RANGERS REPORT

General

Welcome back to all our readers! I am sure that after the feedback on this months report everybody would love to visit Kings Camp! If you are visiting soon it will only be our absolute pleasure to treat you to the best African experience you could ever imagine…

So without any further a due, let me share some of our bush stories.

Leopard

We were blessed with an amazing 43 Leopard sightings in this month!

All the resident Leopards have been sighted on numerous occasions and have provided plenty excitement to many guests and guides during the month.

The female impalas have started giving birth in the middle part of the month and there is a lot of “easy”, inexperienced prey around. The Leopards are very clever in their pursuit and continually sniff bushes, shrubs and long grass for these tasty morsels, quite often with luck! The Impalas will now give birth through November and December, some even still in the beginning of January. This is truly the season of plenty in the bush.

We reported on the Rock fig female and Mangajani male mating not too long ago, but I bring news that she did not fall pregnant. We have seen the two of them mating again twice during the month!

She is one of the older females in the area and one wonders if there might be some complications for her falling pregnant this time around. She has proved to be an extremely successful mother in the past and we surely hope that we could have the opportunity again to see her raising her litter. We will keep you posted on any happenings.

Speaking of pregnant Leopards…. The M’bali female is very close to giving birth and we have seen her exploring a lot around her familiar den sights, potentially looking for the right one. Let’s hope that she will be successful this time to raise a cub.

Lion

Wow!! That’s all I can say…. 79, yes Seventy-nine Lion sightings for November.

Both our resident prides have been very active within the traversing and with the Nomad battles in the southern parts of the reserve we managed to see quite a few good looking nomad males exploring the vacant terrain. After almost a year of nomadic battles we now hope to have a take over soon with settled males in the south.

The Scobele pride from the north is doing very well and has managed to kill Zebra twice in the month! It is amazing to see the two lionesses doing so well with larger prey now. What a feast for five hungry cubs!!

With these two Zebra kills the total Zebras they have killed in the last three years are only three (3).

The Machaton pride from the south has spent quite a bit of time close to camp. This is always a great experience as you can hear them calling close by at night and sometimes you even get lucky enough to see them drinking water at the camp’s waterhole!

They also have done very well on kills this month, the biggest reward being a female Giraffe and her calf that they killed! It was a feast for about five days!!

Elephant and Cape Buffalo

We had 74 Elephant and 56 Cape buffalo sightings.

Large herds of both species have frequented the area and it is always special to see the larger beasts congregating in these large herds. At this stage we have quite a lot of baby individuals in the herds of both, the buffaloes and the

White Rhino

We had 33 White rhino sightings! That is about 20 more sightings than an average month of about 4 years ago!!

Special sightings

It is always good to get to the special sightings… Now you might wonder what special sightings are. The entire list above looks special enough…. They are indeed all special, but for the guides some just stand out more than others, something we don’t even get to see a lot of.

One of these is of Hippo’s fighting. There is an intruding male in the one dam and is not being tolerated by the current territory holder. Fights between these beasts are usually extremely violent and involves a lot of biting with the large teeth they possess and it is a very noisy affair. Often the fights occur on land during the night when they are off grazing. This is usually where they confront each other. This time round they had the battle in the water in the day time…easy for all to witness!

Until next time, take care.

Morné and the Kings Camp ranger team

Photography by Morné.