So the next day, we did a walking safari in the morning, had our siesta, and returned first thing in the afternoon. The leopard and dead zebra were still up in the tree. We watched for a while, but when it was clear the leopard wasn’t going to do anything interesting, Fanwell said we’d come back before the sundowner, and we went on to see other things.
In the afternoon, we stopped by as the sun was setting, and the leopard was up in the tree crunching away. At that point, an entire leg of the zebra came off and fell to the ground. “Wait,” said Fanwell. “The leopard won’t leave it there, because it will attract hyenas and other scavengers.” So we waited, and sure enough, the leopard came down and started chomping away on the zebra leg (missing sundowner number two).
We watched that for a while, but Fanwell was listening. “The baboons, they are still calling out alerts. That makes no sense, since this leopard isn’t out hunting. Something else is going on.” So we backed out of the little hole in the forest Fanwell had driven the Land Rover into and started down the grasslands again. We made it maybe a hundred or so yards when Fanwell called out, “Another leopard, in a tree. No… two leopards! But they are solitary. This is very unusual.”
And when we reached the stop, it became obvious that there were, in fact, three leopards, two in the tree and a larger one on the ground. “The ones in the tree are older cubs, the one on the ground is the mother. She is teaching them how to tree their prey.” And, on inspection, there was a rather gruesome impala body in the tree that the two leopard cubs were struggling with, mostly successfully. Occasionally, small bits of impala would tear off and fall out of the tree, and the hyena we had spotted the prior day (or a different one) would run up, snatch it, and run off again, sometimes getting within a few yards of the mother leopard.
We made it back to the camp late again that night.
Fanwell told us having leopards (the first male and the female and cubs) so close together was unusual but not unheard of.
Spotting five different leopards in less than 48 hours… that was very unusual.
But that couldn't prepare use for day three, the scavenger hunt. Or you can see other photos from the driving and walking safari that day.