2012-09-18 Masai Mara NR, Kenya

During my five years residing most of the time on the Mara I followed many leopards with cubs, Olive in particular. As much as I wished to, I never managed to see the mother carrying the cubs in her mouth. Today it finally happened, and with a totally new leopard I had never seen before, in a new area. We found her sleeping along a gulley with a wildebeest calf kill nicely exposed on a tree. We knew she had cubs so we waited the whole day with her. When it got hot she woke up and went to call the cubs from a big patch of bushes. I was amazed when she came out of the bush carrying the first cub in her mouth. I reckon the cubs should be around two months old. I have seen most cubs of this age already walking with their mother, but probably each mother habituates the cubs differently. She took the first one into the forest and rapidly returned for a second one. Then she disappeared for almost two hours. As she had a third cub to collect, we were expecting her to come sooner. After leaving all the cubs in the forest she came out in the middle of the afternoon to return to her kill. It was a magnificent day, in which we photographed a behavior that very few people have seen. The early morning had been wonderful also, with the Rekero lions in playing mood and a collective chase of a Thompson gazelle fawn by a Jackal, an Hyena and a Lion. Amazingly, the fawn escaped!