The winter is in full swing now as the early mornings are nice and fresh! You know it’s cold when you drive past a safari vehicle and the only thing you can see is the ranger’s eyes, the rest is covered up with jackets, gloves and buffs! With the cold around, animals are getting active a lot later than usual.

With the lions, things are going very well as they have been making kills left right and centre, and it’s not just the females that are doing all the hard work hunting! The other day we found the whole pride on two adult buffalo kills with the males feeding on one and the females on the other which helped a lot as there was a lot less tension while feeding.

With Floppy Ear joining in on the kills, she is at least providing good milk for her cubs! A few days back we saw her along with one of the other big females going back into where she is hiding the cubs, she had some nice fresh wet marks around her mammary glands so the cubs were suckling on her just before we saw her! We can’t wait to see them in the next few weeks.

The two older cubs are really doing well as the pride is doing a great job at providing for them! With all the kills recently they are getting bigger and stronger by the day. We are having some awesome sightings of them as they are full of energy and seem to make the most of their hunting skills on anything that moves, even if it is the wind blowing a branch over!

The leopards gave us a hard time as we had to work really hard to track them down! On some drives we spent more than two hours tracking before finding one but every minute was worth it as the end result was amazing.

Little Bush and her cub were yet again a highlight this week as she and the cub gave us an incredible sighting where she hoisted a duiker kill and the cub, eventually, moving it into a tree where mom could not reach! It was so amazing to see the attitude mom showed towards the cub and the cub realising what she had done and trying to rectify it.

We were treated to a great sighting of the Hlarulini female this week as she tried to stalk a duiker but failed and then went up a termite mound, looking into the direction of the sunrise! We really hope that she starts settling here.

With Maxabeni being away for such lengthy periods of time, other males are starting to roam around his territory - here we found the Flat Rock male leopard just walking through the heart of Maxabeni’s area. This is not good as this male might end up killing Little Bush’s cub as he was very close to some areas where she likes hiding the cub.

And for the Kigelia female, things are going well as she got to finish a bushbuck kill over 4 days and shortly thereafter, went out trying to hunt a cane rat but was unsuccessful.

This week we even got spoilt with the big male cheetah hanging around our area and the one day he managed to bring down a reedbuck and finished the whole kill without being disturbed by other predators!

The wild dogs came running through our property one afternoon looking for some impalas to hunt. We managed to follow them for two hours before losing sight of them in some thick bush.

Even with all the action around and predators lurking around every corner, the general game viewing has been great with sightings of hippo being plentiful and the rest I can just describe to you by showing you some amazing photos...

It’s been an amazing week and I can’t wait to see what the coming week has in store for us!