A lion kill

Last night I spend about 2 hours looking for elephants, who were still up north in the reserve close to the Klaserie river. The first tracks I got led me even further north only to find out that the herd went back south towards the river. They changed their minds and headed south!! After a bit more tracking we finally found them resting themselves in the middle of the bush, where we could not properly view them. Very disappointing indeed, especially as we were losing the light.

Therefore we decided to try again in the morning, now we were going to look for the nocturnals. Luckily Steven, my tracker, has excellent eyes and not to short afterwards spots a lioness lurking in some bushes. She was stalking some blue wildebeest!! After positioning us for the possibility of a hunt I switched off the cruiser and we waited in total darkness for things to come. Then out of the blue the wildebeests started running towards the lioness and shortly afterwards we heard the distinctive sound of an animal being grabbed.

As we get to the area the sound came from we found the lioness muzzeling (her mouth over her preys) an adult female wildebeest. After about ten minutes the gnu was dead and the lioness could take a breather. This lioness, we know, is the mother of two approximately five month old cubs and after a short while she got up and went to get her cubs. After following her for a while we decided to go back to the kill and wait for her there, we were not disappointed. A bit later she came back with her cubs and for a good 40 minutes we were treated to the lions enjoying their fresh kill, they looked a bit on the thin side so it was very welcome.

By Roel van Muiden.