We leave camp at first light this morning and are greeted by monkeys as we enter the park, these monkeys have made their home in the trees that line the stream separating our camp form the park. Although they live quite close to us, fortunately they haven’t started coming into the camp as yet. A little further on we stop to watch a Dik Dik feeding on a small bush, these, the smallest of the antelopes are very nervous and tend to run when they see people, so we were lucky to get a shot of him before he ran away into the bush. This Dik Dik also lives very close to the camp, we catch a glimpse of him from time to time as he passes through.
When we come out onto the plains the antelope, buffalo, zebra, wildebeest are all spread out, grazing in one’s and two’s instead of coming together in herds as usual. As we pass an old quarry, we see four of the sopa pride females, sitting around enjoying the morning sun. Also near the quarry is a small pool, Ken noticed a black and white kingfisher hovering over the pool for a few seconds, then diving down to the water to catch the insects on the surface. It is fascinating to watch the kingfisher in action.
After this there is nothing, no animals, no vehicles, just nothing except the sounds of the birds. We drive for around half an hour in silence. I am lost in the beautiful scenery and my own thoughts and reflections on life and how lucky I am to be here. We drove to the blackrock area to try and find the female lions and their cubs. After a while with no luck Alison rang around to see if anyone had seen them this morning and it seemed we had passed quite close to them as we left the main road for the tracks.
We doubled back and found them not too far away, warming themselves on one of the black rocks. All six females were there but only 3 cubs were around, 2 young ones and one slightly older, this means the mothers must have hidden the other cubs somewhere close by, but try as we might, we couldn’t find them and no-one else had seen them either. Why they had allowed three cubs to remain with them I don’t know. If you are lucky enough to watch lions with their cubs, you will see how much tenderness and patience the mothers have for them and how much affection there is between the females in the group. Two of the cubs wanted to suckle from their mother, first they went to rub up against her face as if greeting her or asking if they could suckle then she turned over onto her back to make it easy for them, both the mother and the cubs seemed very contented.
There were still not many animals around certainly nothing for the lions to hunt so we left them relaxing, we did pass a nice elephant family, a mother, a young one and a baby so small that he was barely visible in the long grass.
We thought it best not to use our usual breakfast spot because the cubs may have been hidden there, so we drove on until we came to a nice sausage tree, this one didn’t have a leopard in it.
During breakfast Alison had heard there was a Leopard near a place called rhino ridge, so we packed up and headed out. We did make a brief stop at a tree where Ken had spotted a group of vervet monkeys. Even though these kinds of monkeys are naturally small they looked lost in this huge tree. You will see in one of the photos a mother with a baby. Some of the monkeys were higher up in the dense foliage, all of a sudden I thought it had started to rain, it turned out that some of the monkeys were peeing on us, I guess they weren’t as thrilled to see us as we were to see them, so we moved off.
The driver picked up the pace and we headed off at speed, it felt at times like we were in the Dakar rally. It took around 30 minutes of driving like this to reach the where the leopard had been sighted. When we arrived, there were already around 12 vehicles searching a small area of dense bush.
You can see in these photos how difficult it is to find a leopard when it doesn’t want to be found. It was a young Leopard and Alison thought it may have been Roho, but it turned out to be Jilime. These two leopards are around the same age between one and a half and two years old, they are also related, in that Roho’s mother, who sadly died, was also the mother of Luluka who is Jilime’s mother. Thelast time I saw Jilime was about 3 months ago, she was in a tree with her mother, it looks like she has started to become a little more independent.
We were first alerted to her position by a flock of guinea fowl, she tried to pounce on one of them and so they flew up into the air, very noisy and very agitated, she tried her best to jump up and catch one and even though she jumped quite high she didn’t succeed. Leopards are by nature opportunists so when they see a chance they take it. She has, like all cats, good instincts.
Jilime has been followed and photographed for all her young life, so she is well used to the vehicles. As she walked through the long grass weaving in and out of the bushes, the cars including ours, circled round to get good positions, she just walked straight up to them, if they were in her way instead of walking around, she just crawled right underneath and out the other side. It was incredible how close we got to her, or I should say how close she got to us.
It seemed like she had considered if we were a threat, we weren’t. If we could be eaten, we couldn’t, so she just dismissed us, we just weren’t that interesting to her. Finally, she settled down again in a ravine, a dried-up part of the riverbed. We had seen where she had laid down but if you hadn’t seen the exact spot, you never would have seen her.
Clearly she wanted her privacy so we left her there and headed back to the blackrock females to see if more of the cubs had come out to play.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t. The females had moved from the rock to the shade of a nearby bush, they were just encouraging the three cubs to go with them, which of course they did. I think this was the height of their activity for the day and we left them as we found them, relaxing, with the cubs feeding. The two youngest cubs were suckling again but the older cub wasn’t finding it so easy this time, he tried 3 females before accepting that he might not get anything.
We made brief stops on the way back to camp to watch a couple of buffalo grazing and cooling off in the water, the oxpeckers feeding off the insects on their backs. And as we approached the camp, I couldn’t resist taking a photo of these young giraffe. Alison also pointed out the pride of Lions just up on the horizon. It was the Sopa pride, we didn’t go to see them as we didn’t have time today, but during the day they had moved closer to our camp, so maybe they will come to see us.