Ms. Leopard Makes An Appearance. And, She's Hot!

November 24

1210

Sitting in the screened in kitchen/dining area of our bungalow at Letaba.  Letaba is a beautiful camp, situated in a park-like setting on a bluff overlooking the nearly dry Letaba River.  It’s mid-day and warming up outside.  Crystal clear with a pleasant breeze blowing through here.  Gina’s taking a nap.  I’m writing when I should be snoozing.

A lot’s happened.  On the 22^nd, took a morning bush walk out of Olifants.  It was very warm and humid and still.  During the walk, we saw clouds building up to the east, and then lightening.  The rangers seemed to hurry the walk along, anxious not to get caught out in the rain.  We did in fact get a shower during the day, but only a brief one.

That evening though, we had a major electrical storm and then heavy winds and rain. Some wind damage in the area. We woke up and it was cloudy, cooler but still very windy.  We took a long drive without seeing a lot though we were able to spend quite a bit of time watching a hyena cub with its mother.  There’s something uplifting about watching any young being play for the pure joy of it and we spent quite a bit of time watching this little guy.  Not great photography, just fun.

A long drive followed, without seeing much.  We found a lot of vultures at the Bangu water hole, where we’d seen the four male lions a few days previously.  They were clustered in a number of trees in the area and of course you think two things – first, there’s a kill somewhere nearby and, second, whomever the perpetrator of said kill is, they’re still around.  But we looked and looked and finally gave up.  It’s a mystery we won’t solve.

Later that evening, I watched vervets raiding our neighbors and I decided that, really, they’re more like freedom fighters than bandits and now I’m on their side.  You gotta understand, these are monkeys that weigh about the same as an average house cat and every single day they’re outsmarting mostly old fat white people (okay, maybe not such a stretch for monkeys).  I was watching this one male.  Male vervets have appendages that seem way out of proportion to their size, at least to the (envious) human eye.  And, get this – they’re blue.  Literally a pale electric blue.  So I’m watching this male and he’s got major swagger going on.  And then he participates in a raid on one of my neighbors, eating her nice apples and white bread.  A plump older lady comes out and scolds the vervets in Dutch, as though they were naughty children, and he just swaggers away, displaying his contempt for all to see.  That was the moment I decided I was on their side.  They can’t have my stuff but I hope they have a long career of upsetting Dutch tourists who don’t pay any attention to the warnings about the vervets.

One more thing about vervets.  They don’t work long hours.  They work in the day until the beginnings of dusk and then they melt away, conceding the darkness to the night creatures and especially Mr. Leopard.  They don’t work late, past closing time, because they’re worried about all the stuff they have to do or because they’re so behind or because they’re trying to impress the boss or create a reputation for themselves as the selfless, devoted martyr who’s slowly killing himself for the company.  And they don’t go to work early either.  No 0630 meetings because that’s the only time the docs can meet.  None of that crap.  They get up, stretch, make love, pester each other and only when they’re good and ready do they start their job of raiding tourists.

Yesterday morning we woke up and it was very cool and clear.  I’d not slept well.  After a lifetime of bureaucratic work, I guess I’m trained to always be calculating the future and I lay there in bed thinking that I only have 4 days left and there’s so much I need to get done including this and that and blah blah blah.  Gina’s so much better at living in the moment than I am. But somehow I managed to come to the conclusion that I didn’t need to get up and rush out the gate and so Gina and I spent an extra hour packing and getting ready and then just sitting on the deck overlooking the Olifants River drinking coffee and watching the rising sun bring color to our surroundings.  It was a beautiful morning in a beautiful spot.

We dropped the key in the box and said goodbye to Olifants for this year and headed south for a long drive before turning back to the north to head to Letaba.  It was a pretty morning, starting cool and gradually warming up and, while we didn’t do any spectacular shooting, it was very pleasant.  We ended up at Satara to check tire pressures and now we find that we have a more serious leak on the left rear.  We bought some provisions, got coffee and bought some trinkets for people back home.

We headed north and had a lovely sighting of a rhino bull.  Mid-day light so not spectacular but still it was a lot of fun.  Also came to a cluster of vehicles in the road north of Satara.  We asked what they were looking at and were told that there was a leopard sleeping under the bush.  And there was, barely visible.  This area is very dry, open savannah with very little in the way of notable vegetation so it was a little strange that a leopard would end up here mid-day on a day that was becoming hot.  He was curled up under this tiny little bush, panting hard.  Almost impossible to see, so we continued on.

