Leopard, and more leopard, December 2011

       By Squack Evans




During the course of 12 days or so, we travelled through Manyara having some phenomenal elephant viewing at close quarters..... some of the best I have had in Manyara for some time.

Following on from there, we went to Ngorongoro and on to Moru kopjies.

We had a lot of rain so were a little bit constrained due to mud, in some areas. However, we had phenomenal sightings. The leopard viewing started here and we saw, in one morning, 3 leopards. One at a distance had just killed and climbed a tree with a dikdik. We managed to find one of the resident lion prides as well as a Black Rhino.

We moved on to the northern Serengeti and the leopard sightings continued in earnest! A mother and adolescent cub with an oribi kill giving us some amazing shows. The cub had attitude; with a snarl and a hiss almost on the end of my camera lens and then it hopped up on to the bull bar of the car.

The next day we found the mother again hunting and climbing trees in the heat of the afternoon. In the evening, she had moved some distance again and gave a phenomenal modelling shoot!

Lions were plentiful as was other game and, being slightly out of season, there were very few other cars out and about.

Our send off at the end was 4 Black Rhino and some interesting interaction as it appeared that a female in the group was in season. Great trip..... and the leopard stole the show.

You never know what is just around the corner.......

By Chediel Mnzava

On safari with a lovely family in July this year.
Location:  Katavi National Park.
And this is why I like game drives. You just do not know
what is round the corner.

Late in the evening, making our way back to Chada camp, we stopped to take pictures of a beautiful sunset. Then, from nowhere,  a leopard came running fast towards our vehicle. About 10 meters from the car, there was a small acacia tree. The leopard took a giant leap and grabbed a vervet monkey from the tree, just in front of us. We were all left with our mouths open. This all happened within a few seconds. It was so fast our great photographer, Andrew, only managed to snap one quick shot as the leopard was running away with the monkey hanging from his mouth.

This is another leopard spotted soon after, the result of careful reconstruction at the scene of the crime. We spotted the impala in the tree first and then searched around until we found the perpetrator.

The safari had many high points. On one of our game drives, we were watching an elephant picking up seed pods from under an acacia tree. We stayed with him for more than 10 minutes, not moving, just watching what he did with his trunk and admiring his ability to pick up such small things with his big trunk. He pushed the pod up with his foot, then picked it up in his trunk. Just before he moved off, he gave us a bit of a show, making a small, quick rush towards our landrover. He stopped a few meters from the car and shook his ears and kicked up some dust before turning around and calmly walking away and disappeared into the bush. As a guide, I knew it was all OK, the elephant was just showing off, but my clients were a bit uncomfortable until they saw that I was not worried. It turned out to be one of the highlights of the safari and gave them a completely different experience of elephants from all the elephants that we had seen before. They thought they knew alot about elephants but now they know even more.

The elephant having a good look in the car, before calmly walking off.

Mahale was next. On the way, we spotted a boat taxi just leaving with its passengers - the best way to get around on the deepest lake in Africa.

We had a good time there, we saw the chimps twice and both times, we did not have to walk far to find them.

We had a nice walk to the waterfall with a beautiful scenery on the way. It was so relaxing swimming on Lake Tanganyika and watching the sunset of the lake from the boat, talking about all the exciting experiences we had in the past 10 days.Mahale came at the right place on our itinerary to bring us to the end of this wonderful expereince.