6 January 2016
Another day,
another chance of seeing animals. Despite the heat that was there early on, we
had a great day! Our highlight was our leopard sighting. Stumbled upon it by
accident, we were happy to see a glimpse of a leopard. The guests had not
expected to see one so they were pretty excited. Then suddenly she walked out
of the bush for three second and disappeared again. Where some of us had
trouble locating her before, now for sure all of us had seen her.
But it got
better. After being mostly hidden in the bush, she suddenly decided to lie down
in the riverbed below the bush. This gave us a beautiful view. She was still
young and playful and every sound of a bird got her attention. As we were the
only vehicle at the sighting we could thoroughly enjoy it as long as we
wanted.
But it got
better as she was not alone. After a while her mum came down too. They greeted
each other like cats do by rubbing their heads together, which was cute. And
then mum started washing her cub. We had watched her groom herself while she
was still half hidden in the bush, and apparently now it was the cub's turn.
She let it happen but she looked at us as if she was really embarrassed by her
mum's behavior. So the fun didn't last long as the cub decided to go on an
adventure a little further away. She got up and walked away from mum and out of
side for us. Mum stayed in the riverbed a little while longer but then got up
and went back into the bush where we first spotted her. It was our cue to
leave, but what a great sighting!
Our second
highlight of today was sitting at Transport Dam and watching the animal
traffic. It appeared we had arrived at rush hour as it was crazy busy around
the dam with lots of impalas all around the dam having a drink. There were
pretty kudu bulls, lots of waterbucks and some males were fighting. A herd of
blue wildebeests came down to drink and rub their faces in the mud and then
roll in it while their babies were chasing each other around and made weird
jumps. Zebras came and went. An elephant bull came by and had a mouthful of
water. It looked like he wanted to go swimming, but while walking through the
dam he found out it was too shallow and he just walked across (chasing some
impalas on the go). And a lone buffalo who couldn't care less about all the
others and walked down to the mud to have a good soak. The hippos in the dam
decided to stay away from the busy corner and kept snoozing on the other
end.
Other interesting
sightings: steenboks, elephants, a chameleon pretending to be a leaf,
waterbucks, blue wildebeests, zebras, kudus, giraffes, white rhinos up close,
hyenas, baboons with bulging cheeks as they snacked on marula fruit and let's
not forget the impalas.
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