This morning was a leopard hunt. The three-week-old cubs from last February were now big eight month old cats. We found all three in different trees by the Seronera River. The mother was in a tree where they had stored yesterday’s kill. As we watched one of the cubs in a thorny acacia, the mother brought the Thompson’s gazelle kill out onto a low branch of the fig tree right next to the road for some of the most spectacular leopard shots ever! She gave us everything we could have hoped for before calling to the cubs and leaving the scene for some peace and quiet. The cubs came down from their trees and made their way to the kill as we photographed every move. I looked up and realized we had been shooting for an hour and there were only GPS vehicles there! My heart went pitter pat… it could have been the leopards, though. The cubs gave us an amazing show as they took turns eating on different branches, making for a wide variety of scenes to shoot. Everyone was one cloud nine for breakfast.  “What’s up for the afternoon?”

Well, the afternoon was an exploration with a plan to see what the leopards were up to around 6:00. There were dik-dik, Egyptian geese with just-hatched chicks and herds of elephant drinking at the river. When we arrived at the leopard tree at 6:00, everything else was forgotten. All three leopards were on the same, perfect branch of my now-favorite-fig-tree-in-the-world! I’ve never seen anything like it! They were done eating the gazelle kill so they were grooming each other and then tossed the horns of the gazelle out of the tree. In came the hyenas to clean up. Some of these photos will be legendary!

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