A Sad Morning for a Mother Leopard – Londolozi Blog

It started out like every other morning at Londolozi – sipping on the perfectly brewed cup of coffee on Varty Camp’s deck, overlooking the Sand River. The early twilight fills the air with a sense of magic and the prospects of yet another exciting day to get out into the wilderness and explore.

It was our current guests’ last morning game drive and we were eager to see if we could go and find the Ximungwe Female and her last remaining cub. We had searched for them thoroughly the previous morning with no luck. The afternoon prior she was found with a duiker kill but we were unable to see her. Chances were high that they’d still be around the area, and even if they had finished the kill, they wouldn’t be too far away.

Having been viewed by vehicles from an early age, this leopard is supremely relaxed around Land Rovers.

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In classic style, Tracker Terrence spots fresh leopard tracks and immediately it’s game on. He hopped off the vehicle to follow the tracks quickly and assess them. He hadn’t even walked 50m when a troop of vervet monkeys started to signal their distress calls in the distance – we knew they’d seen a leopard! We decided that Terrence would stay out of the vehicle and I would quickly drive over to where the monkeys were calling from to see where they were looking – sometimes they can spot leopards hundreds of metres away with their exceptional eyesight.

Once underneath the large leadwood tree that the monkeys were in, I could see they were looking in the direction of where Terrence was. Only seconds later, Terrence called me over the radio to tell me he’d heard a leopard calling close by. I rushed back over to him, he hopped back on the vehicle and we drove off into the bush towards where the sound came from.

At last, we found her! It was the Ximungwe Female. As excited as we were to have found her, Terrence and I knew immediately that something was wrong.

The Ximungwe Female was calling repeatedly for her cub. She desperately walked around in circles through the area they’d been in for the last couple of days, contact calling every few seconds. She even got up into marula trees to survey the area from vantage points, darting her eyes across the landscape with such focus and determination.

We knew she had lost her cub. After we all accepted the sad fate of the cub, we decided to move on and let her be.

A loving moment between the Ximungwe Female and her cub.

Later on during the morning game drive, Ranger Melvin Sambo returned to the scene to investigate further. He ended up discovering through looking at the tracks and other evidence that sadly, hyenas had caught the small cub. It was not able to climb up into the safety of a tree fast enough. Hyenas have an incredibly powerful sense of smell and can sniff out kills that leopards attempt to keep hidden. They are one of the biggest threats to small leopard cubs in situations like these when mothers have their cubs far away from their dens at the kill sites.

It was certainly a deeply felt moment for us all to witness. One can easily begin to sympathize with wild animals when you understand them, and we realized that in many ways they express themselves just like we do. It was yet again just another reminder about the raw nature of the wild.

The Ximungwe Female has mostly been a successful mother, raising a cub to be independent from each of her previous two litters. So we’re hopeful that her next litter will have better odds in their favour. The life of a leopard seems to be a constant series of trials and tribulations. Which is why it’s hard not to be invested in their life story when you’ve seen what they can endure.