Sightings of elephants have been in abundance as there is still a bit of water left in this area. You could just see the excitement of the herds every time they reached any sign of water. Most of the sightings were infront of the lodges during the middle of the day which made for a amazing bush television while enjoying your gin and tonic on the deck.

There has been a lot of tension around waterholes as you could see buffalo chasing giraffe away while drinking and elephants chasing everything that moves away.

This week was a real success for our predators as we found a lot of them with kills. We had Maxabeni male leopard on an impala kill for a few days and White Dam female probably picked up the smell of the kill and came to investigate. She had walked into Maxabeni who was obviously not happy with her presence. She then had a drink and moved off again hopefully back to her cub who we hope is getting better.

With the absence of Warthog Wallow, Hlarulini female has been seen often around the Bush Lodge area, even going far north of that. She is such an amazing leopard to spend time with as she is not shy to show off her beauty.

A few of the Rangers were fortunate enough to witness her fine hunting skills one evening as she successfully stalked and killed a Common duiker. She dragged it far and eventually stopped under a big Marula Tree to start feeding on it. Minutes later a hyena came running in trying to steel her kill but she was too quick and took the duiker up the tree safely away from the hyenas lurking at the bottom.

Lisbon female leopard and her cub have also been very successful with hunts as she finished up a kill and made her way back to the area where she hides her cub. We watched her drinking water and then 30 minutes later she made yet another Common Duiker kill right next to the dam at Earth Lodge. It is really nice to have seen the cub as it is getting more and more relaxed.

The lions have been doing really well the last week. We got to see them on two different kills - the one morning Pravir Patel found the Southern Pride along with their two cubs on a zebra kill, they finished it off in two days and then made another kill, this time it was a fully grown kudu bull. We wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t for the female with the two cubs leading us through some thick bush right to where the kill was. The two cubs are so comfortable around the Charleston males, grooming the big males from time to time.

After all these meals, the cubs even got to witness a hunting attempt on a big herd of zebra in the early morning hours. Even though it was an unsuccessful hunt, it’s a great learning proccess for the cubs.

Floppy Ear/Mandleve managed to get away from the bigger Charleston male (Big Boy) and she managed to join up with his brother to mate. Maybe in the next few months we could have another few of these little cubs running around!

We were fortunate enough to have seen the Toulon Pack of wild dogs and they even made a successful kill late in the afternoon.

To end this week off on a high note, we all woke up yesterday morning having had some amazing rain during the night. The rivers are all flowing and we here at Sabi Sabi had 58mm of rain so far and it looks like there is more to come!!