There’s a roadside emergency shop outside of Letaba and we stopped there to have the tire looked after.  A small puncture was identified and plugged and we were back on the road in less than an hour.  It cost $8….

We checked into Letaba and decided we’d take a short drive around the vicinity of the camp.  There’s an unpaved road just to the left as you exit the camp and it follows the course of the Letaba River. Not far down the road, it dips into what was a very low water crossing at one end of a beautiful little glade.  I’ve shot this little glade before and it’s a lovely spot, shaded and quiet. The road splits and does sort of a loop around it so that you can look into the glade from both directions. It runs basically east-west so it has lovely lighting both morning and afternoon.  We drove down in there and, while the water level was much lower than we’ve seen in the past, there’s still water there, enough to house one resident hippo.  We sat at this spot for a while and then began the steep, single lane climb out of there. 

And there, crossing the road in front of us was a leopard, headed right to left into a mopane thicket.  I stopped before getting too close to prepare the camera and to see what she’d do.  She stood on the edge of the thicket and watched me intently, appearing to prepare to bolt.  The thing with leopards is that they can move 10 meters off the road and you can’t even see them any more so I was thinking that it’s really going to be a long shot that we get anything of this girl.  My assumption is that it was going to be a brief sighting but that she’d take off as soon as I moved the car. And as I began to approach, sure enough, she moved into the thicket.  We tried to keep an eye on where she went and she went a short ways into the bush and lay day.  We crept up the road, searching to our right to see if there was any way to get a visual on her and, amazingly, there was a small tunnel through which I could see her in the bush.  We set up and began shooting her as she was brilliantly backlit and framed by mopanes. She appeared to be a young female and was really suffering in the heat.  After a few moments, she got up and began to slink deeper into the bush, heading downhill.  Her body language suggested that she was stalking with her body held low to the ground and shoulder blades sticking way up out of her back.

I put the car in neutral and rolled back down the hill while Gina tried as hard as she could to keep a visual on the cat.  It finally stopped into the bush where Gina could barely see her, and then Gina saw the scrub hare in a small opening.  The hare was on high alert, standing on its two hind legs, obviously aware that something was up.  The leopard was barely visible just on the other side of the hare.  I didn’t have a clear shot at the hare but tried to stay focused on it, just in case Ms. Leopard decided to hit it.  But in the end, the rabbit bolted and our leopard turned and headed deeper into the bush and out of our sight.

Sometimes you struggle so hard and sometimes you get so lucky.  I’ve had beautiful leopard sightings at Kruger but I’ve also spent days and days where almost nothing happened.  Last time we were here, we were in the park for almost three weeks and saw our first leopard on the last afternoon.  We’d seen two leopards previously on this trip, but just fleeting glimpses, nothing we could photograph at all.  And so this sighting was a gift on a beautiful late spring afternoon in a beautiful place and it was all our own.  That’s just how it goes here.  Sometimes it’s given to you, and Gina and I both felt so grateful and happy that we got to experience it.  We came home, cooked a steak, potatoes and sweet corn on an open fire and drank two Castle Lagers to celebrate our success.

This morning, we got up to take the final bush walk of our trip here.  It was just Gina and I and the two rangers.  It was a beautiful morning and we were driven to a lovely location in mopane woodlands.  Ranger John was especially interested in birds and so we spent much of the walk learning about birds.  It was I think about 6km and fairly hard walking though it didn’t seem to wind them much.  By the end of the walk, it was already very warm. 

Breakfast, and then we took the car to the ‘car wash’ in the camp where Alec did an amazing job of cleaning the car.  You understand that we’ve spent two weeks driving on dusty gravel roads with windows open. We couldn’t bring the car back to Hertz in that condition.  Now it’s clean enough.  And, yes, we’ll drive it for a couple more days and, yes, it’ll be dirty when we return the car, but appropriately dirty for a three-week rental.

It’s winding down now, but we’re excited to do a drive this evening and will be especially watchful in case Ms. Leopard gives us another opportunity.

Gina's clarification of the day.... "Every bad smell you smell doesn't necessarily have to do with me."

Mr. Rhino

Ms. Leopard