A young leopard makes his first kill
Posted by Cheetah Plains in Animal Encounters — 2 Comments ↓ Article from Africa Geographic.
Posted: September 22, 2014
Written by: Justin Glanvill, Cheetah Plains field guide
One of the keys to being an independent leopard is the ability to catch sufficient prey to be able to keep yourself going. This doesn’t happen overnight, and there is very often trial and error in the learning stages. Luckily juvenile leopards are generally well looked after by their mother, who will lead them into kills she has made – but when the opportunity arises, young leopards will try to hone their skills.
We have been lucky enough at Cheetah Plains, with the territorial shift in the leopard dynamics, to have the female leopard, Inkanyeni, spending the majority of her time in our traverse. Previously this beautiful female was a ghost – we would often spend days just seeing tracks moving through, but now that she has come south to Cheetah Plains, our sightings of her have become far more frequent.
Her two beautiful cubs are now probably approaching 10 months old, and are incredibly relaxed with the vehicles. We have been viewing them since they were about two months old, and have seen them in all types of sticky situations, but they have made it out alive.
A little while ago, we were sitting with all three leopards who were finishing off the remains of a duiker kill that the female brought to her cubs. The young male was dominating the carcass, hissing and snarling at his mother and sister when they attempted to approach. Since it was a small piece of a fairly small kill, it didn’t last long and they started moving off together along the recently burnt firebreak.
The two juveniles were harassing their mother, bouncing over her, rubbing themselves under her neck as she walked along, and occasionally having a quick run around chasing each other.
I moved ahead to get my guests into a better position for photographs, when I noticed the juvenile male leopard’s behaviour changing. He was interested in something close to our car, and then I spotted it – a tree squirrel that was alarming due to the leopards, but wasn’t in a position where it felt safe (as it was on a small fallen burnt tree). In the blink of an eye the race was on – the squirrel ran to the closest tree, with the leopard in hot pursuit.
The squirrel reached the tree seconds before the leopard, and up the squirrel went. The leopard leaped after the squirrel and managed to get a paw on top of it, and trap it. The leopard then made quick work of killing it.
With all the commotion that was going on, his sister and mother both came bolting to the tree, but the young male ran off as quickly as he could to devour his well earned prize.
It was such a privilege to watch such a young leopard successfully make a kill. I am sure that we will have many epic sightings of these two beautiful young leopards and see them pushing through the adulthood and independence!
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