I have had a short but oh so sweet Kruger trip this month, it was announced that SanParks are going to host their 9th cricket event in Kruger the first weekend in March, so I immediately went to the office and put in a few days leave for ‘urgent private matters’ and then phoned my Kruger-pelle, Wendy and Sparrow, and informed them that I will be joining them from Wednesday 4 March till the Sunday morning.
So as per usual Wendy and I drive ‘together’ in separate cars and the Thursday morning we take the H1-1 in hope to find the dogs that we spotted on Wednesday, that story will be told later, and it was definitely not our morning as we can’t find them, and then hear from other mites that we missed a hyena/dog interaction with about 10 minutes after we left the hyenas at the S114 crossing…
So we move on, and after doing the S65/S1/S4/S3 back to camp we hear the dogs came back and were lazying around on the S114/H1-1 intersection so Wendy refill her thermal flask for more MMC and at Skuks and drive on to the S114 to hopefully find anything, and wait for her. I get there and find absolutely nothing except a lekker shady spot where I wait for her. She arrives about after 15 minutes and then we decide to check out renosterkoppie dam.
We take our time, enjoying the quietness of the roads (I would love to visit the Park again outside holidays or weekends) and then get to the dam where we find two beautiful specimens. We park our cars and just sit with them, both facing towards the S21, enjoying the silence. When I spot a JJ coming from the S112, he stops at the intersection with his 2 guests and points towards the rhinos and then towards something else, which I don’t see. They excitedly start taking pictures of I don’t know what and all I’m thinking is ‘the rhinos are this way…’ but then I hear the JJ trying to quietly shout to us ‘LEOPARD…’ and then I see walking from the bushes this beautiful lady (the pictures will tell the story)
This all happened in about 20 minutes then as she moved on I drove in front of the brigade, I believed that she would maybe cross the S21 and drove a bit on, but when looking back saw all of the cars jammed up at the S112 intersection so I waited in the back and were able to get this shot of her walking behind Wendy’s car…
She then climbed on a rock a few metres from the road and we spent more than an hour with her, she was open enough so all could see her, and there were never more than 6 cars with her. We left at 12:00 as it was getting boiling hot and wanted to chill in camp so we moved on having had the sighting of the trip on my first full day. And predator sighting for 2015.
To be continued…
