2010-04-01 From my first safari

Another female Leopard from the Mara, this time it’s Bella, with her son Chui in October 2003. At that time I was still working in Nairobi, and I was going to the Mara every weekend to catch up with her and her two cubs. Only the male survived to independence. Bella specialized in hunting Wildebeests as they crossed the Talek River. I never had the luck of witnessing such an event, but on that day in October I arrived from Nairobi in the early afternoon and I found her and the cubs with a fresh Wildebeest dead in the river, killed probably in the late morning. After eating, in this image they are resting on a tree above the Talek River. This tree has fallen down now, like many others, during the flooding of December 2006. And Bella herself died at the end of 2008, of old age, but her legacy lives on in her son Chui (born in 2003) and daughter, Olive, born in 2000.