Opening Day was incredible. We saw most of the Samburu Five on our way to our lodge, and then spent a lot of time with elephants and cheetahs on our first “official” game drive that evening. Beyond the photos, I enjoyed seeing how the animals interacted with each other. The more I watched them, the more I learned, with the help of our incredible guides and other teammates.
Want to get caught up? Check out the rest of the posts below!
Introduction
Opening Day
The Villainous Leopard
The Courageous Lions
Lion Love
As we got into the trip, the main lesson I began to understand: survival is a skill. It is a skill the animals have to use every day, because nature can be quite brutal. Honest, but brutal. Our teacher was a villainous leopard.
I don’t want to get too far ahead of myself though.
Back to the cheetahs
Our first game drive of the next morning was going out to where we thought the cheetahs might be. Everyone’s heads were on a swivel, looking for the distinctive facial patterns and lithe figure of the quick cats. We went down to the bottom of the hill from yesterday, hoping the cheetahs had just fallen asleep where we had seen them the night before. We weren’t really seeing anything but then we heard a message on the radio and our guides revved the engines and asked us to sit. We took off at top speed towards where the cheetah family had been spotted.
(It’s important to remember that these roads are dirt paths with enormous potholes in places, so when I say “top speed” think “window shopping” as our guides carefully navigated the treacherous paths just waiting to claim a transfer case or differential from our trucks while we were all thrown around like clothes in a dryer inside.)
After a quick ride up the hill and over a bit, we saw our feline friends again!
But that’s when our guides once again hit the afterburners as we bounced our way over near a ravine, parked between some other trucks, and saw, hidden in the bush, one of the shadows of the savanna: a female leopard.
Leopards are rare and stealthy. I mean, look at that one, with so much light coming through, it managed to find the one area of eery shadow to appear that much more menacing. Leopards are ambush predators (really one-ups my Executive Director title at work, ugh) and are skilled climbers, where they will either take an animal they’ve just killed into a tree or even lay on a branch waiting for animals to pass underneath. When they strike, they strike quickly. They do not like to be seen, so seeing one on our first morning game drive was an absolute treat.
This leopard was on the ground alongside a creek and eventually walked back into the brush where we could no longer see her, so we went out for a bit to where we thought she might end up. Along the way, we saw the final member of the Samburu Five: a somali ostrich, known for the distinctive bluish colouring on the neck and legs.
We also came upon a large mound. Instead of termites, it was filled with mongooses!
While they might look like adorable (kinda) little rodents, mongooses (you know what, I’m just going to call them mongeese, it just feels more correct to me) are fierce hunters and famously hunt some of the world’s most poisonous snakes. I was hoping a flock of mongeese would mean there were some awesome snakes nearby, but alas there were not. We did see a baby mongoose, a nice consolation prize, but I didn’t get a picture because once again the engines revved and we were off, because…
…the leopard had a kill.
The Leopard turns into a Villain
A quick note: calling the leopard “villainous” is obviously a bit anthropomorphic, putting human emotions and feelings onto an animal. I’m fully aware the leopard was just doing what leopards do. Like I said above, survival is a skill on the African plains, and this leopard was a bit more skilled than its prey. Just some artistic liberty, I promise.
Part of being a wildlife guide is being an expert at spotting animals. Our guides were exceptional at this. Personally, I found myself better at spotting other safari trucks, because surely they would be around the rarest animals. We saw a herd of safari trucks around a tree as our guides bobbed and weaved through the herd to get us a great view of our sweet, innocent, murderous leopard from earlier.
And she looked right at me.
In the tree were the remains of a gazelle that she had killed recently and already eaten her fill. She was resting on the ground while posing for pictures and cleaning herself.
By the way, you know all those awesome pictures of animals roaring that you see from the great wildlife photographers? 99% of the time they were actually just yawning (the animals, not the photographers). The effort it took to hunt, kill, and drag the gazelle up the tree was no doubt taxing on our little villain, who gave us a great yawn almost on cue, showing us the enormous barbs on her tongue that can literally rip skin from bone.
Even her yawn told a story. Notice the damage in her mouth, with one canine almost completely gone and another fractured off at the tip. I could only imagine the battles that leopard had faced and, by her presence in front of us, clearly won.
We then heard her calling out for her cubs that were nearby so they could come have some lunch. While our villain mother was comfortable around the safari trucks I think the cubs were not quite used to them yet, so the cubs stayed where they were. The mother then pulled a move I thought was kind of selfish at first.
