A Plan Comes Together - nearly

Bella 2 between trees

Day 4 and a pattern is starting to emerge. Head for Kaboso’s last known location and see what happens. This time we were lucky and soon after arriving she emerged from the undergrowth. This time she was alone, with no sign of her cubs, but the sighting was superb. She came close, very close and gave us frame-filling shots at 135mm. All too soon she disappeared into dense undergrowth and it was time to move on.

As we turned to head off to our next sighting, we saw both Black-backed Jackal and Spotted Hyenas and with the time not yet 7am, they were bathed in beautiful golden light. An opportunity not to be missed with the Hyenas positioned to give us some backlit shots as well as fully lit images.

Next up was the Double Cross/Enkoyonai Lion pride, but a different situation to most of the encounters with this pride. Rather than Olbarnoti enthusiastically mating at every opportunity, this sighting centred on the other male in the pride, Lolpapit. Overnight, the pride had killed a Zebra and Lolpapit was having his fill of the carcass.

Waiting in the wings were a couple of Black-backed Jackals and a group of Hyenas impatiently waiting their turn with the remains. This caused some amusement as both groups pushed their luck by getting closer and closer, but Lolpapit was wise to their antics. He would allow them to reach a certain distance and then let them know in no uncertain terms that they should back off. They did, but it wouldn’t be long before they tried gain and the whole scenario was repeated.

The next part of the plan had been to make a determined effort to seek out another female Leopard named Bahati. She was located some distance away and we had already tried to find her once and been unsuccessful. However, there had been sightings reported and we decided to try again.

On the way we had a nice sighting of Hartebeest before we stopped to have our bush breakfast. Moving on, we arrived at the area Bahati had been sighted in and spent a while photographing a lone Hippo on rocks. Very quickly the call came that Bahati had been sighted and it was game-on. We had a memorable session, but it turned out this wasn't Bahati, but her daughter Bella 2. She moved back and forth between two trees, first settling in one and then coming down, walking across open ground for about 50 metres and climbing the other.

Clearly we had to move away to have our lunch and we did so hoping that she would still be there, or close by, on our return. Finding a solitary tree to provide shade was a bit of challenge, but eventually we were successful and on climbing out of the vehicle a macro opportunity presented itself. Deep in the grass was a pair of African Reed Frogs, so in the absence of macro lenses the 100-400mm zooms were pressed into service.

Understandably, lunch was a fairly hasty affair as we were all keen to get back to where Bahati had been seen the previous day and soon we were underway again. When we arrived at our previous location, we were pleased to see Bella 2 was still there and actually gave us shots of her in the very top of the tree. Bahati was nowhere to be seen. However, as we moved around to change angles and backgrounds, we noticed no more than 100 metres away was a male Lion, sleeping. Our guide identified this individual as Long Face.

It’s no surprise we spent the rest of the afternoon moving between the two animals capturing some very nice shots, before Long Face awoke and decided to move. This was our signal to do the same as the grass was quite long and the sun getting ever lower in the sky meant the chance of some different shots. We followed him for some distance until we got to a point we felt he should be left alone and we should head back to the lodge. We had quite a distance to travel.

It wasn’t an uneventful journey, nor was it the first time we have had an ‘issue’ on the way home. Back in November we sustained a puncture and with all three of us out of the vehicle, the jack in place and the wheel removed, a male Lion walked past not 100 metres away, totally ignoring us. On this occasion, the mishap befell someone else and involved another vehicle that had become stuck in floodwater on the track. A couple of other vehicles turned up to help, but none of us were able to pull or push the vehicle out. Next day we learned a specialist vehicle had got it out around two hours after our attempts and the guests aboard were late for dinner that night.