WILDLIFE REPORT

General

A warm welcome to all our readers from a cold Timbavati and Kings Camp. Yes, winter is back with a bang!!

We had a fair bit of "late" rain and that caused the vegetation around our area to remain much greener than usual. This in turn provided palatable vegetation for the herbivores and sightings of Zebra's, Wildebeest, Giraffe, Waterbuck and Kudu's are prolific!

Leopard

As usual we had lots of great sightings of these special cats. We are very fortunate to follow them in their daily doings.

Leopards are often described as shy, elusive, secretive and strictly nocturnal hunters. All true, but we so often get to see them moving around so undisturbed by our presence... something not many people witness.

The Rockfig female finally showed us that she has a single cub! We saw them a few times at kills she made but at this stage the young one is still very shy. We hope for it to settle soon so that we can update you on amazing sightings from this successful mother with her new baby.

Talking of young ones... The M'bali female and her surviving female cub were seen on numerous occasions and they are both in immaculate condition. This youngster is almost more relaxed with the vehicles presence than her mother!

With winter upon us the male Impalas started with the rutting again. This usually means that most Impalas killed by Leopards in the wintertime are males that drop their guard when they fight with each other. It is not uncommon at all to see female Leopards with kills that weigh twice as much as they do. Look at the image of Ntombi female with a big Impala ram. It’s much larger than her!

Lion

The Lion activity was very high after the rain we had. All the prides were very active in the area following the high volumes of potential prey moving about!

Both adult Lionesses in the Machaton pride are pregnant again! We hope all goes well and for them. If we are lucky they might use the Machaton River close to camp again. We will keep you posted on the happenings.

The Schobele pride is looking better than ever before and we saw this pride quite often on substantial kills in the month! The big old male however has more on his plate every day... More and more nomads keep moving into the "vacant" area to explore. This keeps him on his toes and he covers great spaces to try and keep the "intruders" out.

Elephant and Cape buffalo

Elephant movement is localized around the main waterholes and days have gone by in which we easily saw more than 100 Elephants on a drive!!

Over the whole month we witnessed four different breeding groups of Buffalo circulating through our traversing seeking the green grass and water after the rain. If you were lucky to see all four herds on one drive your count would stop at roughly 1200 animals!

White Rhino

Something awesome happened! On some days we get lucky to see crashes of between 2 and 8 White Rhino's together! Even better news for our well-known male in the area, as there is fairly good looking female Rhino's now in the area... It keeps him interested and on the move now. Who knows? Maybe we can give you good news in the future when the Stork flies over...LOL!

Special Sightings

This Hyena sighting deserves the spot.

This female stole an Impala kill from a Leopard and stored it away in a mud wallow! Once it cooled down she took the carcass and dragged it for a very long distance into the thickets.

She obviously took the opportunity to use the mud to hide the animal’s scent from other predators and to hide it from the sharp eyes of any nosy raptor birds.

Until next time, take care.

Kind regards, Morné and the Kings Camp ranger team.

Written by: Morné Hamlyn.
Photography by: Morné Hamlyn.