She gazed back at her kill in the tree…
…and effortlessly hopped up to a mezzanine branch a few meters off the ground.
She then propelled herself upward back to the cleft of the tree where her kill was waiting for her. I got an incredibly lucky picture and to this date it’s one of my favorite pictures I’ve ever taken.
And, just like that, she was back in her tree with her kill. She took a few bites, but then her attention locked on something else.
…right as someone in our truck said, “Aw cute, a little family of warthogs with babies!”
Uh oh.
What happened next was…almost casual. We looked over and saw a pair of adult warthogs with four piglets walking nearby, all with their tails pointed up in the air like little remote-controlled cars. We looked back in the tree and…the leopard wasn’t to be found. She had already silently climbed down the tree and was casually walking towards the warthogs. The warthogs went just beyond our sight, behind some bushes. Some of the safari trucks blocked our view of the leopard…but about 20 meters away we saw a sudden cloud of dust…the pounce. We then saw, through a clearing in the bushes, the adult warthogs defiantly facing off against the leopard. We wondered if this meant the leopard was spotted before she could strike…or those more cynical about the world (me) surmising that they wanted to make sure they only lost one piglet and not more. We soon had our answer.
And then, as casually as you’d expect from such a skilled hunter, she dropped the former piglet over to her cubs for lunch and then made her way back to her kill in the tree.
We all remembered the Circle of Life song from the Lion King movie and commented that this seemed like more of the heavy metal second verse that they forgot to sing.
Even when we saw the leopard cubs later and how cute they were, it was a lot for our first full day of game drives!
After the villain
Thankfully, the next animals we saw were more of the cute variety, a bit of eye bleach from earlier. First of all, we encountered a family of gerenuks, one of the Samburu Five species that I kept calling Ragnaroks for some reason. Very similar to a duck-billed platypus in Australia, these animals seemed like they were a hodge-podge of other animal parts hastily assembled into adorable animals. If someone would’ve described them to me and I wasn’t sitting there looking at them, I wouldn’t have believed that an animal like a Ragnarok gerenuk even existed.
AND THEN WE SAW A BABY!
I’m convinced these things are born ears first and that those ears were so big that they could hear conversations taking place on the International Space Station! Just adorable.
And then, the only thing that could make my day even better: we saw an animal I had once read about and laughed at its name back when I was an immature teenage dude in Texas. Ladies and gentlemen: the dik dik.
Dik diks are cute little deer, approximately two-feet tall, that existed, as far as I could tell, purely as little snacks for the bigger cats. That said, they were fast, could jump incredibly high for their size, and…well, they’re called dik diks. Everyone in my truck was patient as I immaturely giggled while taking dik dik pics.
The rest of our time in Samburu was filled with incredible game drives seeing such a wide variety of animals, including some familiar faces that I’ve already mentioned before.
From a Grevy’s zebra…
To an Oryx looking directly at my camera…
to our old friends the cheetah family from earlier.
We even got to see the cheetah cubs playfighting a bit, honing their skills to defend themselves and become their own version of fierce hunters someday.
A day later we happened upon a watering hole where we got to watch so many different animals interact and one of the world’s great intersections.
Photographically it was challenging and rewarding, not only watching how the animals interacted with each other but also finding compositions that showed the animals in the serene plateau setting around us.
We saw impala battling for dominance (let me know which one you think won the battle in the comment section)…
And more giraffes amidst some of the most beautiful scenery I’ve ever seen.
Another morning was just so special. We had seen that same cheetah family yet again near a termite mound and we stayed still, hoping they would hop up onto the mound for a better view around them. Cheetahs hunt with speed and do not take down massive animals like lions or even leopards, so they have to be on the hunt constantly, which means they are always looking for good viewpoints to find prey.
… anyway, our hunch about the termite mound was correct and our patience paid off!
At first the mother hopped up…
…and soon the cubs made their way up as well.
But wait. The villain was not finished.
The villainous leopard strikes again
We found out from our guides, only a few weeks after we got home, that the same leopard from earlier in the story had struck again. Its victim this time? Unfortunately, one of the cheetah cubs you just saw.
Nature is brutal.
But even though it’s brutal, we ended up seeing that leopard again the night before we left Samburu, before the cheetah cub incident that I won’t talk about anymore. Our villain was simply getting some water, a cute moment amidst what can be best described as total domination of her part of Samburu.
We were clearly just visitors, in more ways than one. This was HER home.
We bid a fond farewell to Samburu and our lodge, where we enjoyed our starters.
Where to next? You’ll have to wait and see!
