2010-09-24 – Maasai Mara G.R.

We woke up to very loud and near Lion roars. They were unusually close and clearly made by huge males, and initially I couldn’t figure out who it could be making them. It later turned out that it was the four males we watched yesterday, Notch’s Boys, invading the Ol Kiombo pride’s territory with no fear. They crossed the Olare Orok and the Talek River and headed west again before falling asleep. The Ol Kiombo Lions are now busy occupying the area called Hamerkop, in the east of the park. We didn’t see any of this as we rushed to the location where we left the Cheetah with the six cubs to be there by sunrise. We found her with only two cubs. She and the cubs called extensively and looked around for about an hour before the remaining four cubs appeared from a termite mound some distance away. As they reunited they started playing and running everywhere.
In the afternoon we had another interesting encounter, this time with two young male Leopards that I had never seen before. They are about two and half or three years old, and looking at my photographic archive of individual Leopards, I couldn’t match them with any other I had seen already. One was sitting in a bush, the other was way up on a tree, terribly scared by two Lionesses at the bottom and clearly by vehicles as well. He is definitely not an habituated Leopard. We decided to leave him alone immediately to avoid him making wrong decisions due to stress. We later found out that he descended the tree and bolted in the bushes to safety.