Leopard

The prettiest kitty. Dozing on a branch over the Sabie just like her ancestors have probably done for thousands of years.

Not every leopard just walks right up to your car.

This old guy’s almost ready for Valhalla. Scarred. Wounded. Moving slowly. I reckon his days as a silent bushveld assassin will be over soon.

This leopard had apparently had two kills stolen in one day by the same bastard hyena, and then this oaf came charging in. Best give it up, go back to bed, and try again tomorrow mate.

Handsome boi. Wait for it… I thought I’d lost these clips. One of those times where you see something spectacular between entering Kruger and getting to camp. This was on the way to Pretoriuskop from Numbi Gate, I think. 2014. Prolly should have cropped this for insta. Oh well.

This was the second leopard posing on our drive this afternoon. We only stopped for a few minutes for this one because it was 20 minutes to gate closing. The other one that @withoutaleaf photographed was even more amazing.

Not my best pic from the trip. But you can’t beat this for excitement. We were given bad instructions on where to look for this leopard - so out of 35 mins we spent there we spent about 5 mins actually looking at the animals. But shortly after we did spot them, this little leopard kitten stuck up it’s little head and I grabbed a couple of pics. This also shows you why people use such enormous lenses for wildlife photography. This was with a long lens (500mm) and a 1.4x extender. And this is still a crop of only probably 40% of the image area. On a phone this leopard cub would have only been a few pixels. ...

We finally saw a spotty cat. This was yesterday. Quite a scrum of cars. We saw one better today though that @withoutaleaf got some nice pics of.

#tbt to the last time I tried to shoot wildlife on a medium format film camera. And by luck we encountered this scarred old veteran close enough for the Pentax 400mm lens with a 1.4x extender.