2011-09-09 – Masai Mara G.R.

Though I am not interested in “big five” or checklist safaris, where you have to see all animals in a given amount of time as if it was some sort of race, today it just happened to be a day in which we saw all the big five within the morning. We started with the Lions, Notch’s gang still mating with the females on the Talek river. We then found a single female Cheetah who tried to hunt three times unsuccessfully and a nice family of Elephants browsing from the bushes on the hills above the river. We then headed towards the Paradise plains, where we found a Black Rhino out on a morning stroll and a male Leopard with an Impala carcass up a tree. We stayed with the Leopard the whole day, it’s a 3 and half years old male who was born on the Ntiakintiaki river in early 2008, from a female we call Acacia. The real surprise was in the late afternoon, when a Leopard cub, about six months old, climbed the same tree. It’s probably the male’s son, but it’s quite rare to see father and son together on the same tree, as females normally raise their cubs alone.