2011-07-02 – Masai Mara N.R.

During the past four years in the Mara I cannot count how many days with Cheetahs I spent. Cheetahs are probably the animals I spent most time with. They are definitely in my top 3 favorite animals. And with all these days I have never spent a day as quiet as this with Cheetahs. Shingo and her cubs did absolutely nothing from first light to sundown. We expected them to be hungry and looking for food today, as yesterday they had tried but without success. Instead, we found them all laying on a dirt mount, and we later realized the bellies were quite full. She must have hunted early in the night, probably not long after we left them last evening, and it must have been something reasonably big to knock them down completely. We were expecting some playing in the afternoon by the cubs, but they didn’t even leave the shade they were under. It happens, when you follow the life of a single animal you get days like this and in the end such days contribute to increasing one’s intimacy with that particular animal.