Holy Grail of the Savannah – Londolozi Blog

There have been many extraordinary, special moments throughout my career as a Londolozi Ranger, and last week I was lucky enough to have yet another.

For a little over a month, we had known that a mother cheetah had been seen on the odd occasion with some young cubs in the southwest of the Sabi Sand Nature Reserve. It is an incredibly vast area where open savanna grassland stretches to the horizon all around you.

Cheetah can cover huge distances and searching for one is oftentimes referred to by rangers as trying to find a needle in a hay stack. Our guests at the time were here for a week-long stay and this afforded us a bit of extra time to spend searching the grasslands very thoroughly.

With there being a lot less water over the dry season, especially so in the grasslands, it’s always a good idea to pass by any of the prominent pans to see what might have come and gone.

It was one of our final morning game drives, and I had already made the call that this was going to be the last of many drives we’d spent searching for the mother cheetah and her cubs. We wasted no time and headed straight down to the southern end of our traversing area, which is where we would begin looking for any tracks or signs. A couple hours went by and we still had no luck.

Tracker Terrence and I were just about out of options, and our ideas were no longer aligning with one another. I was about to turn onto a road that would take us back north away from this area, when Terrence turned around, looked at me and jokingly said “Bhuti (brother), let’s keep going west. All the way. We’ll get them at Mandevu Pan”. We chuckled, knowing that at this stage, we both hadn’t a clue where they were. It sounded like a good place to stop for our morning coffee break so I agreed to continue all the way to the pan.

Just as the pan came into view, Terrence’s left arm shoots into the air pointing to a fallen marula tree a couple hundred metres south of the pan. “Cheetah! Cheetah!”, he said almost leaping out of his seat with excitement.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. We saw four little cubs playing about on the tree beside her as we drove closer! What an incredible moment this was for us all. We found them. The Holy Grail of the Savannah.

Mother and cubs survey their surroundings from the fallen marula tree. Mother Nature rewarded us for our persistence!

Below are some of the pictures that I managed to take of this very special sighting. I’m certainly not known for my mathematic capabilities, but I calculated that it had taken me over 2000 official Londolozi game drives to see small cheetah cubs. They are very rare and incredibly difficult to find across the Sabi Sand region.

It was the mother cheetah we had been searching for.

The cheetah in this area have access to millions of acres of wilderness. With such a high density of lions and leopards in the Sabi Sand, the numbers of cheetah are lower here as they opt to live in areas where there is less competition with other predators.

Every so often, in classic cheetah fashion, the mother will find a slight point of elevation from which to survey her surroundings. She makes sure that there is no sign of any threat to her or her cubs.

They would rest in the shade for brief intervals. She never wants the cubs to tire out in the heat. They need to constantly maintain maximum energy levels, should they need to run from danger. Here they rested and suckled for about 10 minutes.

It was a very special moment for me and my guests as we witnessed them bonding with their mother.

The cubs pause for a moment, following in their mother’s footsteps by constantly assessing their surroundings. They are far more trusting of vehicles than small leopard cubs. This is because there is a much more direct sense of feedback between them and their mother. They will not doubt any decision she makes. If she feels safe, they feel safe.

After we had spent about 45 minutes with them, we let them wander off into the grasslands and out of sight. This was certainly one of my biggest highlights as a Londolozi Ranger.