked it up and hauled it off deep into the bushes to finish eating it in peace. On a side not the jackal came back and stole some bit of stomach that had fallen off when Zero dragged the wildebeest away. We were amazed at how lucky we were to have just come across this scene not only seeing the jackal but then Zero too so we left the sighting on a bit of a high.

As we drove down on down the road still on our way to the Cheetah boys we noticed up a head something that looked like a lion on the side of the road. My first thought was that it was one of the sub adult male lions, that by the way I have not yet seen, but as I looked through my binoculars I came to realize that this massive cat was not a lion at all but a big male Leopard! I quickly grabbed my camera a snapped a few shots before he slinked off into the bushes and then spend down the road in hopes to get a better view but unfortunately no luck. Still a leopard sighting is rare and am always excited at even the briefest of visuals

So thus our drive continued still making our way north to cheetah boys. Because of the major rains lately and all the flooding the rivers are un-crossable so we had to drive out of the reserve on the roads along the fence line. As we are driving along to the next gate to enter in there are the cheetah boys just lying along the fence. Since we were on the other side of the fence we were able to walk up close to them and sit and with them for a while before they got up and moved to the shade of a nearby tree. Thus we saw all the big cats in one drive and never even had to work hard for it.