We have been seeing so much over the last 3 days: lions, cheetahs, rhinos, elephants, kudu, impala, the list goes on and on. So I have picked the two (well, this is a very personal opinion) “best of” sightings. As I said, this is just what I would have preferred having seen myself, had I been as lucky as our guests to be out on safari.
One is an amazing nocturnal leopard sighting. The most elusive of all cats, and enigmatic of all. We see them more and more often, but one still needs some luck to spot them as close as this. We saw this big male leopard last night on Impala road. He was pretty relaxed. He sat up and watched us for a while before turning and disappearing into the thicket. One of our guests succeeded with an amazing shot also, and we published that shot on Facebook, here the link to that:
Here our tracker’s shot, not bad either (ok, it’s pretty bad actually), it gives one nonetheless a good idea of what an exciting close-up sighting this really was.
My other personal favorite was a SUPER rare Saddled Billed Stork (actually two, as it is a couple). Some birders will pay an arm and a leg to get a sighting like this one. Only a very few breeding couples are known in South Africa, and we are lucky enough to have one of them on our reserve, breeding successfully. What a joy! This to me is one of the biggest conservation successes on our large reserve, along with our rhinos, wild dogs and cheetahs amongst others.
